In 1997 I started a web company called Digitalus with Daniel Crothers. We ran it from a rented house on the outskirts of Hawera, in rural South Taranaki. We built sites for clients across New Zealand from that house, years before anyone called it remote work. Around 2003 we moved the company to Auckland.
One of our clients was Skinfresh, a doctor-led skin clinic on Auckland’s North Shore that has been running since 2003.
Digitalus wound down in 2016 and I moved to the UK. The client work never quite stopped. I still look after the websites of a number of Digitalus-era customers today. I apply the updates and handle the security patches myself.
Right now I am rebuilding the Skinfresh site from Reading, which is about as far from Auckland as you can get without leaving the planet. Same client, twenty years on.
A website is a long-term thing. Somebody has to still be there in year five and in year fifteen. Distance turned out to be the easy part. It already was in 1997. What a client is really buying is somebody who stays.