JULIEN GUISS.

I created my first email address at 16. My father had set up the family computer in my bedroom: without knowing it, he'd just opened a door that would never close again. I used AOL's search engine, until the day a friend told me about Google — almost revolutionary in its simplicity.

At the same time I discovered Caramail and its chat rooms. Countless evenings talking with strangers from all over the world — "ASV?", for those who remember. That fascination with online exchanges quietly planted, very early on, the seed of my interest in dating sites and affiliate marketing.

A work-study business degree at a luxury hotel-restaurant. The owners ask me to update their website. I hear about HTML for the first time. I realize that with a few lines of code, I can build pages and make them visible anywhere in the world.

Dreamweaver, the WYSIWYG principle, Photoshop for design. My first pages finally exist. I wasn't a developer yet: I was a passionate tinkerer who'd just found a playground with no limits.

I was one of the few people who owned a two-megapixel digital camera. The iPhone didn't exist yet and almost no one photographed nights out. Since I went out a lot, I wanted a place to share those moments.

I discovered open-source CMSs, PHP and SQL. My first site ran on PHP-Nuke; I tried almost everything that existed, added a forum, a print-on-demand shop, then adopted WordPress. During a work-study placement at a food company, I rebuilt the site on TYPO3 and built an osCommerce store — not as smooth as a Shopify today, but a very concrete grasp of how an online store actually works.

The economic click. I'd installed Google AdSense on one of my blogs, just to test it out. One article — back then, an embedded YouTube video and a few lines were enough — went viral. I received my first check from Google and saw my name show up in French blogger rankings.

A single piece of content had just generated the equivalent of a monthly salary. I understood that creation, visibility and monetization could form a system. I had no intention of stopping.

After a master's degree and a highly varied role at an importer — e-commerce, packaging, product sheets, paid campaigns, SEO, even shipping — the urge to build my own projects becomes too strong. I take the leap.

Building sites for clients only half suits me: always one more revision, then having to go find the next project. I wanted to build assets. While trying to build a dating site from scratch, I discover affiliate marketing. Dozens of niche sites, tutorials to share my methods — and one day, the French TV show Capital on M6 reaches out for a feature.

When a Traffic Manager role comes up, I take it to get back to working with a team. By then, my own network already counts over 120 sites.

Nearly four years across WebSphere and Magento ecosystems, combining creation, acquisition and SEO. SEO was changing fast: not provided, Panda, Penguin made easy shortcuts far less reliable. This period forces me to professionalize my methods and think in terms of quality, architecture and sustainability.

I start applying abroad again. Chance works out perfectly: passionate about affiliate marketing, I unknowingly apply to a company that had built a spectacular success in that exact space. I take the risk and move in October with my wife and our year-and-a-half-old daughter.

I'd found an almost ideal environment: an entrepreneurial company, a tight-knit team, ambitions matching my own passion. In under a year, I become SEO director.

One day, the CEO asks me to try ranking for a new, very popular term. I was able to tell him we were already ranking first on the main queries, and that it had generated around $60,000. That sums up pretty well what I love about SEO: spotting the opportunity early and moving fast.

SEO Manager, SEO Director, Strategic Acquisition Director, then Vice President of Web Strategy and shareholder. I work on very high-traffic sites — some among the most visited in the United States — and on hundreds of thousands of non-branded queries. The organic search I contribute to generates several million dollars in annual revenue.

At this scale, success is no longer one person's doing: it comes from the synergy between SEO, content, affiliate marketing, media buying, developers, systems, legal, product and marketing. My role is to keep the big picture and create the conditions for everyone to do their best work.

I now live in the south of France and work remotely, with several trips a year to Canada to stay connected with my teams.

And outside of work, I keep launching small side projects — often around artificial intelligence. To stay sharp, and because I still love creating just as much.