The journey - How'd I come up with the idea.

I started an Internet Service Provider back in 1995 with some friends. I was the one learning and building backend services and productizing everything, offering DNS, ISDN, Fiber, analog modem connections, email service, web hosting with Coldfusion/Perl CGI etc, It worked and we started to reach breakeven after 3 years, but it was hard to motivate 14 hours workdays. Then most of the websites were static, but I was fast moving to build dynamic sites with Pearl and Coldfusion. The thing we lacked was the focus. It's not possible to both try to be an ISP and a web agency with only one person doing the daily work.

So I now I thought after a couple of failed startups that I should start something similar to a web host/ISP (which had never failed and was a success). But nowadays the competition is on another level but technology has also evolved and changed.

So I researched how to build a Startup with zero cost that offered web hosting and of course it was not possible. But I also noticed the JAMStack movement (the term was not invented yet) and had used Jekyl before. So after 1-month research back in 2015 I started to build Appernetic based on open source projects, free and freemium services and connected API's. It was almost ready in January 2016.

Of course, I had no users and no marketing budget so it took another 5 months to build up an organic reach on the Internet.