At the end of 2021, I burned out from client work, spent some time decompressing, got back into crypto (big mistake), and saw a gap in the market to build a good piece of software.

But, I had no money to build it, so, I put up an idea for the concept, to see what people thought.

They were excited. We quickly got a lot of attention. After months of hard work put into the site, I raised $250,000 from 500 excited community members.

Two weeks before the Terra collapse, where I lost about half of the money raised. The rest went into paying contractors to get it where it is today.

Homepage made in Framer: millions-dust-691089.f…

after 365psd, 7 years later I wanted to do the same thing for Sketch. Thinking that it would be a success because I did it before.

It was a ton of fun to build, but I hated maintaining it. It didn't survive long.

I launched this in 2010 for fun. I had a deal with my brother
@Larkef where the person with the least traffic would have to pay for dinner every week.

Before I sold it (for scrap), I got about 10k unique visitors a day. It was a great time.

I'm still proud of the work I did as their first designer. I spent about 6 months working on both the design and the front-end. It was a special time and I miss it dearly. So fun to see what it became.

Right after we started Awkward, we started building Shipment. Our dream tool for sharing work with clients. At the time, Sketch, Figma, and other collaborative design tools didn't exist. We used Photoshop, and it was the stone-age.

When Dropbox came around, we saw an opportunity to combine it with design, and have the files sync, on save, and push an update to the client.

We got a lot of traction, but in the end we weren't able to deliver the app we had in mind, and the competition (Invision) was faster.

What we now know as Sketch, started out as "DrawIt". Back in the day, I knew Pieter through Mac forums, and we got to know each other.

Before Sketch was the Sketch for designers we know, it focussed on vector drawing.

I was lucky enough to design their website back then.

When I was looking for an office space to work from in 2010, I was lucky enough to join a few passionate people in the same industry, and after being in the same office for a few months, we decided to team up and build our own software, while doing client work at the same time to bootstrap our apps.

I left in 2014, but they went on for another 6 years before closing shop.

We had some amazing designers come through our doors over the years, that went on to do amazing things.

Really early in my career, I was lucky enough to get to know Renato, who got my into the startup scene I so desperately wanted to be in.

This is during the time that "web 2" really took off. It unlocked a bright future for me, and I'm forever grateful I got to work on it.

As a Product Designer a Xero I was responsible for conceptualising a new app together with other designers. Taking user feedback and turning it into wireframes and ultimately the actual interface.

As soon as I realised I could design and code for money, I started my own freelance business and rode the Web 2.0 revolution.

I have done a crazy amount of client work.

Jonnotie was and is still the username I use for many things