As soon as I learned to code back in 2010 I started to offer my services as a freelance website developer. At first it would only be some pretty small static websites but I was improving really fast and I started to get more interesting projects for my portfolio. In 2012 I was starting to generate some interesting revenues especially for a full time student so when the time came where I was supposed to do an unpaid internship for 3 months in a boring company in order to graduate I decided to launch my first real business Expresso Technologies instead and hire myself as an intern.
I ran expresso for a little bit more than a year and I was earning good money but since I was now a full time IT engineering student I was starting to have difficulty scaling my business due to a lack of resources and time. That is when I decided to find a partner who could handle clients, marketing and other administrative tasks while I would focus on design and development. Marc-Antoine Arbour joined the team and we changed the name of the business to Mandoline Agence Web.
Together we worked on dozens of website projects for SME’s within a few months only and it was a pretty good run until Marc-Antoine had to leave for the west Canadian coast. This was one of the triggers that led me to sell most of our client list and put the business on hold a few months after in order to start other projects.
I Sold the company client list in 2015 for a first small business exit.
*Mandoline Web / Lab is now the legal structure behind the Dev Shop / Creative Studio in charge of the Children of Ukiyo NFT project.