About Pieter van den Bosch

Introduction
I was born in Thailand,  but my Dutch parents brought me to Holland. I came from not a rich background, having lived in an orphan home, however in the Netherlands I got the opportunity to go to school. So I did. I studied at the Erasmus College, in Almelo for pre-university and decided after graduation of my VWO-NG exam to NOT to go to the university of Twente, but instead go to Saxion, the University of Applied sciences to study Business Engineering (Industrial Management). This decision turned out to be a huge decision from me and my future success. Here is the full story:

Passion for Technogy
Dad and his programming passion influenced me to love technology.
As a kid I was very interested in technology, at the age of 6, I remember me playing many adventure games, Lucas Arts games were games about graphical puzzle solving, in which the language was English. These games helped me to learn English very fast (just point with the mouse icon over an graphical object) and you see the English name. It got me to learn English very fast and at the age of 8, I started to develop simple software programs and play with my dads source code, he often programmed games for me like Yahtzee and it got me introduced with variables concepts and programming language. (He programmed in Visual basic).

Lucas arts

Designing
Learning the concepts of writing software as a teenager

At 12 I started to write software myself such as games, calculators and from there it exploded. At 14, I designed games for my secondary High School together with a (still) good friend of mine. I noticed that he was way better than me in programming, however most of the time I spent time in integrating idea’s  of software concepts. Although I believe he was creative in his own way e.g. programming. At sixteen I released a website focusing on supporting hardware for gaming consoles, while the topic might not be so interesting for you, it was very interesting that I understood the power of clearly writing, introducing a topic well. The power of good phrases, explaining concepts can convince someone to do action. I had setup a forum, created a community, and ran some affiliates which gave me an income of 30 dollar every week, just by writing. GOOD DEAL as a kid!!!
From there I kept on writing software but as the internet became more adopt and I was heavily following Google, I asked myself, what should I do later in life? I knew that designing is very cool (the adventure gaming got me into drawing as-well) So then I started to develop simple HTML websites (I build the support site myself).

f2a

Building websites and automation.
I kept on building sites for like 4 years and writing software. By writing software I every time improved my development method, I soon noticed that programs need to be simple, intuitive and not brain teasers. So I reduced all functionality to 3 steps methods. Then at the age of around 18 I designed software to hack the Wii, I did NOT write the hack by self but found a way to distribute them in a 3 step model, not including the hack self but selling the automated steps (in which the user could initiate the download)  Instead that the user had to download the app, investigate, read online how to, making folders, renaming, copying, making sure he now had the right version and it was compatible, the 3 steps reduction was great doing software-matically. I released a free version on the internet and it got distributed by the community , it was downloaded 10.000 times in three days . Then I improved the software and added to  support future version a price tag of 5 dollars to it. Why you may ask? Because I spent time on writing it….It did well and was sold over 400 times.
Not that I think that the software was special..but there was something very good in it.. The actual source code was 30 lines (written and released in one day..) But the design was great and the downloads enormous. I learned this from another application I wrote which was a screensaver for the Palm handheld in 2006. It was a screensaver still floating around in 2011 on the internet, developed in 2006. These simple programs are downloaded a lot.

palmart-01

Websites as a Service development
At the university of Applied scenes I started to develop with my twin brother Paul, an action site for electronic devices.  We registered a business (Elektronicamarkt) “This turned out to be the biggest project we have worked on so we needed friends to participate. The system worked great, but it had not any profit model, the architecture was great too, partly open-source. But the business to operate was too intensive, it needed marketing, operations… So the project failed..However, the platform and it’s technology were great in that day and the knowledge we gained about project and customers and approaches..it was good having that background knowledge now. (Later we had licensed the platform for 3k to other people who want to buy and sell)

The swift to creating core technology.
A bit dazzled about the failure of elektronicamarkt, we noticed that the project didn’t fail for our goals, we just wanted to create interesting technology. As soon the platform was finished it needed operations..something that we not like that much, we wanted to explore technological solutions. So we noticed this is our core business to do in life. Create new innovating software, make it ‘perfect’ and see if we can operate it. If not, throw the business away but keep the technology knowledge….And we did, which started our new tech startup: Boschmedia.   

Shifting towards Business

Frustration at “companies”  led to founding own company.
From here things went fast, still in university college, we created websites and during an industrial outplacement of the university (stage in Dutch) I worked at a company in which I needed to create an e-commerce website. Partly outsource it, work with developers.. And there was my supervisor, A guy who did not know anything about coding, design, just a bit about business. Well it was my first outplacement so I want into finding solutions, we came to find Magento in 2008 it was then a baby child but growing fast.. With my supervisor letting me to solve the problems and he ..well doing not that much I contacted a developer from Germany, and he started to work on a skin design. However the programmer disappeared suddenly so I had to find out all the problems myself.. And there I learned the whole system, maybe I just could deliver the project.. A few weeks later the developer showed up again  (making me wonder…are all developers like this?) and he helped me out with delivering the skin. I did the project deployment, setting up the server, architecture and all the other things besides skins.. And this was also the product import. Well the project import was then not automated but by using an excel and spreadsheet you could import the product in the back-end.  This was great! a way to inject data! But it wasn’t automated and my supervisor well, he couldn’t care.  I still had some weeks to go so I focused with a programmer, who was a bit lazy sometimes on the import script side. Being lazy too  I thought why do this manually and not automate it..spend 10 hours more and we automate it or 100 times manually. So we automated it.. And then BOOM the company went bankrupt..The company was called iTexion, which was a business unit of TSI-solutions. (travel company).. I felt bad about it but the managers were all not technologist they just thought they had good business and the architecture will be developed by programmers them self. Well if someone cannot direct that team or not speak their language well then you know what will happen. And it did. Their software got extremely slow, over-engineered not making deadlines..The funny part here is that I told them about development methodologies and SCRUM which was then just introduced, initial I applied at TSI , told them about development models but they wouldn’t listen. (My intuition said that they had no idea where to focus on)..So with iTexion bankrupt I started finished my outplacement with a 7. My supervisor left also and I tried to contact him Reinder but he didn’t answer the phone. I still needed 300 euro, gaining only 150 euro per month for the whole project.. Yes it is absurd I know but a sweet opportunity followed making the 300 euro seem nothing. I went on with school again, put completely down elektronicamarkt en focuses on the script which I still had left. Remembering the format, I thought that it should be flexible, agile, any word columns should be created. I obtained this data set by creating product through he visual manager and exporting it. Then look at the format. It was the beginning of backwards engineering the data set, allowing it later to be flexible.I understood the data-set and i tried at the forums if there was any interest. And there was, a guy from the US , Eric contacted me to work on his site for a simple 300 dollar job. Well I thought why not experiment and I took the job, remembering that my dad was a good programmer, I thought well I have the concepts , prototype build (I wrote a fast demo) and thought it needed a lot improvement. So I asked my dad if he could work on it for a dinner. And he liked the idea of eCommerce and the puzzle. So he developed and worked towards a version one. Main-while I asked tried the forums again and told them what we were developing. Before my dad started to work on it, I acted if it was “done” already creating interest. I thought: “Well development is never done” so why not tell them about it as of it was nearly finished”. People started to follow my blog and were subscribed to my post treat.” . When dad and I released v1 Eric paid and later I decided lets put it on the forum now… Well the next weeks we were selling software….creating sales like min. 2/3 per  month. it doesn’t seem much but we target the software around 200 euro.
In the same time we had the new start-up Boschmedia which was focusing on websites, doing some simple project for people who wanted a website. We did WordPress, Magento and developed the auction software, not this time for our-self but for a client, bringing in 3k, he had offers from other for 100k . He thought it was a good deal and so did I. So the initial project of Elektronicamarkt didn’t bring in any income, this project had refunded all our costs and licenses. Boschmedia did good.

The start-up of an international software company
We kept on selling which allowed us to rent an office. We got to know great new people and we were introduced to the entrepreneurial world. Coming from a technical background we found it very interesting that the social part  was as much important as the technical background.  I was studying Business Engineering (Industrial Management) and I combined the two skills. Due to the success of the software I was able to create a brand around the importer product and the design was even more simple than the Wii hack software .. “ONE SIMPLE BUTTON” which stated import.
The import itself was managed by a configuration file. This was edited by filling in parameters. The design was left simple. I think that this contributed as well for the success. Anyway, we created additional cross selling product, product modules and allowed to import from whole saler profiles. I got a team together, my twin working on it too and we did several years.

Development Methodologies &  Software as a service Platform development

Live-Sync-Mac

More will follow up

 

 

 

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