Things I’ve built
This article contains a list of things I’ve built. THIS PAGE WAS LAST UPDATED in 2019 AND HAS BEEN NEGLECTED
Wanna build something with me? I’d love to collab. Just contact me.
Trashness (2012)
Trashness is a men’s wear brand that grew like crazy. It was my most succesful sideproject. It revenued $435K in it’s first 12 months. I could write an entire book full of adventures and stories about this project. It started in my bedroom, and quickly grew into a warehouse with an office and employees and $60K of revenue per month. We designed and produced 150+ products. Think knitted ties, dress shirts, sweaters, bracelets, etc. Our business was designing and selling beautiful men’s wear, with our own brand on it. We worked with Chinese factories to produce it, who then sent it out to our office/warehouse in the Netherlands. From there, we’d ship it out to our individual customers. DHL came by our Dutch warehouse at 17:00 every day to pick up our orders. Our brand had a cult following and people went crazy over our products.
Wordo Dictionary (2013)
Wordo is a beautifully designed dictionary with some social features. You can create an account, follow other people, and you’ll get a notification when they ‘like’ a new word (Amin liked the word serendipity, 18 min ago). I wanted it for myself, as I’ve been obsessed with words and definitions since I was young. But it turned out a few random autists around the world also like it. To be fair, the project is a faillure because barely anyone uses it. Check it out on https://wor.do
Harf.io (2015)
A live videochat platform where multiple users can videocall, and an unlimited nr of people can watch. Users can create rooms and give them a name. Every room is publicly listed on the homepage and anyone can join to watch what’s going on. A bunch of people got addicted to the website. Live video processing was hard on our servers, and we have to upgrade several times to super powerful servers. If I had to do it again, I’d use peer to peer webRTC technology – which is inferior for one-to-many video broadcasting, but will make hosting a videochat platform virtually free.
A bunch of funny trolls discovered the website as well.
See the guy with the guitar in the bottom left with the frozen stream? His name is Anthony. He and a lady named Crystal met on Harf, and they fell in love with each other. They lived in different US states and started traveling to see each other every moment they could. They got engaged.
AlexaRank.io (2014)
Alexa (not the virtual assistant) is an Amazon company that tracks the popularity of websites. Alexa gives each website a number based on their ranking. Google is number 1, meaning that it’s the most popular website on the planet. If you want to track the popularity of your website, and see the changes in a chart, you have to pay Alexa about $100 per year. So my friend Anas and me built a tool that allowed users to enter any domain name, after which our tool would track the Alexa rank and show you the data for free. We did this by illegaly scraping the official Alexa website for each domain. And we offered it ad-free and free of charge.
PopularFollowers.com (2012)
A long time ago I had a business. My business had a Twitter account with 10K followers, and I wondered if it had any celebrities following us. I did not want to go scroll through 10K followers to see if any of our followers were celebrities who had millions of followers. So I teamed up with my friend Raymond Camden to built a tiny tool that shows your top 100 Twitter followers, ranked by their follower count. We later allowed users to share their results on Twitter, linking back to our tool’s webpage. This brought us many more users
A Lyrics website (2010)
I built a lyrics website. Back in the day, way before genius.com, all lyrics websites were ugly as hell. The text was small and the page contained a handful of flashy advertisements. I teamed up with my friend who goes by the name of Chi (nicknamed after his zen-like calmness). We illegally scraped about 1M lyrics from a big lyrics website. Too bad I can no longer find screenshots of what it looked like, because our interface was beautiful.
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