We opened our Constanța studio

For the first year, Basetool Labs ran on borrowed tables: kitchen tables and coffee shops, wherever a laptop happened to open. The work was real and the clients were real, but the studio was a state of mind, not a place. On 14 June 2026 that changed. We opened a permanent studio at the Millennium Hub & Hotel in Constanța, on the Romanian coast, pressed a rubber duck into every hand at the door, and filled the room with the people who made the first year possible.

A room that looks at the sea

The studio sits inside the Millennium Hub & Hotel, with the coast in the windows. We wanted a place that felt like the work: calm, a little playful, built for long stretches of focus and the occasional loud argument about an API. There are beanbags, a record player with a stack of vinyl, a whiteboard that will never be clean again, and enough room to put a whole team around one problem. It is where we design, build, and ship from now on.

The rubber duck is the point

Every guest left with a rubber duck, and it was not a party favour. Rubber duck debugging is a real practice with a real name. When you are stuck on a bug, you explain your code, line by line, out loud, to a rubber duck on your desk. Saying the problem slowly forces you to hear the assumption you skipped, and most of the time you find the bug before the duck has to say a word.

You are not debugging the code. You are debugging your understanding of the code.

We give out ducks because that is genuinely how we work. We talk a problem through in plain language before we write a line of code. The hard part of software is almost never the typing; it is understanding the problem clearly enough that the answer becomes obvious. The duck is a small, slightly silly reminder of that, and it sits on every desk in the studio.

Meet Pepe, the office mascot

Every studio needs a mascot. Ours is Pepe, a green frog who spent the evening being passed from hand to hand, photographed from every angle, and refusing to leave the spotlight. He has a permanent seat in the studio now and, we are reliably told, strong opinions about pull requests. The whiteboard behind him read "Welcome to the opening party," and Pepe took that personally.

The first public look at Sussur

The opening doubled as the first time we showed Sussur to people outside the team. Sussur is our Mac-native sales coach: it listens to a live call and coaches the rep in real time, and the audio never leaves the device. Watching people try it in the room, on their own calls, taught us more in one evening than weeks of internal testing had. The questions they asked and the moments they leaned in told us exactly what to build next. You can see where it is headed at sussur.ai.

The people who got us here

A studio is just a room until people fill it. The ones who filled ours are the clients who trusted a year-old team with real work, the collaborators who picked up the phone at odd hours, and the friends who kept asking how it was going and actually meant it. We build with these people, not only for them, and the evening was mostly an excuse to say thank you in person.

The door is open

The studio is open for the work, and open to the people we want to do it with. If you are nearby, or building something you think we would find interesting, the door is genuinely open. Come say hello, meet Pepe, and take a duck on your way out.

Here are the photos from the night.