New Adventures

It’s been a while since I posted my last article on this blog, but what is really weird is that I have not mentioned yet what has been bothering my days and nights for the past 8 months.

In January this year, the first Startup Weekend was organized in Betagroup Coworking, Brussels. At first I didn’t want to attend, because I thought it was silly to hope you could do anything meaningful in merely 2 days. But Leo insisted, and 2 days before the event, I finally made up my mind. I was working on HuddleKit back then but I wanted to propose a simple idea for the event, something powerful and effective enough to be quick to implement. I had discovered AirBnB a few weeks before, and the whole collaborative consumption trend with it. Around a lunch at Vivansa‘s HQ, Said started thinking out loud about how difficult it was for small companies to adapt their office size as they grow, and how companies could mutualize their office space. We started dreaming about what a concept like AirBnB’s would mean applied to office space, how it could enrich business relationships. And then it struck me: 2 years ago, I published a post entitled “Let’s Solve Problems“, that ended like this.

Now I don’t know how or when, but this could very well become a major breakthrough in my personal and professional life somehow.

Well, guess what. The same day, I registered kodesk.com, and four days later, Kodesk won the grand prize of the jury and the leanest startup prize of the first Startup Weekend Brussels. After that, it was pretty obvious to me: I stopped working on HuddleKit and all my other pet projects, I progressively decreased my involvement with Vivansa and I started working almost full-time on Kodesk. In May this year, Frederic joined me in this adventure and we invested our own money in it. In late May, we released the first version of Kodesk and let’s just say that beyond visibility and publicity, the first results are not all as satisfactory as we expected. Now I’m certainly not complaining: we know that we are on the right track, our vision is crystal clear, we have a lot of support and it’s very rare for startups to get it right the first time. It’s even more rare for ventures that try to change common beliefs and evolve an entire culture.

But today it becomes obvious that building the right product and finding a profitable business model is going to take some time. And until we do, it’s going to be very hard to raise any external investment. Now we don’t want this financial constraint to remove all the fun from the adventure of creating our dream business from scratch, so today I am making a new move.

I love technology. I’m a geek and I am proud of it. My friends find it very useful and my passion for technology has allowed me to develop quite a reputation. Now it is time to earn some money with this passion and reputation, and to use that money to fund this groundbreaking business I’m building. So starting today, I am going to provide businesses of all sizes with three main services: technology watch, training and iPhone/iPad development, because those are the three things I love the most and I am really good at.  If you want more information, I created this page to promote my services. And if you know any company or individual who could be interested in my services, please feel free to pass my information along.