Cherry Pulp: Co-Founder, CTO & Head of Frontend

# Cherry Pulp: Co-Founder, CTO & Head of Frontend

#leadership#architecture#frontend#tooling

Co-founded a Brussels digital agency, grew it 4 → 20 people, shipped 200+ platforms, and exited to CBTW in 2023.

client: Cherry Pulprole: Co-founder, CTO & Head of Frontendwhen: 2013–2024

The big one. I co-founded Cherry Pulp, a Brussels digital agency building custom websites, platforms, and web applications, and spent eleven years (2013–2024) watching it grow from a 4-person room into a 20-person studio that shipped 200+ platforms before being acquired by CBTW in 2023.

The challenge

Running an agency that ships at volume is a consistency problem before it's a code problem. Dozens of concurrent client projects, a growing team, and an eleven-year run meant the real challenge was making 200+ platforms ship fast and stay maintainable, without every project reinventing its stack.

What we built

A modular delivery foundation the whole studio built on:

• Reusable boilerplates, conventions, and CLI tooling that made project setup fast and long-term maintenance sane
• A standardised stack around Docker, WordPress + Bedrock, and structured conventions
• Custom deploy workflows on Forge with Digital Ocean and AWS

My role

I started as head of frontend and grew into the technical owner: co-founder, CTO, architecture, stack choices, delivery foundations, scoping, and the unglamorous plumbing that keeps a busy agency consistent across dozens of concurrent projects.

• Defined technical direction and project architecture across client work
• Built and maintained the boilerplates, conventions, and tooling behind every project
• Mentored a team that peaked at 12 developers, 4 designers, and 3 project managers, and ran hiring, onboarding, and knowledge sharing

The interesting part

The unglamorous truth of running a busy agency is that the work that doesn't ship is what lets everything else ship. Building and maintaining the boilerplates, CLI tooling, and conventions across 200+ concurrent and sequential projects (flexible enough for diverse clients, but structured enough that a developer joining the team could pick them up immediately) was a continuous engineering and organisational challenge in its own right. Getting the foundations right was the multiplier for everything the studio built.

Outcome

Cherry Pulp grew from a 4-person room into a 20-person studio, shipped 200+ platforms for Unicef, Oxfam, Engie, Delhaize, Telenet, KBC Brussels, Monizze, Solidaris, RTL, RTBF, eFarmz, and more, and was acquired by CBTW in 2023. The throughline I took from it: the work that doesn't ship (the conventions, the tooling, the shared foundations) is exactly what lets everything else ship faster. It's the throughline of everything I've done since.