Biography
I was born in 1987 in the Netherlands, a cute rainy flat country in Europe. I was raised at the sea actually! We have one of the widest and longest beaches at the North Sea. Don’t pack your bag just yet, because the Norh Sea is very cold and only 2 monts a year in the summer its good staying there.

I grew up in a loving and God fearing family. I went to a great primary school and got decent grades. At the age of 10 I started to work to bring newspapers to people, but that didn’t last very long in the rainy weather…

When the internet arrived and our computer with windows 95 became a fact, I started a new business, selling floppy disks with games to my classmates. Sim City 1, Raptor, Pac-Man and Jill of the Jungle sold like crazy. After a year or so the first CD writer was introduced to a friend in my neighborhoud. You won’t believe the first game I copied with that thing… Carmageddon! Oh boy did I found copying disks interesting.

The internet came in our house with a dial-up modem, and then everything changed. I was introduced to the world of Dreamweaver and started buidling my own websites. This was in 2001. It was all HTML and I can’t remember that I touched PHP at that time. We also got a flatbed- scanner which was a real joke to use a program like MS Paint to fix my picture in some scanned in paper money. Napster was a pain with my dial-up modem, but in the meantime the local bakery who came door to door started selling Top40 music cd’s next to the fresh bread and croissants (not a joke). Those were all copied and highly illegal. However, I thought it was a smart move. He already got the logistics, so why not make a extra buck here and there!

First succes
When I was 14, the first mobile phones did their entrance at our place. We got the polyphonic ringtones, which at that time was a-ma-zing. However, there were no good resources for those ringtones, mostly the tones would simply not work when download on the phone. So I decided to create them myself from downloaded MP3’s via Napster. I quickly found a website called tagtag.com which enabled free hosting for mobile XML websites. I started to build one called “Poly4Ever” and it saw daylight on 7-5-2003.

For 6 months I runned this website untill it got way to popular. Hundreds of thousands of people found the site (if I could believe the statistics of tagtag.com). It started to dawn me that SEO was a pretty cool thing and that its possible to reach thousands of people from my parents attic. The downside was that all polyphonic ringtones were made of my illigal Napster downloads… so I deleted the entire website (this was well before VPN’s were available for the ‘normal’ people), before I got into real trouble!

I was 16 at that time when MSN was hot. Chatting all night with people found on Hyves (the Dutch version of Facebook before Facebook became the end of Hyves). In that time I also had a drive-in show with my best friend. We called ourselves DJ’s and made money while going to different parties and have a great night.

Education & work
In that time broadband internet became a thing and finally I went to college. I chose HBO Communicatie to get my Bachelors degree in Communication and Marketing. I have done minors in Social Media and did a internship at ING (the Dutch big bank) on online marketing.

Then in 2008 I got my first real job next to my study, I was a official SEO & SEA Consultant for small businesses. I learned a lot these days about SEO and the pretty boring (imo) tasks of SEA.

It was in this time (2009) when I told a friend (Ferdy) to stop playing with Joomla and start to go working with WordPress…. He did told me to also start making video’s on YouTube (as more people would say over the years).

I married the love of my life in 2009. It was then when I started giving training and started lecturing all around the Netherlands. From 2009 till 2019 I have spoken on stage for small groups (20 people) up to 1500 people in one meeting as the keynote speaker for 45 min.

After 4 years I graduated to become a ‘Bacherlor in the Science of Communication and Marketing (HBO in Amsterdam). Straight out of college I became a “Online Marketing Advisor” in one of the top-3 Online Marketing businesses in the Netherlands. I had to do sales and accountmanagement of real big accounts. We had all different kinds of expert consults working with us. SEO, SEA, Google Analytics, E-mail Marketing and Social Media Marketing were the teams. Just before I came aboard, one SEO’er (Joost de Valk) just left the company to start a small business that would change WordPress SEO forever… However, his knowledge did not left the building fortunately, so I could learn from the top of the class.

After 6 months I ‘earned’ my place in the company and got a iPad (1st gen!) a iPhone 2, and yes, a Volkswagen Polo Bluemotion with every option on it. I was happy and working 4 days a week. We were a pretty big name in that time with accounts as KLM and Schiphol. The ones I personally made a client for the company were big Dutch names like Greenpeace, CoolBlue, ICM, Liander, Portaal, VGZ and LeBallon.

Why did they chose me to be there accountmanager at my very young age? It was a blessing of God but I also brought my skills to the table. I listened, gave advice from my experience and expertise, ask great questions and knew to bring the right consultant to the right conversation.

Time to go solo
After a couple of years there was a crossroad. One of the owners of the company took a wrong turn financially, making the company basicly bankrupt. There was a takeover and I got the change to start for myself OR to go with the new owner. As I scored more than excellent with my sales (11 times my own gross salery!) I did some thorough praying about it. It then hit me that God had other plans and I needed to go solo.

And so I did. In 2013 I started to work by myself, finding clients, learning great skills, read a million books about self-development and dragged my friends in it to. I created 2 webshops which sell physical products. Those webshops still do bring in a lot of revenue and score #1 on SEO in their niche-market. I created a lof of different great projects in the hunt for recurring income. I don’t say ‘passive’ income, because that is a myth. You always have to do some work for it, no matter what your income is, its never passive. I created website for clients, did their managed hosting and reported to them monthly.

Since 2013 people kept telling me to start a YouTube channel. I didn’t believe those people and told myself I wasn’t good enough, the market was saturated with self-called WordPress Guru’s and there was no money to make there. Untill some YouTubers showed me how much money they made with there tutorials. My eyes were opened, but I needed a way to stand out in the YouTube crowd.

In 2020 one night over a beer a friend asked my what my strenght is with my clients, why they loved me so much and keep bringing in new clients. I told him I helped my clients, and I fix ALL there problems. “Like a doctor?” He asked: “Why not the Divi Doctor!?” I thought that was awesome, but a bit to narrow. Then the WPress Doctor was born!

YouTube
As all things I life, I like to go hard and fast, even with no experience. Learn while you go, grow your wings on the way down – is my advice. So I did. I recorded my first video’s in my bedroom with a Logitech Webcam and a Greenscreen bought from someone else. For the sound recording I used my iPhone. I got some cheap Softbox lights to light me out. I went all Doctor on it, the white coat, the stethoscope, the clipboard… I needed a way to be so ridiculous that it would stand out. It was my goal to get the first year to 100 subscribers, if that worked, I would continue to make video’s as a side income to my own businesses. If not, I would quit YouTube and never touch it again. Remember that I had multiple projects of new websites, a hosting company, 4 kids, a beautiful spouse and 2 webshops, so enough work to be done…

The first year I ended up at 1000 subscribers. I don’t know why, but appearently God blessed me and told me this was the way. With views came money to pay for gear. A 4K camera and new mic were the first things I invested back in the business. After a dew months more my entire studio was paid by YouTube Money. Except my PC, wich was a old (but fine) PC. However, I had to be creative. For example, exporting a video longer than 10 minutes would not work. I had to export in parts, or else Premiere Pro crashed my entire PC. First 1-10 minutes, than 10-20, 20-30 and so on. Then I would stich them together and export the entire Full HD video. It was a real hassle but hey, if you want to reach some goals, don’t stop!

In 2021 I decided to drop the greenscreen and create a nicer background. When there came more views and subscribers, I also decided to create a new video every week in 2022. Finally my PC started to fall apart so in 2022 I bought a completely new PC with specs I could only dream of. Now I could make 4K video’s and normally export them. Thank God and thank my amazing viewers for making this all possible!

In 2024 the YouTube channel did very good and got 100k+ views (only long form videos) every single month – A staggering amount. Imagine every single hour 134 people are watching me. Or 2 people every minute! I love the comments and the people that are really helped and say their problems has been solved. I love to work with developers and brands, to see if I can help to bring their exciting plugin to more people. However, 9 out of 10 proposals I decline, simply because as an expert in this field I know what the (undiscovered) gems are, and what are generic products/services, just more of the same.