Ampolic

During the first few weeks of my freshman year of college, I started my own company! Why did I do this? Well the summer before I started college, my friend Dylan and I were becoming fed up with how bloated the internet is and how inefficient/expensive most web design companies are. While discussing this problem one day, we jokingly said we could do things better ourselves and, in that very moment, Ampolic Digital Solutions was born.

The Early Days

Well that previous statement isn't entirely true. It wasn't until 3 months after our original joke that we officially filled with the state of Ohio to form a company. Nevertheless, starting the same night we made the joke, we began looking for a company name (like any promising business does) and thinking about how we would design our websites. After a few days, we decided on the name Ampolic and bought ampolic.com and started registering the handle on various social media companies. Dylan started setting up our server while I started building the website and on November 2, 2020 Ampolic Digital Solutions LLC became an offical company (with a complete website). Two months later, January 1st 2021 to be exact, the company became profitable and we made back our original investment!

Our Philosophy

The motivation and philosophy behind Ampolic was the idea that if you're gonna do something, do it the right way. For example, if we need to add a map to a clients website, we need to do it in a way that can be easily repeated in the future. This saves us human capital going forward and allows us to taken on bigger projects as we can combine the pieces of smaller ones. We also are strong supports of free and open source software. Every tool we develop is licensed as GPLv3 and nearly every piece of the company runs on open source software. This saves us (lots) of money and ensures that the company is not reliant on any third party providers.

Our Status

As of the writing of this article, Ampolic is alive and well! In 2021, our monthly revue more than doubled and we've expanded a lot. I developed a custom (python based) static site generator, Blockable, to help streamline develop and make our websites more secure, we have a fully working, self hosted, email server, a collection of open source tools for managing web servers, and so much more! For me, Ampolic is not a full time job and while the income is nice, I currently just see it as a personal project. However that being said, if things keep growing like they are, I might need to start seeing it as something more - what an amazing problem that would be!