Did you know that memories and feels can lie to you? Well... that's what I learned when I set out to write this.
I started 2018 with no OrganiCode. I had nothing lined up, it was just me, a laptop and a client that needed something built. How did I happen upon said client? I have a habit of keeping in touch with people I've worked with over the years (I even hired a previous co-worker for a two year contract and had a buddy do some contract based work). I have a bunch of ex coworkers I still touch base with, send memes to etc. Some of which I play games with from time to time. One of those ex coworkers referred me. The Organic in OrganiCode existed before it did.
The paperwork finally caught up in August even though the doing-work-for-people-who-pay-you thing had been happening for months by then. When you start a business organically, you don't spend the time picking out names and logos and colour palettes BEFORE the time... those things happen because the business is already businessing, and the paperwork and processes come next, and this seems to have become the pattern for me.
OrganiCode turned eight on the 15th of August and the website morphed into a new form around the same time. This is the story of what happened between the start and reaching 8 years old. This story is the raw one, receipts, wobbles and everything else.
(If you want the origin story, the age-thirteen, Turbo-Pascal-out-of-a-textbook, how-did-this-person-end-up-here part, that's a different post. This one starts roughly where From Worker to Owner ends, and picks up the company.)
The accidental company
Nobody pulled me aside and said "hey you need to register a company"... It was just the logical next step.
Before OrganiCode there was BitStar, a company I co-founded with a friend after we'd built an Android app in around 2013. That app was a learning experience of note! It was a real app, it was on the playstore, it was even in a Vodacom booklet in a feature "top 10 apps for small business" (on the same page as Skype mobile - Skype is better than Teams... by a long way!). It made a little money, got a bunch of downloads (thousands). BitStar taught me a LOT and I'll forever remember it with fondness for those lessons and the times we had. When I left it hurt, endings usually do. The exit was clean, there was no fighting over clients or anything like that. I was paid for my shares over roughly a year and my directorship came to an end on paper at the end of 2018... again the substance happened and was followed by the paperwork later.
There's no reason to dig up the body of that exit and dissect it. There's no dirty laundry, nobody tried a coup or did dodgy dealings... it was just time for something different. What I WILL tell you though is that I was 34 years old, I had a wife, a bond and I was about to walk away from all income and bet on myself with absolutely zero guarantees... I had zero prospects. The kind of weight you feel when you realise putting food on the table is 100% on you is something you cannot describe to someone who hasn't been through it.
While I was formulating this post I came up with a saying which describes how I left BitStar with nothing but learnings in my pip. (the company wasn't worth a huge amount when I left so this wasn't a "Founder exits company with millions and stumbles into next big thing while on a 2 year eat pray love journey)".
That's the BitStar logo. I designed it, and I still think it's cool. (I also co-designed the OrganiCode logo with my wife, so apparently branding is a recurring side quest.)
An accidental product line, too
A couple of years later, in the thick of COVID, a chiropractor needed some forms digitised.
It wasn't something that would be complex, but it also wasn't something you'd toss together over a weekend and call it done. As I tend to do I hit them with the cold water and then the warm heart "For what it would cost to build for you only it won't be worth it for you, but here's what I'll do... I'll build the thing as an OrganiCode product and license it to you at a reasonable monthly cost". As it was said so it was done.
A later referral (Thanks Cabbage!) needed five forms digitised in their business. Those five forms became "hey... could we add this function?", which became "can we digitise this other process and this other one and and and...". That platform has morphed into a quoting, production, site, spares, equipment, hr, workforce and more management tool.
I've said that OrganiCode has always been the bridesmaid but never the bride, but that was changing... OrganiCode now has an armada of its own products in different stages of development. FlexForms (which is a re-invention and modernisation of the platform built in 2020), FlexHR (which is a really flexible HR system that includes payroll functionality and integrates into payroll providers), FlexTasks (a task tracking system that I'm "dogfooding" and refining through that dogfooding), FlexBackup (I tried to use an existing backup provider but they couldn't get their product talking to the databases, so I set up an epic backup tool), FlexDeck (this one is a passion project, it's a hardware controller to open and close programs, control Discord and more). I have even more rounds in the chamber, but these are the current ones.
Software that started life as me trying to save a client money and turned into a thing OrganiCode actually makes.
I didn't set out to build products. I set out to solve one small problem honestly, and the honesty is what opened the door to the bigger one. That's a pattern I'd notice again and again: the small, unglamorous, do-right-by-them decision is the one that compounds.
People above profits is one of my mottos.
The client wall
Over the years the work has touched Volkswagen SA, the Cape Town Stock Exchange, GHD. Big logos, serious systems, the kind of clients you'd assume need a big company with a sea of developers.
They didn't, they needed someone who would get stuck in and get stuff done. They needed someone who would pick up the phone when needed. And that's exactly who I am... if I'm needed I'm THERE. I always go the extra mile, and I even offer it when I'm not asked. I'm the guy on the phone to Vodacom when their DNS causes issues for clients across the country where many other places go "server is up, your connection isn't our responsibility" click. They aren't wrong but that doesn't make it right. Many customers have asked me to expand the current system I've built or even brought me back to do new systems and other work after the initial engagement.
The honest wobbles
A birthday party without the tough parts is like a happy birthday song being sung without the person standing at the cake cringing. This is a story, not an advert so...
COVID clobbered the business and me personally. We all got battered around by it. A global electronic-component shortage ran a project I had high hopes for aground. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular just my own personal lived experience of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Was it the only project to ever be shelved? NOPE. There have been a few attempts at getting products built. Sometimes with people, sometimes an idea that I had. Some have been permanently retired, others have been put on the shelf for a while. Some are in progress and we're hoping for a win. Like they say, you have to be in it to win it!
"People over profits" is an EPIC tag line, but it's EXPENSIVE to actually mean it. But, I've meant it anyway, and it has cost me in ways that were mine to carry. Eight years in, I still choose it. It's not a regret or something that needs fixing... it's just who I am and who the business is.
Eight years is enough time to teach you that businesses have seasons. Clients boom, clients wobble, projects pause and sometimes come back a year later. I won't be telling any stories of clients that wobbled (even anonymised isn't truly anonymous as any of them reading would immediately know I was talking about them). Those are their stories to tell, if they ever wish to. Another one of my core beliefs is that we are here for each other, not merely to make money and die. So I will always do right by clients, and I always have. Even more so when they need extra help.
The unreliable narrator
Our memories can be fallible, fictitious or even downright fake as mentioned in the opening. It's actually the same principle as the "Mandela effect" (just on a smaller scale). Post-event information can alter your original memory, leading to inaccuracies in recall. Missing pieces can get filled in by our brains doing their best effort, but failing to be accurate... It's not only ChatGippidy that infers the wrong things and hallucinates happenings. lol. And this is the exact reason they take statements from multiple witnesses at an accident or crime scene.
I only discovered this one by accident while researching this blog post, checking old emails for the dates in this very post.
I remember the period after leaving BitStar as a long, dark, sadsack-on-the-couch era. As I started writing this post my memory said "it was MONTHS on the couch" (I actually typed that out and had to correct it).
The archaeological dig into the archives tells a significantly different story. It was basically a month. By early February 2018 I was already engaging with a paying client, after leaving BitStar in December 2017. Mid December to mid January are basically "non-events" because everyone goes on leave. International people reading this, does your country hit a "go slow" from early December until early/mid January like here in South Africa?
Those negative feelings were very real, there was real dread and depression. I'm not going to pretend I marched out of BitStar fully confident that I would land on my feet. But the receipts are real and showed there was momentum even when I FELT like I was going backwards. My belief in myself and my output have traditionally been disconnected. There's a story there too and I'm turning a corner where I'm starting to believe.
*partially generated and partially photochopped by yours truly
"He's beginning to believe" - Morpheus, The Matrix.
I suspect I'm not the only business owner who tells himself there were darker times than there actually were. If that's you, go and look at the data. You might have been doing better than you are remembering. If you need an ear I'm here.
What eight years actually bought
Let me get the dirty shorts out here, people don't normally ask the questions.
A salaried developer with 2 decades of experience earns more than I have paid myself. I had an employee for a while that I paid more than I've paid myself. It's just how it is. I'm an evidence guy. On straight cashflow, employment has won thus far.
But, as they say, there are some things that money just can't buy. I have maybe not had the cashflow that I could have had, but I have had access to things that most salaried developers couldn't easily get.
When my wife and I did IVF I was there for every appointment. We often saw women there alone because their partner was chained to a desk. I could be there. When the eventual pregnancy turned high-risk, I could be there for every step of the journey. When my wife was in hospital for 2 weeks before the premature birth of our son. I was there. The two weeks he spent in NICU, I was able to be there. I bought the ability to be present when I gave up the larger salary. A few times a year we get to the coast, and I work between beach visits, the laptop life actually lived instead of performed for a caption. Many companies are hitting that RTO (Return To Office) grind now, work from wherever is only what LinkedIn influencers post about.
I swapped higher earnings for the ability to be in the room for parts of life that others can't be. I also get to spend way more time with my wife and son than most people. No amount of money can buy that back at a later stage.
The reveal
*crafted by my own hand in Canva
And now we're here... August 2026 and the timing isn't an accident.
For eight years OrganiCode has run on referrals and gut feels and me. It has worked, but it's been "flying by the seat of your pants". No way of tracking who arrived at my website, who clicked through from the posts I made on socials. A mechanic's car and that whole vibe.
So I got out the jack, lifted the car on stands and got to work (my dad was a mechanic by trade and I grew up in a workshop... so I can actually swing a spanner). The site is newly improved (I've always found the phrase "new and improved" odd, is it new, is it existing but improved. Is it having an identity crisis?!). It finally has a way of monitoring who arrives, what stuff is getting clicked, how people find the site. But it has also been revoiced to sound more like the founder front and center and not just another generic "we build software" banner in a sea of faceless websites.
Here's how I see it now:
Eight years ago I registered a company. This month I shipped it a nervous system.
The business that ran on referrals and gut feel now has attribution, a funnel, and a founder willing to stand in front of it. That's not a birthday. That's the company hitting the age where it learns to read.
Or, if you want the shorter version: the revamp isn't a new coat of paint. It's the business finally dressing like its founder.
(OrganiCode put up its own, slightly better behaved birthday note too, with the new site and the products in it: Eight years, and a new front door.)
Eight years. Nothing but learnings in my pip. And the substance, as ever, arrived first.
The calm, by the way, is for hire. If you're running your business on spreadsheets and gut feel the way I ran mine, there's a door at OrganiCode, and it's an easy one to knock on.
*thanks gemini