One person. The whole company.
SecondFirst exists because premium tech deserves a second first: the moment a device that was written off feels brand new to someone else.
I'm a founder based in the Netherlands. SecondFirst Tech sells certified refurbished Apple devices — iPhone, iPad, MacBook and Apple Watch — as well as AS-IS products, shipped across the EU.
What makes it unusual: there is no team behind it. I design the brand, write the code, photograph the products, read the EU directives, file the VAT and pack the boxes. Every pixel and every paragraph on secondfirst.tech went through my hands.
That's not a constraint I tolerate — it's how I learn fastest. Running every discipline of a real company, for real customers, compresses years of experience into months.
The road here.
Allround medewerker IT systems & devices
Vocational IT education: hardware, networks, Windows Server. Where taking devices apart — and putting them back together properly — became a profession instead of a hobby.
Intern
Six months inside the world of managed student devices: repair, service and logistics at scale. First taste of what it means to keep hardware alive for its next user.
Customer service
A year on the front line of the Netherlands' biggest telecom. Learned what good support actually feels like from the customer's side — patience, clarity and keeping your word.
Founder & CEO
Everything above, combined: hardware knowledge, a service mindset and customer focus — now under my own flag, selling refurbished and AS-IS Apple devices across the EU.
Built end to end, in-house.
The storefront
Shopify under the hood, but nothing out of the box: the theme is hand-written at the Liquid level — custom sections and snippets, bespoke collection filters, colour swatches with sold-out logic, variant-aware pricing and a rebuilt cart flow, with checkout configured for 15 EU markets. The storefront now runs in three languages — English, Dutch and German — with every translation checked by hand, down to the option names.
secondfirst.tech ↗The iOS app
A native shopping app written from scratch in React Native and Expo, running on live storefront data — with secure credential storage, account deletion and an EU-compliant returns flow.
The invisible layer
The unglamorous work that makes a shop trustworthy: a live backend for the EU right-of-withdrawal, GDPR-grade cookie consent, copyright and compliance audits, and a clean finance stack.
The marketing engine
An AI pipeline I built to run the full marketing side: it researches which angles perform, writes scripts and captions, turns them into on-brand videos and schedules the posts — and it runs the paid side across Meta, Google and TikTok, priced from my own cost model, with pre-agreed kill-rules on every campaign. It does the repetitive work — nothing goes live without my sign-off.
SecondFirst, in your pocket.
Not a wrapped website — a real native app, written from scratch in TypeScript with React Native and Expo, talking to the live storefront.
Content that plans itself.
The marketing engine from my work above, drawn out: a loop of six AI agents I built around the shop. They do the repeat work — every post and every euro still passes through me.
The content loop
Six agents hand work to each other. Nothing ships without my sign-off.
Reads the live ad numbers: what converted, what died.
Picks the next videos — more of what works.
Script, captions and hashtags for every platform.
Turns the script into an on-brand product video.
Schedules every platform at the best time — as drafts.
Builds the Meta campaigns — created paused.
A company that runs itself — with my sign-off.
The content loop above grew into a full operating system: seven AI agents running a daily cycle on a Linux server in my room. They read the store, watch the ad spend, plan the content and brief me on my phone every morning. They propose — I decide: publishing, spending and store changes sit behind gates only I can open.
A daily cycle
Every morning at ten the system reads the shop, the ads and the market, picks its own priorities, does the work and sends me a briefing — with every decision written to a permanent log.
Rules before spend
Campaigns launch with their end written first: pre-agreed kill-rules pause anything that underperforms, automatically. Budgets live under hard ceilings the agents cannot raise.
It writes its own lessons
Every day the system reviews its own mistakes and writes the lesson down — a playbook that grows itself. I read the diffs over coffee.
Where it started.
Screenshots from the earliest builds of secondfirst.tech — the storefront taking shape, one commit at a time. None of it came from a page builder or theme editor: every section on these screens is hand-written Liquid, CSS and JavaScript. The bones were there from day one: honest grading, a 12-month warranty, and Apple-clean presentation.
Every discipline, first-hand.
Commerce
Engineering
Automation
Localisation
Operations
Brand
Nothing fake
No demo data, no dead buttons, no placeholder promises. If a feature can't work for a real customer, it doesn't ship.
Compliance is a feature
Withdrawal rights, honest warranty terms and clean consent aren't legal chores — they're why people trust a one-person shop.
Own the whole stack
When one person understands the code, the numbers and the customer, decisions take minutes instead of meetings.