Built by someone who has actually run businesses.
I don’t work from a list of services. I have run businesses: products, customers, suppliers, advertising, websites. And I have hit the problems that only appear when all of it has to work together.
That changes how I build. I know which corners cost money later, because I paid for cutting them.
Hamed Hosseini, founder of Inenova. The Hague.
I started in IT and network administration, taking systems apart to find out why they broke. That is still the habit: when something in a business is not working, the interesting question is never the symptom, it is what upstream caused it.
Then I stopped maintaining other people’s systems and started building my own businesses. First trading nuts and food ingredients, dealing with suppliers, quotes, margins and customers who wanted a price yesterday. Then a sports nutrition brand that I took from the first version of a formula to the last shipped order.
That meant suppliers who missed deadlines, labelling rules that had to be exactly right, packaging that had to survive a courier, and advertising that had to pay for stock I had already bought. Not one discipline. All of them at once, with my own money on the line.
I have built businesses, not just websites.
What I think is wrong with most agencies.
None of this is a swipe at people doing good work. It is the pattern I kept running into as the one paying the invoices.
They sell a service, not an outcome
You ask for more customers and get a retainer for the thing they happen to sell. If all you have is an ads agency, every problem is an ads problem.
Nobody owns the seams
The designer hands off to the developer, the developer to the ads agency. What is broken is usually in the gap, and the gap has no owner.
The work is never checkable
Reports full of numbers that do not reconcile with your bank statement. If you cannot verify it, it is not a result, it is a claim.
So: one person, one chain, fixed scope
You deal with me from the first call to the handover. Where a specialist is genuinely faster at one piece, I bring one in, and the responsibility stays with me.
Three things I will not do.
Sell you work you do not need
If your site is fine and the problem is your offer or your pricing, you will hear that instead of a quote.
Hold your accounts hostage
Every account, file and password is in your name from day one. You can walk away with the whole thing and nothing breaks.
Quietly edit my own mistakes
When I get something wrong, the correction stays visible with the date on it. Advice you cannot check is worth no more than an opinion.
Based in The Hague, working with clients anywhere. Fluent in English, Dutch and Dari. Reachable on +31 6 38 73 78 12, usually the same day.
Tell me what’s not working.
One paragraph about your business is enough. You get a plan, not a pitch, usually within a working day.