Detaching from Marketplaces

I didn't start this career with a plan. Not even a loose one.

I somehow ended up in the UK back in 2000 working as a junior web developer in an agency, touching projects for brands I had no business being near at that stage. I was dealing with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer on a Mac issues, trying to make things look the same across browsers that clearly had no intention of cooperating. It was messy and stressful. What I really hated though was the corporate environment. Oh I really hated it.

Then I had to leave. Military service. 12 months. Back to Greece. Sir, yes, sir etc.

The "ok" years

I started freelancing. Small websites for local businesses mostly using WordPress. It worked. I was making a living but it was a "not great, not bad" kind of thing. Things were stable in that very dangerous way where you feel safe but you're not really building anything that can survive a shock.

Around 2008, anyone watching could already feel something was off in Greece. You didn't need charts or reports. Clients were slower, decisions were delayed and there was this quiet tension everywhere. If I stayed tied to the local market, I'd be done. I needed to detach geographically. I needed to build something that didn't depend on where I live.

When everything hits at once

Then everything collapsed at once.

The Greek crisis hit and my family was right in the middle of it. My father had a heart attack and then a stroke. My sister suffered a mental breakdown. My brother lost his job overnight. On top of everything, I inherited a six-figure debt.

Hey survival mode, waaazzaaaaaa?

First attempt, complete failure

In 2010 I tried to break into the global market. I launched four premium WordPress themes on CSSIgniter. I genuinely thought I would wake up the next day with sales coming in. The first sale came after a week. The guy asked for a refund the next day. Build it and they will come? Err... no. :D

I pushed a bit, tried to get some traction, but nothing really moved. The project just went quiet for about a year. Had to take some freelance work to keep things afloat. At the same time, things at home were getting worse. Banks were circling. This crushing pressure that won't let you think straight.

The list

At some point I wrote everything down on a small note. All of my problems.

Make sure my father gets proper treatment. Make sure we don't lose the house. Make sure nobody ends up in prison. Help my brother get back on his feet. Help my sister recover. My entire game.

Second attempt

In 2012 I tried again. I submitted a theme on ThemeForest. Hard reject (Basically a "don't bother resubmitting this"). Tried again with another one. Soft reject ("Needs improvements, but yes you can resubmit"). I fixed it, submitted again, and it got accepted. Finally woke up with some good news and 10 sales in one day. Ten. Money. Things will be ok. It ended up sitting in the popular themes list for months.

That changed things. Not overnight, but enough to give me some breathing room. I rebuilt CSSIgniter and started selling themes there as well, trying to not depend entirely on the marketplace.

Accepting reality

I remember looking at that note again and thinking there is no way I win on every front. I was already preparing myself to fail somewhere. I was focusing mostly on my family. I couldn't care less about losing the house at this point, although I was doing my best to avoid it.

But somehow things started to resolve. Managed to pay off the debt. Helped my brother move abroad where he found a solid job. Helped my sister stabilize. Helped my father recover.

Not perfectly, but enough. Everyone still here, alive and kicking.

So now what

WordPress changed. The block editor was introduced. I still remember exactly where I was when I read the announcement that WordPress was going to introduce the block editor. I knew that I have less than 24 months before my business model was irrelevant for the crowd I was after. I could either stay and build things I didn't fully believe in, like plugins for things I don't fully understand or take my expertise and try to apply it in a different ecosystem.

In 2021 Shopify opened up their theme marketplace. I launched TrulyFinePixels and started working on my first theme in late 2021. I got in with my first theme at some point in July, 2022. Now I have three themes in there, Athens, Maranello and Tokyo.

By 2024 I had served more than 150,000 customers in total across both platforms.

It was at this point that (no, no this one :D) things became crystal clear to me. My job is to help very small businesses build their first website in the most simple and affordable way possible.

Ready for the next detachment

So, geographic detachment: Check. Took me more than a decade and if it wasn't for the nightmare I had to deal with, it wouldn't take that long. Who cares though. It's a solid win.

The next step is obvious: Detach from marketplaces. Not because they are bad and I'm really grateful for what they've done for me. It's just their stores and their rules. At some point I need to write about my almost 20-year journey selling digital products in marketplaces. Besides the fact that it's been an amazing ride, it's also scary how similarly they operate even in completely different markets, audiences and time periods.

It's time to move on though. Oh btw I'll keep supporting my themes and my customers. My good customers. That doesn't change. I have created a super safe environment and a very good runway that ensures I can support them for years to come. No problems there.

Widgetizer

So I started building Widgetizer back in 2024 for 3 main reasons:

I wanted to get back to coding. I hadn't really written code seriously since around 2015. Now I'm back in it but in a completely different way, working with Claude and Codex. Started with Sonnet 3.5 all the way up to Opus 4.6. Amazing journey and I've learned tons of stuff.
I needed to understand this whole AI coding game. Coding was never something I cared about to be honest, my thing was always about pushing pixels and coding was getting in the way. Now with tools like Claude and Codex and I can move freely and very fast. No problems. It was a good decision to heavily invest my time on these tools. It seems that this is the next generation of writing code and it makes perfect sense.
Detach from marketplaces.

I'm still focused on the same people I've been serving all these years. Mostly non-technical people who just want a website that works.

Widgetizer is not one of those projects where I throw something together and see what sticks and move on to the next thing. It's my next mission in my professional life. It might look crazy to build a website builder in 2026, in a world where tech bros have started undermining the very platform that made them, the web, simply because they want to promote the "agentic" era. The agentic era is cool and I'm all in for it. But I'm still focused on the crowd I've been serving all these years. Mostly non-techies who want to be part of the digital transformation, and yes, that's where many parts of the world still are.

I already have an open-source version working exactly as I want it to. A basic theme. Some presets. Documentation. I'm experimenting with ways for people to build their own stuff using their favorite LLMs without having to rely on complicated tools or workflows.

And obviously, this is just a small piece of a much, much larger plan that I'm going to document on this blog.

But more on that later, fren.