So, who is this Alwin Hoogerdijk dude?

I am the President and founder of Collectorz.com. Collectorz.com is a software company, developing database software for home users to catalog their personal collection of CDs, DVDs, books, comics and video games.

I studied Electrical Engineer and Computer Science in Delft. During my last year at the university, I published my first shareware program NoiseMaster, a sample-editing tool. And yes, I got my first sales too. Solid cash arriving in envelopes in my PO Box 🙂

I started my first job as a programmer in 1994 at SIG in Utrecht, which is where I met Mark-Jan Harte. At SIG, I got interested in databases and starting using Borland’s Delphi tool for application development.

To learn Delphi, I began a little hobby project in my spare time, a small database program for cataloging my own CD collection (about 300 CDs at the time). After a few months of programming, I called it Keep it Compact 1.0 and released it as shareware. In the first month, I sold 1 copy, the 2nd month 5, then 17. User feedback helped me improve the program, which resulted in Keep it Compact 2.0, then 3.0.

After 3 years I hopped over to work at Lost Boys in Amsterdam, a company doing multimedia CD-ROM projects and websites. Had a lot of fun there, learned a lot and had my first experience managing a small group of programmers. While at Lost Boys, Keep it Compact kept getting more and more popular and soon I was making more money with my little spare time project then I earned at Lost Boys…

Which of course got me thinking… What if I could spend more time on KiC? What if I created a similar program for DVDs? (all the new rage at that time).
Through the years, I had kept in touch with Mark-Jan Harte and he was having the same thoughts, as he had created a shareware card game called Canasta, very popular too.

So we joined forces. We both quit our day jobs in October 2000 and started our own company Bitz & Pixelz. We renamed Keep it Compact to Music Collector, started work on a DVD version called Movie Collector and released both under the new brand Collectorz.com.

Now, over 12 years later, the Collectorz.com range includes seven Windows app, four Mac OS X apps, 11 mobile apps for Android and iOS and five online applications.
Mark-Jan has left the company in September 2007 and since then I have been running the company together with my wife Sytske Hermans. The company now has 11 employees (that’s including Sytske and me).

At the moment, I spend most of my time doing marketing stuff, project management and some web development. Through the years I got more and more interested (and experienced) in SEO, Adwords and Internet Marketing in general.