Bio
Bio
I grew up in a loving and God fearing family. I went to a great primary school and got decent grades. At the age of 10 I started to work to bring newspaper to people, but that didn’t last very long in the rainy weather…
When the internet arrived and our comuter with windows 95 became a fact, I started a new business, selling floppy disks with games to my classmates. Sim City 1, Raptor, Pac-Man and Jill of the Jungle sold like crazy. After a year or so the first CD writer was introduced to a friend in my neighborhoud. You won’t believe the first game I copied with that thing… Carmageddon 1! Oh boy did I found copying disks interesting.
The internet came in our house with a dial-up modem, and then everything changed. I was introduced to the world of Dreamweaver and started buidling my own websites. This was in 2001. It was all HTML and I can’t remember that I touched PHP at that time. We also got a flatbed- scanner which was a real joke to use a program like MS Paint to fix my picture in some scanned in paper money. Napstar was a pain with my dial-up modem, but in the meantime the bakery who came door to door started selling Top40 music cd’s (not a joke). Those were all copied and highly illegal, however, I thought it was a smart move. He already got the logistics, so why not make a extra buck here and there!
First succes
When I was 14, the first mobile phones did their entrance at our place. We got the polyphonic ringtones, which at that time was a-ma-zing. However, there were no good resources for those ringtones, mostly the tones would not work. So I decided to create them myself from downloaded MP3’s via Napster. I quickly found a website called tagtag.com which enabled free hosting for mobile XML websites. I started to build one called “Poly4Ever” and it saw daylight on 7-5-2003.
For 6 months I runned a very succesful website untill it got way to popular. Hundreds of thousands of people found the site (if I could believe the statistics of tagtag.com). It started to dawn me that SEO was a pretty cool thing and that its possible to reach thousands of people from my attic. The downside was that all polyphonic ringtones were made of my illigal napster downloads… so I deleted the entire website, before I got into real trouble!!
I was 16 at that time when MSN was hot. Chatting all night with people found on Hyves (the Dutch version of Facebook before Facebook became the end of Hyves).
In that time I had a drive-inn show with my best friend. We called ourselves DJ’s and made money while going to different parties and have a great night.
Education & work
In that time broadband internet became a thing and finally I went to college. I chose HBO Communicatie to get my Bachelors degree in Communication and Marketing. I have done minors in Social Media and did a internship at ING (the Dutch big bank) on online marketing.
Then in 2008 I got my first real job next to my study, I was a official SEO & SEA Consultant for small businesses. Man I learned a lot these days about SEO and the pretty boring (imo) tasks of SEA.
It was in this time (2009) when I told a friend to stop playing with Joomla and start to go working with WordPress….
I married the love of my life in 2009 and graduated college after 4 years. Straight out of college I became a “Online Marketing Advisor” in one of the top-3 Online Marketing businesses in the Netherlands. I had to do sales and accountmanagement of real big accounts. We had all different kinds of expertises working with us. SEO, SEA, Analytics, E-mail Marketing and Social Media Marketing were the teams. Just before I came aboard, one SEO’er called Joost de Valk just left the company to start a small business of his own… However, his knowledge did not left the building fortunately, so I could learn from the top of the class.
After 6 months I ‘earned’ my place in the company and got a iPad (1st gen!) a iPhone 2, and yes, a Volkswagen Polo Bluemotion with every option on it. I was happy and working 4 days a weak. We were a pretty big name in those time with accounts as KLM and Schiphol. The ones I personally made client with the company were big Dutch names like Greenpeace, CoolBlue, ICM, Liander, Portaal, VGZ and LeBallon.
Why did they chose me to be there accountmanager at my very young age? It was a blessing of God but I also brought my skills to the table. I listened, adviced from my experience and knew to bring the right consultant to the right conversation.
Time to go solo
ofter a couple of years there was a crossroad. One of the owners of the company took a wrong turn financially, making the company basicly bankrupt. There was a takeover and I got the change to start for myself OR to go with the new owner. As I scored more than excellent with my sales (11 times my own gross income) I did some thorough praying about it. It then hit me that God had other plans and I needed to go solo.
And so I did. In 2013 I started to work by myself, finding clients, learning great skills, read a million books about self-development and dragged my friends in it to. I created 2 webshops which sell physical products. Those webshops still do bring in a lot of revenue and score #1 on SEO in their niche-market. I created a lof of different great projects in the hunt for recurring income. I don’t say ‘passive’ income, because that is a dream. You always have to do some work for it, no matter what your income is, its never passive.
Since 2013 people keep telling me to start a YouTube channel. I didn’t believe those people and told myself I wasn’t good enough, the market was saturated with self-called WordPress Guru’s and there was no money in it. Untill some YouTubers showed me how much money they made with there (imo really poor quality) tutorials. I was blown away. I made that in a entire year! My eyes were opened but I needed a way to stand out in the YouTube crowd.
One night a friend asked my what my strenght is with my clients, why they loved me so much and keep bringing in new clients. I told him I helped my clients, and I fix ALL there problems. “Like a doctor?” He asked: “Why not the Divi Doctor!?” I thought that was awesome, but a bit to narrow. Then the WPress Doctor was born!
YouTube
As all things I life, I like to go hard and fast, even with no experience. Learn while you go, grow your wings on the way down – is my advice. So I did. I recorded my first video’s in my bedroom with a Logitech Webcam. Greenscreen bought from someone else and for the sound recording I used my iPhone. I got some cheap Softbox lights from someone else (still use them) to light me out and the greenscreen. It was my goal to get the first year to 100 subscribers, if that worked, I would continue to make video’s next to my own businesses. Remember that I have multiple projects of new websites, a hosting company, 4 kids, a beautiful spouse and 2 webshops…
The first year I ended up over 900 subscribers. I don’t know why, but appearently God blessed me and told me this was the way. With views came money to pay for new gear. A 4K camera and new mic were the first things I bought from YouTube money. Now my entire studio was paid by YouTube Money. Except my PC, wich was a old (but fine) PC. However, I had to be creative. Any export longer than 10 minutes, I had to export in parts, or else Premiere Pro crashed. First 1-10 minutes, than 10-20, 20-30 and so on. Then I could export the entire HD video. It was a real hassle but hey, if you want to reach some goals, don’t stop!
In 2021 I decided to drop the greenscreen and create a nicer background. When there came more views and subscribers, I also decided to create a new video every week in 2022. Finally my PC started to fall apart so in 2022 I bought a completely new Ryzen 9 9500X processor with 24 cores and 12 threads. New motherboard and I also upped my RAM to 64 GB and bought 2x 4K screens. Now I can make 4K video’s which is VERY nice. Thank God and thank my amazing viewers for supplying all this!