Ten websites, and the first one that took root

When people see the ecosystem of platforms I work on today, they almost always assume there was a plan — a moment when I "had the idea" and things took off. The truth is far less spectacular and, I think, far more useful to tell: before anything worked, there were about ten websites that didn't work at all. My first real note is about them — and about the one that, after three years of failure, finally took root.

The first website: for my dad

I built my first website with a bit of HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript, picked up here and there at school and from tutorials. The goal was simple and, or so I thought at the time, very practical: to help my dad. He works a trade — he fits windows and double glazing — and the site was meant to be an online shopfront, a clean showcase that would bring potential customers his way. In my mind back then the equation was obvious: put his quality work on a good-looking site and the clients come on their own.

Months went by. I checked almost every day, with the same naive hope. Not a single message. Let alone a client. At first I told myself it just needed time, then that it needed even more time. After nearly a year of complete silence I finally accepted the truth I'd been putting off: it was a clean failure. The time invested and the running costs were in no way justified, and the site had brought in, quite literally, nothing.

What I learned the hard way

The uncomfortable part is that I wasn't helping much either. I'd made exactly the mistakes anyone makes when they start without knowing: I'd bought a domain pricier than it needed to be, I was paying for a host that asked a lot for what it gave, and I'd made a pile of technical decisions out of pure ignorance. Only by going through all of it did I begin to understand, concretely, what a web platform actually involves — beyond writing code that "works".

I learned that a website isn't an object you finish and walk away from, but something alive, that demands maintenance, monthly costs and constant attention. I learned that you can have the most beautiful page in the world and it counts for absolutely nothing if no one reaches it — that the hard part isn't building, it's being found. And I learned to read the real costs before getting excited, not after.

The dozen-plus websites that brought nothing but expenses taught me, the hard way, things no course and no teacher would ever have taught me.

The second, the third… and so on

I didn't give up — though, honestly, that would have been the logical moment to. My second site was a bit better prepared: a games portal, in the style of Friv, that you could play straight in the browser. I'd learned from the first, so I started with more care. And yet, as fast as it appeared, it disappeared just as fast. I was still in the red. Again.

Many other, smaller attempts followed, none significant if you measure them in numbers or profit. On paper, a long list of dead projects. But each of them left me with something: a mistake I'd never make again, a piece of the puzzle of "how things actually work", a better instinct for what a real user needs. Without realising it, I was building, piece by piece, not just the skill but the confidence that, at some point, it would work.

The point where everything changed

After some three years and more than ten websites that had brought only costs and zero results, I felt, for the first time, something different: something that was genuinely taking shape, that didn't fizzle out after a few weeks. It was AXS Liceu — axsliceu.ro.

This time I wasn't starting from "what site could I make", but from a problem I'd seen up close, in the eyes of students and parents: at high-school admission, people don't get stuck on a lack of information, but on a lack of clarity. They don't know how the admission average is calculated, don't know where they stand against everyone else, don't know which school realistically fits them. That's how a platform for students, parents and teachers came to be, one that does exactly that step: it calculates your admission average, shows you where you stand against previous years' cut-offs, and gives you a way to explore schools across the country. An abstract number suddenly becomes a concrete list of options.

The difference wasn't that I'd suddenly gotten better at code. The difference was that, for the first time, I was building something that solved a real pain, not a technical experiment that "would be cool to exist". Everything I'd failed at over those three years had taught me, without my noticing, how not to fail this time.

What came next

From there, things went entirely differently. AXS Liceu gave me the first confirmation that the road was right, and around it a whole ecosystem grew, naturally. I went on to build AXS Technologies, under which the other platforms gather: the everyday tools (axspdf.com, axstxt.com, axsgif.com, axsimg.com) and the education projects — axslearning.ro, axslearningcentre.ro, eralumis.ro and eralumis.com, alongside AXS Liceu. Each of them, in turn, started from a concrete frustration I wanted to solve, not from an idea for the sake of an idea.

I look back now at those ten failures and I don't regret a single one. Without the first site built for my dad, without the games portal that died quickly, without all the small attempts no one remembers, I wouldn't have known how to carry AXS Liceu further — nor everything that came after it. Those failures weren't the price paid for success. They were its school. And if you're reading this at the start of your own string of attempts that don't work: keep going. It's not the ones that fall that count, but the first one that takes root.