First off, a heart felt welcome! The journey for me to get to this point has been a long one to say the least. The mere fact that someone else out there on the internet is here, reading something I’ve written, related to something I’m building, is a huge honour and milestone that makes me very happy and one that I’m very proud of!
This post won’t be very long. It is intended to serve as a quick introduction, with more information to come in future posts.
What is PixelPaper?
In short and simple terms, PixelPaper is a “web builder”. That is, a tool you can use to build websites. You may be saying to yourself that there are many tools like this out there, and you’d be right, but I think I can offer something better. By better I mean a tool that bridges two worlds that most often live rather separately; the very “user friendly” and the very powerful. More on this in the next post. Before we go any further, let me introduce myself…
So, who am I?
Yes, you read correctly, I said “I”, not “we”. PixelPaper is a bootstrapped product, so it's just me working on the product at the moment, but I hope to change that in the near future.
It can be a huge advantage in the early stages of a product's development to have a small team (in this case me) pushing it forward.
I greatly value my customers (I've been doing business with some of them for 10 years) and go to huge lengths to ensure that they’re happy! I purposefully put myself in their shoes on a daily basis to keep close to what’s important to them. If PixelPaper does not work well for you, it directly affects me, so I have a vested interested in making the product the best it can be.
Hi! I’m Wouter (pronounced “Voter”) and I live in the beautiful city of Cape Town, South Africa with my wife and 5 children. I’ve spent 15 years refining my craft, serving customers and dreaming big so that I can take this step. This is not my first business or product, but it is the first one that I’ve started alone.
I love tech, trail running, baking sourdough bread (I bake two loaves a day) and curing meats. Feel free to follow me on Twitter/X where I occassionally share posts on these topics.
Making a difficult relationship seem easy
I’ve been building websites and web applications for the last 15 years. Initially, I hand coded websites with HTML and CSS. Later, many of the sites I built were Wordpress sites or similar, and in more recent times, I’ve been hand coding sites and apps using frameworks and I found that this is where the magic lies for both me and my customers.
I believe that, solving these problems and building creative sites for my customers over all these years, has given me front row seat to understanding the relationship between people and technology. It’s a complex relationship, but when done right, it feels somehow effortless. Almost as though the complexity never existed, and more than that, it goes from being a difficult relationship to one that can bring joy.
This all sounds great, but the big problem with it is, IT’S EXPENSIVE! In the world of building websites for customers, as I’ve been doing, it is not possible to offer this utopia to every client, because budget and time usually do not allow for it! This is one of the primary reasons I set out to build PixelPaper. I want to build something that captures the essence of what I’ve mentioned above, and building it into a re-usable product makes this a possibility.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is only a short introduction to me and PixelPaper. If what I’ve written about sounds interesting to you, please join me on this journey.
While I build out the rest of PixelPaper I’ll be releasing blog posts as often as I can that explain more about what PixelPaper is, why I’m building it, what makes it different and possibly even comparing it to other options in the market, so please feel free to follow along or to subscribe below.
If you’ve got this far, thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope to see you again.