Amiba Design
2008 - 2010
This was my own web design company, which I co-founded during university with a friend as a way to earn extra income. We initially aimed to provide web development services to local businesses, but quickly realized that many clients were hesitant to work with us unless we could bill them officially. This led us to establish our own company, giving us the ability to operate professionally.
Our primary focus at the time was creating simple presentation websites for small businesses. However, we also took on more complex projects, such as e-commerce stores and hotel websites. Many of these were built from scratch using HTML and JavaScript, and we even developed our own custom PHP framework that we applied to most of our projects. While we occasionally used platforms like WordPress or Drupal, this was typically reserved for projects with more complex requirements.
Interestingly, despite advising against it, a significant number of clients requested animated Flash websites. This eventually became one of our specialties, and we earned a reputation in the local area as the go-to team for Flash-based sites.
In addition to client work, we tried to diversify by developing our own projects, including a local real estate aggregator and a dating site. Unfortunately, these ventures did not generate much revenue.
By 2010, the lingering effects of the 2008 economic crisis were still evident. As the business income became less sustainable and government regulations and taxes increased, I decided it was time to close the company and pursue opportunities with established companies where I could gain more experience and stability.
What was up with the weird name?
At that time, late 00s fighting tournament called K1 was very popular on tv. My friends and I used to watch it together, and they had a funny looking sponsor banner in the ring sometimes, a social media company from Japan called Amoeba.
We liked the name and the logo so much we decided to make our own twist of it.
