I Graduated With No Idea What I Wanted to Do. Everything After That Led Here.

When I finished at UJ, I had no clear answer to the obvious question.

What are you going to do now?

My degree had covered a lot of ground. Photography. Graphic design. Illustration. Animation. Video editing. Web design. And UI/UX — which is its own rabbit hole that deserves its own conversation entirely.

I was capable across a lot of things. Which sounds like an advantage until you’re standing at the end of four years trying to decide what to do next, and the breadth that made you interesting in a classroom makes you hard to categorise in a job market.

What I Was Already Doing

I hadn’t waited for graduation to start working.

Since 2019 I’d been freelancing — picking up Digital Media Design and web development projects wherever I could find them. I could see how much these skills mattered for real businesses. A brand built properly changed how a business was perceived. A website done right changed how it was found. That was obvious to me, even then.

Finding the right clients was the hard part. Most of the work came from whoever I happened to know, or whoever they happened to know. The pipeline was thin and unpredictable. But I worked with what I had.

The Pull Toward Development

At some point I started wondering how deep the technical side could go.

I attended a WeThinkCode bootcamp. Got introduced to Python. Started understanding software development not just as a tool for building websites but as its own discipline — infrastructure, servers, databases, the architecture behind the things I’d been building visually.

That shift changed how I saw everything.

When I started building websites for clients that went beyond design into actual engineering — figuring out hosting, wiring up databases, managing servers — I started seeing the problem from the inside.

And the problem was obvious once you were inside it.

The Observation That Started Everything

Every client I worked with had the same friction when it came to getting online.

Not a lack of desire. Not a lack of budget, necessarily. A lack of someone making it simple enough to actually do.

The domain and hosting experience in South Africa was fragmented. Confusing. Built for people who already knew what they were doing, not for the business owner who just wanted their name on the internet without any technical expertise to interpret what they were buying.

I’d been on both sides of that — as the person trying to help clients navigate it, and as the developer who’d spent enough time in servers to understand why it was broken.

That combination of observations became Jetdomains.

How It Actually Started

Before a single line of code, I did what any design student would do.

A precedent study. Every major domain and hosting company — their positioning, their pricing, their user experience, their visual identity. I wanted to understand the landscape before I tried to build inside it.

What I found was a clear gap between the top companies and everyone else. The best ones looked and felt completely custom. The rest looked like they were running the same template.

I designed a logo. Designed a visual identity. Created the whole brand like it deserved to exist before I knew whether it would. Just how I was taught.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I remember thinking: if this fails, at least it’ll make a great portfolio piece.

That thought kept the project alive in the early days when nothing was certain.

The first version ran on WordPress. It was rough. But it existed.

And the portfolio piece mindset — the idea that the work had value regardless of the outcome — gave me permission to start before I was ready.

Which, as it turns out, is the only way anything gets started.

The story continues — the job market, the rebuilds, France, and what it actually took to get here.

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