Retrospective: 2013-2015

"It's raining money, and we're not getting wet."

That line summed up how it felt in the early 2010s looking at the work flowing through Melbourne agencies. There was so much opportunity, and it became the spark for starting a studio of our own.

Founding Rocketmen

In 2012 I co-founded Rocketmen with my friend and business partner, Vincent Lu. We met while freelancing at CHE and a handful of other agencies around Melbourne, and quickly realised we worked well together. Vincent was (and still is) a brilliant engineer and a pragmatic thinker; having him as a partner meant I had someone more senior technically to learn from and to bounce ideas off.

Early work and first clients

We focused on agency overflow work at the start, picking up projects through friends at Eleven Media and other contacts. One of those introductions turned into a long-running engagement with Kidspot, one of Australia’s largest parenting sites. We rebuilt their front-end/theme, helped scale their infrastructure, and shipped a lot of custom features and campaign sites over several years. You can read more here: Kidspot case study.

What we built

The bulk of the early work lived in and around WordPress:

• Brochure sites and campaign microsites
• Custom plugins and integrations
• Basic e‑commerce setups

If you’re curious, you can see examples in the work section of this site.

Having a partner

After a few years freelancing solo, it was a relief to have a partner. Sharing delivery, having a sounding board for decisions, and pairing with someone who could push the technical bar higher made the work more enjoyable and the outcomes better.

Shifting beyond WordPress

As our projects grew, we started to take on more complex PHP builds—Laravel and other frameworks—alongside the WordPress work. That shift pushed us into better engineering practices, clearer architecture, and more robust deployment processes. Below you can see some brands we were fortunate enough to work on during this time.

Learning account management

A big learning curve was client handling and account management. I had experience working directly with developers and agencies, but dealing with end businesses was different. We didn’t have formal training or established processes; we had to wing it—writing our own proposals, shaping engagements, setting expectations, and putting lightweight delivery rituals in place.

It was challenging and rewarding in equal parts. I grew a lot in how I communicated, how I framed scope and trade‑offs, and how I preferred to work.

Today

Vincent still runs Rocketmen to this day, and we regularly catch up. I’m grateful for that formative period—building a studio from zero, learning by doing, and shipping a lot of work with a small, tight team.