The founder

I founded BVB Media in 2000, and I’ve built software for a living ever since. I stay personally at the helm and keep the full picture in view, from the first architecture decision to the final delivery to the partnership that follows.

People who work with me figure out the nickname quickly enough: Problemcrusher. I don’t just patch things over. I take a problem apart until there’s nothing left to fix. I solve the root cause, not the symptom, and I stay calm while I do it. When a system goes down, panic doesn’t help anyone. “On it” gets it solved.

And I listen more than I talk. After 25 years working closely with founders, I’ve learned that you don’t really understand a business until you’ve stopped talking long enough to hear how it actually runs.

I learned the most important lesson the hard way: quality requires focus, and focus requires saying no. Twenty-five years and a few hard knocks taught me that trying to serve everyone at once quietly destroys the very thing people come to you for.

So I built everything around a single belief: if a piece of software isn’t good enough for me to run my own business on, it’s not good enough to hand to you. That’s not a slogan I picked. It’s the only way I know how to work. I’d rather give an honest no than a disappointing yes, and where I can’t help, I’ll point you to someone who can.

For more than fifteen years, my focus was entirely on e-commerce. I built TYPO3 Multishop (a complete e-commerce platform) over roughly eighteen months, then shared it as open source. At its height it powered more than 500 webshops worldwide, in countries I’d never visited.

Everything I know about building software that has to run a real business, day in and day out, I learned there. I watched clients I worked with for a decade grow many times over: strong software meeting strong entrepreneurship, both sides doing the work. That’s still the part that keeps me going: not new logos, but watching someone I’ve worked with for years grow into something neither of us imagined at the start.

But Multishop taught me the harder lesson too. For years I said yes to everything. Every request became a feature, every feature became more to maintain, until one person was carrying far more than one person should. It cost me: a few hard knocks, and the realization that capability without boundaries is a dead end. Most of those relationships survived it with the friendship intact. The work didn’t, and shouldn’t have.