In 2004 I bought a pile of books on design, online marketing, HTML, CSS and JavaScript out of sheer curiosity. I finished them out of stubbornness. By 2007 my first websites were online — in Joomla, WordPress and Magento, because that's what you did back then.
In 2009 I started Bobstar Websolutions. Hundreds of clients, logos, websites and webshops went out the door. Meanwhile I was running two lighting webshops of my own, because apparently I wasn't busy enough.
That led to Hilox Lighting in 2015: my own lighting brand, built from scratch, in a technical automotive niche. I designed the product together with a Chinese manufacturer. A hobby that got out of hand, and honestly it still is.
In 2019 I simply did it again, with Grill Bill. Another brand of my own, production in China again, doing the product development and the follow-up work myself again. And of course building the shop myself — for the fourth time since 2019 by now. Except this one genuinely runs entirely on Neuramerce.
And in all those years I ran into the same wall: systems that didn't talk to each other. Dozens of plugins getting in each other's way. Twenty subscriptions, half of which I no longer knew the reason for. No overview at all, and every time something needed doing, it needed doing in four places.
So I came up with Neuramerce: one platform that simply does about 80% of the work itself, without plugin soup and without separate subscriptions elsewhere. I'm starting with the people who, like me, are wrestling with WordPress and WooCommerce and going through exactly the same thing. Then Shopify. And after that we'll see.
And now that I'm writing all this down, I finally understand why everyone always called me the moment their computer, their email or their website stopped working.
"I was juggling systems more than I was running a business. At some point you're not an entrepreneur any more, you're the unpaid IT manager of your own company."