dear digital

With dear digital we want to help e-commerce companies grow in Europe by being the best possible partner for them. We offer both digital marketing and development services.

As a Business Lead I focus achieving the most important milestones in the growth of our agency.

With my start-up funding background I guide our clients in their finance and funding stories.

Co-Founder & CEO

Puzzle in a bag

Scaling our own DTC brand in Europe, we won "Starter of the year 2020" in Belgium.
We try to reinvent the puzzle by making culturally relevant puzzles by young designers.
We sold 3.000 puzzles in our very first month.

Co-Founder

BeerSelect

Lid raad van advies

Birdhouse Services

Founded a funding agency and raised about 20 million EUR for start-ups in 2 years. We also created his our own investor network and organised a 6 day investor academy teaching seed investors how to best invest in young companies.

CEO & Co-founder 

Vlerick Business School

Executive Masterclass Corporate Finance

The Birdhouse

Manager Birdhouse Services

PwC Belgium

Junior Auditor

Aerey

Board Member

Hiring an Odoo Consultant ➤ Helping brands scale their e-commerce channel ➤ Business Lead dear digital ➤ Scaling our own DTC brand Puzzle in a Bag

Hiring Business Analysts, Functional Analysts, Project Managers & Designers , more info here:
https://dear-digital-bv.odoo.com/job

Young entrepreneur who loves new concepts that dare to challenge the status quo and lives for big challenges!

Started his first company in 2018 with which he raised about 20 million EUR for start-ups, created his own investor network and organised a 6 day investor academy teaching seed investors how to best invest in young companies.

Decided mid 2020 that is was time for a change and founded a digital marketing agency with a focus on e-commerce companies. Now he focuses on everything there is to know about e-commerce companies and understanding how to scale them as fast as possible.

Always available for a chat or coffee!

Niels Desot

Freelancer → agency owner → SaaS founder.

Now running Botster.io → an all-in-one tool that helps digital businesses extract, monitor, and weaponize web data.

Posting SaaS learnings, automation tricks, technical deep dives.

If you’re building anything online - you’ll probably find something useful here.

If you're looking to automate your business - text me, DMs are open.

Denis Grammakov

Get an OFFICE. Pay for it.
Go into debt if you have to.

I visited a guy recently who “works from home.”

His office was:

- a wobble-ball "chair"
- two monitors jammed into the corner of the living room
- kids running around
- wife cooking two meters away
- toys, noise, chaos, distractions
- honey, can you take out the trash please

And he wonders why he can’t focus or scale.
Why nothing gets finished.

HERE is the TRUTH:

You are NOT building anything meaningful if your work environment is set up like that.

An office isn’t a luxury.

For $200/month you can rent:

- a quiet room
- a coworking space
- a spare office in someone else’s building
- anywhere with a DOOR that closes

And suddenly your productivity triples. WOW didn't see that coming! 

Your standards rise.
Your thinking sharpens.
Your business becomes real.
You're happy to get home once your day is finished. 

People say:

“I’ll get an office when I’m successful.”

No. It works the opposite way:

You get an office TO BECOME successful.

Environment is everything. Respect your work. Buy silence.

Denis Gramm

Solofounder @ Botster & StayAPI // B2B Web Scraping & Workflow Automation // I blog about my journey and findings

If nobody emails me that it’s broken — it’s NOT broken.

I spent SIX MONTHS building features nobody asked for
for users who didn’t even EXIST
for revenue that wasn’t coming

This was when I was building my first startup:

Pixel-perfect design.
Every page “needed” to exist. Cookie policy? VERY important.
Company address with a map widget? A MUST-HAVE
Perfect UI and UX (so I thought)
Perfect everything (so I thought)

Now?

If Sentry doesn’t light up - it’s not a bug.
If customers don’t ask - it’s not a feature.
If nobody misses it - it doesn’t exist.

Real example from a few weeks ago:

A user emailed:

“Hey, your payment gateway isn’t working.”

Of course it wasn’t working.
There was no payment gateway.

I processed his payment manually, wrote back:

“Payment processor was acting up on my side — fixed now.”

30 minutes later I added the integration.

The next customer paid successfully.

Done. Shipped. Nobody died.

Don’t build what nobody asked for.
Don’t polish what nobody will use.
Don’t delay your launch for imaginary problems.

If the pain is real, people will ASK.

Ship now.
Fix later.

Startups don’t get copied in weeks anymore. They get cloned in hours.

Someone posts on X that they got into Y Combinator.

The next day three different people ship the EXACT SAME product. Oh and it’s free. 

Good luck competing. 

Some dude launched an AI-powered MVP and showcased it.

And it had a couple of cool ideas to it.

Two days later, I copy those ideas and roll them out to prod.

The speed is insane.

I used to scroll Twitter to find one good product per week. Test it, form an opinion. 

Now? It’s an endless flood of apps. AI tools spitting out products every damn day.

New directories. New apps. New agents.

Most of them half-baked. Most of them pointless.

But it’s still impossible to keep up.

And this is before agents start building agents.

Where this is all heading? I have no idea. No one does.

Hold on tight.

Shipped a new endpoint at StayAPI 👇

You can now pull hotel reviews directly from Trip dot com via API.

- Real guest reviews (ratings + full text)
- Structured JSON, ready for analytics or search
- Pagination + filters for large datasets
- Easy to plug into dashboards or recommendation systems

If you’re already working with OTA data and missing Trip dot com reviews — this fills the gap.

Try at https://stayapi.com

DM for examples and integration tips!

Yeah… freelancers are cooked.

I barely hire anyone anymore.

And I’m saying this as someone who spent over $300,000 on Upwork over the years.

In the last 2 months I only hired one developer only to write a Python boilerplate so I could hand it off to AI and never need him again.

Closed the contract 
Fed the code to Opus 4.5 (which feels like alien tech).

That’s it.

Yesterday I asked Nano Banana to draw a simple “whiteboard style explanation” for one of my blog posts.

See attached. I was shocked it even worked.

It took 10 seconds to understand the request and output the image.

No revisions.
No back-and-forth.
No invoice.

Just done.

Who’s going to hire illustrators for blog content now?
Or $400/month diagram designers?
Or “brand visuals specialists”?

The market isn’t shrinking, it’s evaporating.

AI replacement is real. Anyone with working eyesight can see what’s happening.

If you’re a one-type-of-gig freelancer… I honestly don’t know what to tell you.

Get a job, maybe.
And after you get one — hold onto it with both hands.

THIS is how you make yourself UNFIREABLE in 2026

Not “more valuable.”
Not “harder to replace.”
UNFIREABLE.

FIRST Make a list of every SaaS your company pays for.
All of it.
CRM, dashboards, reporting tools, chat tools, automations - everything.

THEN Write down how much each one costs.
Most employees have no idea their company is casually bleeding $300… $500… $1200/month per tool.

AFTER THAT Pick the easiest one.

The one that:

- costs the most
- does the least
- has ONE feature you FULLY understand

NEXT - VIBE-CODE that feature.
Not perfectly.
Not enterprise-ready.
Not “rewrite the whole product.”

Just recreate the ONE feature your team actually uses — even if the code is dumb, ugly, stitched together with safety pins. 

Use whatever - Replit, LOVEABLE or n8n - AI will hold your hand.

Build it in a week after work.

SHOWTIME: Show it to your boss.
“Hey, we’re paying $500/month for this.
I built the part we actually use.
Costs $20/month to run.
I can add unlimited features and fixes.”

Watch what happens next:

Your boss goes BALLISTIC
That $500/mo subscription gets CANCELLED immediately.
Your app becomes “mission CRITICAL”
YOU become "the automation guy"
Every workflow now routes through you.
You get trust, leverage, and JOB SECURITY.

Congratulations.

You just became the person who SAVES the company money instead of the person who COSTS the company money.

And companies don’t fire the people who SAVE them MONEY.

They fire the people who can’t do what you just did.

That’s how you stay employed FOREVER.

That’s how you survive the AI wave.

taplio

The Battle

Niels Desot

Denis Grammakov

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taplio

The Battle

Niels Desot

Denis Grammakov

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