Unless started as a hobby

Version 1.0 · Published 2026-07-27

Three months after we threw a free tool onto the internet and forgot about it, we looked at the numbers. Thousands of websites were running it. That was great, right up until we understood what it meant.

To explain why that number scared us instead of thrilling us, I have to rewind a little.

Scratching an itch

The tool that became Unless started as a hobby. Marcel Panse and I were not building a company, we were scratching an itch that every developer knows: you ship a custom-built site, and then every small text change or translation becomes a request in someone’s backlog.

Our answer was a client-side script that let developers add CMS functionality on top of custom code. Quick content changes and translations, without rebuilding the site and without a migration. Simple idea, with one hard part.

That hard part was speed. Rewriting content in the browser has an ugly failure mode: the original text flashes for a moment before the replacement loads, and everyone who has ever seen that flicker knows it instantly. We tuned the script until the swap was invisible, put it online as a free tool, and moved on with our lives.

The moment it stopped being a hobby

Then came the three-month check, and the thousands of websites. At first that just felt like validation. But somewhere between the graphs, it dawned on us what we were actually doing.

We were quietly rewriting the words on thousands of websites, for people we had never met. And we did not have a company. If something broke, if our script mangled a checkout page or garbled a translation on a site we had never heard of, there was no legal entity to absorb that. It would land on us personally.

Nothing about the product changed that week. The code was the same, the users were the same. The only thing that changed was that we finally understood what we were responsible for, and once you see that, you cannot unsee it.

A notary in a parking garage

So we did the unglamorous thing. We found the cheapest notary in the Netherlands, who, fittingly, held office in the basement of a parking garage, and we registered the company right there in 2017. The legal entity is called Rocket Launcher BV, and Unless is still its trade name today.

There was no champagne and no business plan. Just two guys catching up with something they had already let loose on the world, signing papers under a building full of parked cars.

What I would tell my past self

A lot of real companies do not start with a plan. They start with a thing you built for yourself that quietly gets away from you, and the moment you take responsibility for it is the moment it becomes a company. The notary visit was paperwork; the founding happened when we saw the numbers and felt the weight.

Funny enough, both halves of that origin are still in the product. The itch, keeping website content current without anyone babysitting it, grew up into Living Knowledge, a library that maintains itself. And the weight, knowing that software acting on someone else’s website carries real responsibility, became the way we build for regulated Europe: no autopilot, no black box, every decision traceable.

We did not know any of that in the parking garage. We just knew that thousands of strangers were trusting something we had made, and that deserved more than a hobby. It still does.