It was 30 years ago today

In February 1996, I came up with a way to measure and report website traffic remotely. I put an image on my ‘HTML Corner’ website, served from my own server, named it Nedstat (the directory needed a name), and built the first version. When the page loaded, a file was updated on the server. Clicking the image triggered a Perl script that reported: last 10 visitors (due to a bug it was 11, don’t ask) visitors per day, per hour, per country. Real time. Simple. But this idea didn’t exist yet. I thought immediately: this could be something big.

I emailed the ‘Surprising Site of the Day’, a Dutch cool-site-of-the-day equivalent, run by Hans Veldhuizen. We already knew each other; I built a lot of sites and had been featured before. He wrote back: HTML Corner is nice, tomorrow you’re SSotD, but what’s on it, that Nedstat, that beats everything. We need to talk.

On April 10, 1996, thirty years ago today, we met.

Translation: Regarding out meeting tonight: I’ve reserved a table at restaurant Bartholdy, van Baerlestraat 35-37, on the name of Veldhuizen. See you there / Hans

I’m not going to tell the full history. I want to say three things that are now more relevant than ever.

It starts with an idea. The internet in 1996 was still small. Analytics even more so: logfile analysis was the norm, hits was the currency. There was room for something better. But an idea isn’t enough: The road from idea to success is called execution. That means working hard, thinking carefully, bringing the right people together, and always looking through the eyes of the customer.

We made good choices. A free version with a daily top 10 and an overview of new visitors: a worthwhile destination, even for people who didn’t use Nedstat yet. And a clever platform: the webmaster of a corporate site often had a personal homepage with a Nedstat counter, and that’s how we reached new customers through the ones we already had. Building means falling and getting back up: server crashes, slow load times, human error. I’m grateful to ABN-AMRO, our pioneering client, who weathered our growing pains with patience and firmness, and in doing so gave us a real chance to grow.

Then the people. What luck that I met Hans. In the early days you have to chase every lead, and he did that in giant strides. Literally. As a journalist he could tap his network and generate press coverage, and where bluffing doesn’t come naturally to me, he handled that for us. That led to the next phase: Michael Kinsbergen, first as investor, later as CEO. Michael has an eye for detail, demands simplicity, reads people extraordinarily well, and built the organizational structure for what was to come. I won’t name others (mention one person and three others get annoyed) but everyone who was there knows. People who grinded, thought along, pushed back constructively. People in the right place.

And then luck. Something I struggled to accept at the time, because I believed it was all about quality. But what fortune: that I studied astrophysics and my workstation was allowed to be a web server. That I was working on exactly these kinds of ideas at exactly that moment. That I already knew Hans, that Michael read that piece in the NRC, that so many people helped us build something. Present in 7 countries, up to 175 head count. Not nothing.

After Nedstat, I thought: I’ll just come up with something great again. But I had underestimated people and luck. That combination was rarer than I realized.

Since then I’ve done a lot of worthwhile things – among cocoa farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast, traders in Nigeria, taxi drivers in Kenya. Helping build AI sports planning through SportinnovatieStudio. Working with Jim and Eiso on AI solutions for great clients. With Roland and Anshul, contributing to the electrification of the Kenyan taxi fleet. And now, thanks to AI, building my own tools and apps like Acini.

But, to use a legacy term, still no hits. Because building is just one part. And a team of loyal AI agents is not the same as a group of enthusiasts who bring unique expertise and character to an idea.

I’m still building. I’m still learning. But I’m also looking: for the right idea, at the right moment, with the right people. Does this resonate, or are you working on something worth a coffee or a conversation? You know where to find me.