I was 6 when I first saw the internet. It was 1996, I came home to my Dad and he showed me a big white screen with an even taller big white box next to it:

“Aron, this is a computer. It gives us access to the internet!”

He connected to the internet via a dial-up modem and he fired up the Netscape internet browser:

“Type in anything you’d like to know!?”

Being 6, I couldn’t come up with anything better then what would be on tv, which back then was unheard of (if I’d had only seen the potential then, hahaha!) so he showed me some results he came up with, making me realise immediatly that this was going to be big.

At 7, I was introduced to a friend of my Dad, still remember: Fred Philippo.

I have no clue what he did at the time, but I remember him as my Dasd’s cool friend who had a ton of games and software, computers galore, and an entire room dedicated to it all.

Fred was awesome enough to introduce me to CoffeeCup, one of the first HTML editors online. He attempted to teach me basic HTML and showed me how to make a web page.

No WordPress. No Themes. No Plugins.

I had 0: a blank notepad file with some weird scribbling in it which at the time… Didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Fast forwarding: gaming (Wolfenstein 3D, Tomb Raider I and Max Payne), my Dad passing away (I was 14), making ny own websites since 8 years old…

I picked up the art of magic, and was able to get in touch with a magician in the USA. He was one of the many magicians creating his own effects and selling them on his website.

I bluffed myself into making him a site, to become friends with him and work together. 
Thats when I learned determitation: I had just bluffed myself into a job and the client accepted!

I had to learn HTML, learn Photoshop, and create a full blown website that would actually be a complete site, blog, webshop system and e-mail system in one installation. It’s one of my specialties by the way but anyhow…. I did learn it all doing it with little bits of PHP, HTML, CSS, and some tables xD

He thought me magic for free, he got a cool website! He was selling via PayPal at the time, and all was running smoothly.
He teamed up with other magicians:

“Need a website? Aron’s your guy!”

Since then, and still I work with a group of magicians and cardistry artists ( click that link, you’ll like it. Promise 😉 ) and maintain their sites, and sometimes even host them through our hosting company. 

I got into internet marketing around 2010, being introduced by a vague (dutch) video that promised something along the lines of: work 4 hours a day and get $2500 a week… An impossible promise that simply couldn’t be lived unto, unless they have a magic machine that generates a product, website, converting sales copy and of course, please don’t forget: The traffic, that needs to be of such quality that it actually converts with the offer… In just four hours a day? And btw that’s just the beginning of starting your own product and services.

I had my own physical phone repair company with a friend, which we ran out of my home.

All said and done, we ran it for a year and a half and decided it was best to part ways. Had a lot of fun, but for some reason it just wasn’t profitable -> Should write a story about this xD

From there I started to figure out how to work online from home, and came to the conclusion that it was best to run SAAS services: Products that require such software that fills a gap, something someone might need for their business, and a product that you can charge monthly for. 

Each customer you rake in, you can bill monthly as your product offers a service which needs high maintenance for example.
Servers, domains, support, interaction, finances and so much more that comes around the corner when you have your own business.

So when I started out, I got with a shared hosting package for all my sites. They where good, cheap, and charged me per year at a fair price. Had a bunch here and there, and built up a product the published at a social network.

I charged monthly for it, and offered a free version to test out.

Doing all this at being 22, I considered this  “easy”. I setup PayPal recurring billing, created a nice big clear buy button ($1 Trials!) and did some SEO work – If you want my exact methods, hit the contact method above – and landed on the first page of Google. 

Traffic came in organically, people where LOOKING FOR MY PRODUCT……………………. which was of course the best situation to be in as a seller.

I even got word around town, and I guy came up to me asking me if I could create a poker website for him. He was paying too much renting a script then if he’d let one be made. I offered him to partner up and together we started pokersitesnamehere.nl 🙂

Thinking about the site I had made a few weeks later, I considered the fact… What if I sold this site… I could create unlimited duplicates of it, license them and charge them X amount to run the script.

So back to the hosting 🙂 I met Sharon after creating my initial product, and together we started looking at ideas, domain names and so much more an registered them with various hosting and domain registration companies.

We’ve done a lot of things together already, and we’re now proud to introduce you to Cloudustries, our hosting and domain registration company!