France, a Hard Season, and the Decisions That Followed

There’s a part of this story I haven’t written about yet.

Right before I graduated, I got married.

And not long after, I moved to France.

My wife is French. She had a job here, a life here, roots here. I had freelance income, a half-built product, and the belief that I was flexible enough to make the transition work.

Flexibility and stability aren’t the same thing. I was about to learn that properly.

What I Didn’t Fully Account For

I thought I could find work in France, or at least keep the freelance pipeline going while I figured things out.

I was already in conversation with a company back home about working remotely. When that fell through — they couldn’t make the remote arrangement work — I let that job go and made the move anyway.

Then reality started arriving in waves.

French is not optional here. I had to learn it — properly, not conversationally — which takes longer than anyone tells you and costs more cognitive energy than you expect.

The exchange rate was quietly devastating. Every rand I’d earned through freelancing bought less and less as I was spending in euros. The savings I thought would give me runway were shrinking faster than I could replenish them.

And I was still trying to build Jetdomains through all of it. Started posting. Started marketing. Still freelancing. Still looking for work. Doing everything at once in a country where I was still finding my footing.

Then we had a baby.

What Happened Last Year

Last year it caught up with me.

I ended up in the psych ward.

I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because that experience was the moment I stopped being able to tell myself comfortable lies about how I was operating. The clarity that comes from hitting a wall that hard — from having everything stripped back to what actually matters — is brutal and clarifying in equal measure.

Something had to change. And I knew by then that the product wasn’t the problem. The strategy wasn’t the problem.

I was the problem. Specifically, the decisions I’d been making — or avoiding — for years.

The Work That Came After

Coming out of that period meant doing something I’d been deferring for a long time: making difficult decisions and actually committing to them.

Deciding what I was not going to do anymore. Deciding what the actual priority was. Deciding to stop treating Jetdomains like something that would succeed when the conditions were right, and start treating it like something I was responsible for driving forward now.

That process wasn’t fast. It didn’t happen in a single conversation or a single week. It was slow and uncomfortable and required me to be honest about patterns I’d spent years rationalising.

By the end of last year — beginning of this one — something had settled.

I am the founder of Jetdomains. Agency work and freelancing through Utopian Ideas keep things alive in the background. But that’s the support structure, not the mission.

What Version Four Looks Like

V4 is being rebuilt with a cleaner philosophy than any previous version.

Astro.js on the frontend. Raw PHP backend with MySQL. Some of the serverless infrastructure I’d already built, repurposed rather than rebuilt. Less architecture for its own sake, more execution toward things that actually matter.

No features nobody asked for.

Outreach first. Content first. Sales first.

The technical decisions this time are downstream of the business decisions — not the other way around. That sequence, which seems obvious from the outside, took me years and a very hard season to actually internalise.

Why I’m Writing This

Not because the story is over. It isn’t.

But because the honest version of a building-in-public journey has to include the parts that weren’t content-worthy at the time. The years of spinning in place. The move that was harder than expected. The season that broke something open.

Those parts aren’t separate from the business story. They are the business story.

The decisions I’m making now — about focus, about identity, about what gets my time and what doesn’t — are shaped directly by everything that came before them.

I moved to France thinking I was flexible.

Turns out I was just unanchored.

I’m anchored now. And I’m building from that.

This is part of an ongoing series documenting the real arc of building Jetdomains. Start from the beginning on the blog.

Jetdomains is live at jetdomains.co.za — domain registration and hosting for South African businesses and founders.