26 years building on the web, time to come out of my cave

Hi everyone 👋

I’ve decided to come out of my cave.

I’ve been a web entrepreneur for 26 years, Google barely existed, the holy grail was getting listed on Yahoo ...

I’ve always developed my own projects to then "run" them myself (never as an external developer).

Today, staying in my cave is no longer possible, AI has replaced my biggest competitive advantage, my speed at developing and launching good products. So I have to evolve towards being more visible (and that’s a big effort for me).

To keep it short about who I am:

• 15 years old, first computer > first website one week later (about Age of Empires and Zelda :D)

• 16 years old, first website making me a few hundred euros every month (news for teenagers)

• 17/18 years old, 3 publisher websites bringing me to a few thousand euros in revenue per month (first declared salary at 18 years old and 1 day)

• 20 years old, one of the 3 websites (about travel) is very profitable, thanks Google! I can make a living 100% from my work. In the meantime I launch a board game shop (I’m a fan), it does well, but I understand that it will take a lot of money and time before I can make a reasonable living from this project, and hiring won’t be an option. I give up after a year despite around 20 orders a day.

• 23 years old, a new website (deals) makes me a good living for 8/9 years (thanks again Google, and Facebook ... 300k fans when the word "followers" didn’t exist yet). Competition and 3 weeks of DDoS attacks, rarely seen according to OVH (hosting provider), make me lose too much ground on Google. The website still exists, the community is still super active 18 years after launch ...

• 32 years old, I co-found Semjuice.com (which I recently sold), a French link building platform. A lot of experience gained, discovering real company management (up to 42 employees, 2 partners). And yes, I still stay in my cave anyway (I’m the tech guy on the team, working remotely ...).

• And today, 41 years old, still plenty of ideas in mind, I’m looking for projects that have a chance of surviving AI. I launch Communik.io (an fast site builder, assisted by AI or not, that took me 2 years to develop (...)) and a new e-commerce website for personalized 3D printed objects that I’m creating with my wife (myfabrik.eu, mainly for the European market).

Obviously, I’m leaving out the dozens of projects that didn’t work at all ...

I’m signing up because I find the discussions here to be of a rare quality, and particularly focused on the weakness of every self-respecting tech person, marketing. So I hope to learn, discipline myself to learn, discuss, network, which is very counterintuitive for my very reserved nature.

Thanks for welcoming me among you.

Jeremy