About Me
I spent twelve years running a 30-person agency. Now I build the technology that helps agencies turn what they know into something they own.
Why I do this
I have always been a builder. I started making websites in the 1990s, spent twelve years building and running an agency, and eventually came back to doing the thing I enjoy most: taking an idea and turning it into something that works.
What changed is what one experienced person can build now.
AI has made software dramatically faster to create, but speed is not the hard part. The hard part is deciding what should exist, understanding the business it has to work inside, making the right trade-offs, and being accountable when it ships.
That is what Yellow House Digital is built around. I work directly with agencies that have valuable expertise, methods or ideas and turn them into working technology - sometimes to improve the agency itself, sometimes to create proprietary IP, and sometimes to build a product that can eventually stand on its own.
My story
A few chapters that shaped how I work today.
Early years
I started building websites in 1996: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, often with a friend for our first small clients.
What hooked me was the combination of logic and creativity. You could start with an empty screen and finish with something people could actually use. That has never really changed.
Agency years
After graduating in Business Intelligence in 2000, I worked across advertising, direct marketing and digital production in Amsterdam and London, including TBWA Netherlands, Echo Direct and OY.
At OY, I helped shape and build OY Transfer, the file-transfer product that later evolved into WeTransfer. It was an early lesson in what a simple product built around a real frustration could become.
In 2009 I co-founded This Page Amsterdam. Over twelve years we grew from two people to a team of 30 with roughly $5M in revenue, working for brands including Volkswagen, Bose, Schweppes and McDonald's. Our work won a Cannes Lion, D&AD Pencil, Webby and Lovie.
The awards were nice. Running the business taught me more: how agencies actually make money, where margin disappears, how clients and teams behave under pressure, and what happens when too much of the company still depends on a few people knowing what to do.
Reset
In 2021 I left the agency and stepped away from the industry for a while. I sold almost everything, moved to Mexico, built a house, travelled, wrote a non-fiction book about endemic animals, tried carpentry and gave myself room to work out what I actually wanted to do next.
Digital never really left me. But I knew I did not want to rebuild another 30-person company just to make software again.
Back to building
AI pulled me back in.
Not because I wanted to become an "AI consultant", but because the economics of building had fundamentally changed. Work that once required a multidisciplinary team could increasingly be done by one experienced builder with the right tools and judgment.
Today I am back where I started: designing and building products myself. The difference is that I now bring 25+ years of technical experience and twelve years of running an agency to every decision.
Yellow House Digital is deliberately small. The person you speak to is the person defining the product, making the technical decisions and taking responsibility for what ships.
Why agencies
Agencies are where my business experience and technical experience overlap.
I know what sits behind the polished case studies: proposals, margins, client expectations, founder dependency, repeatable methods, senior judgment and the countless decisions that never make it into a process document.
That is also where I see a large technology opportunity. Many agencies already possess valuable IP. It just does not look like IP yet. It lives in people, frameworks, workflows, spreadsheets, decks and ways of thinking.
Turning some of that into technology can make an agency easier to run, harder to copy, and sometimes create an entirely new product.
How I work
Three principles that shape every engagement.
Own the outcome
I do not want to be one pair of hands inside a chain of handoffs. If I take on a build, I want responsibility for making the whole thing work.
Start with the smallest useful version
Good ideas get expensive when everything becomes important at once. I prefer a tightly scoped first version that proves the important assumptions before we invest in more.
Say what I think
If I think something should not be built, should not use AI, or can be solved more simply, I will say so. The job is not to maximize the amount of technology. It is to make the right product.
What does your agency know that could become technology?
If there is a method, process, dataset or idea inside your agency that you think could become something more, tell me about it.
Discuss your idea