Why Did I Make This Website? (Not a Happy Story)

Contents

All the sticks are falling off

Have you ever heard the phrase “All the sticks are falling off”?, I guess not.

In the Dominican Republic, there is a phrase to define a person when at a certain moment many things go wrong “All the sticks are falling off”. (spanish: se le están cayendo todos los palitos)

For me, it wasn’t just “the sticks fell off”, it was a whole forest.

In a nutshell, one day I found myself in the middle of my hot bedroom, I had been fired from an abusive and toxic job, without benefits and without notice. (I was a subcontractor, but I was in that company for years and I didn’t have time for other things).

Months began to pass, and despite my experience and profession, getting a job became similar to getting water in a desert.

My wife got sick, my stepson got sick, and I had no money for medicine, all kinds of debts piled up, several months of rent, school debts, car debts, etc.

It was very hard, it was as if the moon was falling from space on my back, then I understood that many people go through this.

The website idea is a light at the end of the tunnel

In the course of the days, I managed to join Uber as a driver (terrible experience), working as a driver in the city of Santo Domingo, is like facing Mike Tyson in his prime, a beating.

One day in desperation, I typed on my laptop “how to make money online” and I came across a video on Youtube, two young people from the United States explaining how they make money creating websites.

Best of all, the information they were giving was free, I realized that I had almost all the tools to do it: I know English, I love to write, and I have been using computers for years.

All the tools except the most important one: I didn’t know anything about programming or creating websites.

Under this pressure, under this weight
We are diamonds taking shape ( Coldplay-Adventure of a lifetime)

What about the website name?

Yes, when starting something new you always make silly mistakes, and guess what? I made silly mistakes with this website which was my first one.

My first mistake was choosing the domain name (the name of the website), a huge mistake, which I can’t undo.

In those days I was so broke (no money), I didn’t have the money to pay for hosting and a domain (yes, you probably don’t know what hosting or domain is, I didn’t know anything back then either)., so I took advantage of an offer where they gave me a free domain name.

For some stupid strange reason, I chose the domain name of a famous YouTube channel from the Dominican Republic, a bad choice.

I tried to change the name, but I didn’t know what I was doing. In the end, I decided to keep the name of the website although I don’t feel good about it.

Imagine that your father named you Michael Jackson and to top it off you want to be a singer, growing up with that name implies growing up under the shadow of something you didn’t create, so yeah, it’s no fun at all, anyway…

The most important thing in life

The boy in the profile picture of the topic is my 10-year-old stepson (at the time of the photo), his name is Yulian.

Incredibly, he has been a great support for these projects, he always asks me how the websites are doing, and if they have been growing, and he tells me that someday he wants to collaborate with me.

One day, in a random conversation, Yulian told me a phrase that impacted me a lot, because it really is something I have always thought about and because it is too deep for a child to think about it, so I told him to write it down on a piece of paper.

He told me “The most important thing in life is…freedom.”

This post is written to never forget.

This website is not a “place”, it’s a journey

To finish, I would like to tell you that now I’m “bathing in the money”, but I’m not, although I’m really very satisfied.

Currently, me and my family are doing well thanks to these projects, remembering those bad times is just an encouragement to keep grinding.

I’m not doing this to show off, or to be pitied, as I mentioned previously, this is a reminder for myself, and incidentally, something to let people know something tangible about me.

Nowadays I don’t worry so much about money, this is so much fun, plus, being helpful to many people is a very fulfilling feeling.

You meet your destiny in the path you take trying to avoid it (quote from Kung Fu Panda), I never wanted to see myself in a bad situation in my life, but thinking about everything that happened to me, I feel grateful for that bad moment.

I currently have a portfolio of 8 websites and a Youtube channel, most of them based on design and architecture (my profession).

And although this website is mostly visited by people from North America, one of my architectural design websites has literally reached the entire world in less than two years.

In blue color, are represented the countries that have visited one of my architectural design websites, in less than two years.

It all started with a simple step, with this website about my home country, the Dominican Republic.

At one point in my life “all the sticks fell out”, all the logs fell on me, but, I gathered them all and I’m building something beautiful. After all, I am an architect.

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2 Comments

  1. juan alfonseca says:

    Quiero comenzar a construir en mi pais , tengo unas tierras

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