Now back in Essex, I decided a good way to find projects would be to organise the local Ecademy networking meetings, the online business forum I was an active member of.
My assumptions were correct and led to me learning my first hard lesson in self-employment - always ask what the budget is! Supamax were an oriental food ingredients supplier who had stalls at universities and colleges, with foreign students being their main customer base.
Whilst I’d seen Drupal in action on the business forum, I’d also discovered there were many of these Open Source frameworks, and the one I backed at the time was called XOOPS.
They also wanted to sell online, which given the large amount of products and processes they had would’ve been quite the task. Knowing life is defined by what you say no to, and not feeling confident enough in the equity deal he offered I declined the opportunity, built them what they needed to hopefully grow to the next level and gain more resources for such an entrepreneurial endeavour, and moved on.