Wouter is a self-taught developer who makes $145k a year from niche job boards. He learned to code after he grew tired of outsourcing the work to other people. Learn how to got into programming and created his job board businesses:
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved so far as a founder?
I am 32 years old, live in a small place near Rotterdam in the Netherlands with my wife and two kids.
Currently I run around 5 job boards take make money plus my other business Inhuren.com that is still around and doing fine (but not at the scale it did back then).
Big difference right now is that I am doing it almost solo. Instead of with a team of employees. I have a couple of freelance contractors helping me out with stuff but 95% of the business is just me.
I am only running my only business fulltime for over two and a half years now and the job board revenue is only part of it. The freedom it gives me and my family is amazing. And I will probably never again run a company with employees, and office and lots of overhead costs.
How did you learn to code?
I basically started with the HTML/CSS course on CodeCademy and then after that I did the PHP course like 3 times so I had a good understanding of the basics.
Believe me when I say that to this day, I consider coding very hard. Also, because I only do it a couple of hours per week, this keeps the learning curve pretty flat.
Next step was learning Laravel and in the meantime working on my Wordpress websites and building custom themes, functionalities and then basically go from there.
Do you have advice for people learning to code in the AI era?
Just like website content for SEO, I am not a fan of AI generated or low quality content just for the purpose of getting traffic without providing any value.
I think I approach coding a little bit the same. Yes, nowadays I use AI but I still want a clear understanding of how code, functionalities or certain concepts work.
Why did you become a founder?
I think I became a founder because I just have difficulty working with/for other people (hahahaha).
Most people around me would describe me as a loner/anti social person. Never had much friends or a big social life. So that is why running an online business is a blessing for me every day. Because I do not really have to rely on other people.
How did you get the idea for Sustainable Jobs ?
The idea of a sustainability job board came from the fact that I thought it is a broad term where you can define a lot of jobs under. Sustainability in the Netherlands stands not only for climate or energy transition but also for biodiversity, nature conservation, NGOs, non profits, ecology and organizations with a positive societal impact.
