Dear friends and former colleagues,
It's been a while. Some of you I last saw during the Timble days. Time to catch up on where we are now, and more importantly: where we're heading.
The Path to Marsvaardig
After Timble, I chose a different path than expected. No more large projects, but back to basics: helping local entrepreneurs. That's where we saw an opportunity to make a real difference.
Robin, Steven, and I founded Marsvaardig with a simple idea: the small business owner around the corner deserves a good website too. You know us - we love elegant technical solutions. But we noticed that many entrepreneurs primarily needed personal contact and practical solutions.
We've Been Busy Bees
- 2016: Migrate Joomla websites to our own multisite platform
- 2017: First B2C webshop live
- 2018: Sell tickets for events
- 2019: First B2B webshop live
- 2020: Newsletter component
- 2021: First Point of Sale live
- 2022: Easy import of products
- 2023: Overall improvements
- 2024: 125 active customers
What We've Learned
That focus on local entrepreneurs proved invaluable. Through pure word-of-mouth, we grew to 125 active clients. From law firms to restaurants, from architects to retailers - we built a platform that works in the real world.
Interestingly, we still use much of what we learned at Timble. The multisite concept from the Open Police Platform? It's now running for all our clients. Kodekit? Still the stable foundation under everything we build. You'd be proud of how that technology has evolved.
Coming Full Circle: RetailBee
And now everything comes together in RetailBee. We see that retailers especially struggle with digitalization. They need a platform that supports both their webshop and physical store. One that understands how retail works. That can grow with their ambitions.
RetailBee will be that platform. Built on the foundations of Kodekit, but modernized for today's challenges. With all the experience we've gained in supporting local entrepreneurs. And - this will appeal to you - in 2026, we're making it completely open source.
The Team Behind RetailBee
We have an amazing team making RetailBee possible:
- Robin combines his work for Marsvaardig with a role at Perfect Web Team, where he explores the latest developments in web technology
- Steven voluntarily manages our server infrastructure, with impressive results: 99.9% uptime!
- And I focus on translating business needs into practical solutions
Why We're Sharing This
We're sharing this story with you because we're proud of where we stand today. But also because we believe RetailBee can become what we envisioned with the Police Platform: an open source platform that truly makes an impact.
We're curious to hear your thoughts. Perhaps you see opportunities to contribute when RetailBee goes open source? Or do you know retailers who could benefit from what we're building right now?
Let's Stay in Touch
It would be great to catch up. About RetailBee, about what you're doing now, about the future of open source retail. Send us a message or drop by on Discord.
