About
Hi, I'm Jan
XcelBuilds is one person, not a company — which is exactly why the "build once, license to many" model exists in the first place.
I'm Dutch, currently living in Colombia. My career started out in engineering, working on projects in different parts of the world. These days I'm home more, and I've picked programming back up — it was actually there at the very start of my career, before the rest of it took over, and now it's back to filling my time.
The first app on this marketplace exists because I needed it myself. I manage rental properties, and I was tracking tenants, meter readings, and progressive tariffs by hand — so I built a spreadsheet to do it properly. Once it worked, it was obvious that other landlords and small businesses run into the exact same kind of narrow, specific problem, and none of them can really justify paying a developer to build something from scratch just for them.
That's the idea behind XcelBuilds: build a real, working app once, for one business's actual problem, then let every other business with the same problem license that same build. It keeps the price honest, and it means the tool stays in use instead of sitting in one company's private folder.
That first app came from my own problem, but I only have so many of those. So that same idea is now turned outward, onto the request board: instead of me guessing what to build next, other business owners post their own version of that problem, other people vote on what's worth building, and I build the next app the same way I built the first — for a real problem, once, for everyone who has it.