I Only Started Calling Myself a Founder This Year

I started building Jetdomains in 2022.

I’m only calling myself a founder of it in 2025.

That’s a three year gap between the thing existing and me actually claiming it. And I’ve been sitting with that gap long enough to understand what it was really about.

Where It Started

Before Jetdomains, I was freelancing.

I started in 2019 — Digital Media Design, Web Development, picking up clients where I could. I was still studying at UJ at the time. The plan was to get good at building things for people, learn how the web worked from the inside, and figure out the rest later.

I graduated. The freelancing kept going. And somewhere in there, a pattern I’d been seeing with every client I worked with started pulling me in a different direction.

Most of them couldn’t get online. Not because they didn’t want to. Because nobody had made it simple enough for them to actually do it.

That observation became Jetdomains.

I wrote about the full product origin story in another post — the infrastructure thinking, the problem with SA registrars, where I want to take it. That’s the product story.

This is a different story.

The Side Hustle Trap

For a long time, I treated Jetdomains like a side hustle.

Not because I didn’t care about it. Because that was the identity I carried into it. Freelancer. Developer for hire. Someone building something on the side while staying available for client work.

The problem with that identity is that it shapes every decision you make.

When you’re a freelancer with a side project, you don’t go all in on outreach — because outreach is exhausting and the client work pays the bills. You don’t obsess over your landing page — because there’s always a more urgent task. You don’t call yourself a founder — because that feels like a claim you haven’t earned yet, and you’re not sure when you will.

I spent years making those decisions.

And the whole time, I expected business results from something I was treating like it came second.

That’s the trap. You want the outcomes of someone who’s fully in it, while showing up like someone who isn’t sure yet.

What Shifted

There wasn’t a single moment. It was more like a slow accumulation of evidence that the approach wasn’t working.

Jetdomains had been live for a while. Clients were coming in — not from some clever strategy, just from conversations and referrals and the work I’d done to keep showing up. But growth was slow in a way that felt directly connected to how I was treating it.

I kept building features nobody had asked for instead of doing outreach. I kept telling myself I’d go harder on sales once the product was more polished. I kept deferring the things that would actually move it forward.

At some point last year, I stopped and named the pattern honestly.

I wasn’t treating this like a business. I was treating it like something that might become a business if the conditions were right and I felt ready.

The conditions were already right. The only thing missing was the decision to act like it.

The Identity Comes First

Here’s what I’ve come to believe:

The identity has to come before the results, not after.

You don’t call yourself a founder once the revenue hits. You call yourself a founder because that’s how you need to show up for the thing to have a chance.

When I started saying “I’m the founder of Jetdomains” out loud — in conversations, in posts, in how I introduced myself — something shifted. Not in the product. In the decisions I made every day about how to spend my time.

The outreach got more consistent. The content got more intentional. The things I’d been deferring stopped feeling optional.

None of that happened because the product changed. It happened because I did.

Where Things Are Now

Jetdomains is my primary focus. I still do agency work through Utopian Ideas — Meta Ads, branding and marketing for clients. That keeps things moving while I build. But it’s the means, not the mission.

The mission is Jetdomains. Domain registration and hosting for South African businesses. Simple, transparent, with someone who responds when something breaks.

I’m a founder. This is what I’m building.

It took me longer than it should have to say that out loud.

But I’m saying it now — and it turns out that saying it changes everything.

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