CV of Herman Martinus

Cape Town, South Africa
Contact

Summary

I'm a maker and a builder of things with a historic focus on improving niche communities. I've worked in big VC funded startups and small, one-person companies. I am interested in, and regularly write about climate related topics. I take a data-driven approach to the protection of ecosystems and currently contribute 1% of all revenue to climate protection projects.

Work

2020 - Present

Founder of JustSketchMe - A 3D modelling web-app for artists. I built and grew this company to over 150,000 monthly active users, and is both profitable and bootstrapped.
https://justsketch.me

Founder of Bear Blog - A no-nonsense and privacy focussed blogging platform and website builder. I built and grew this as both an open-source project and profitable, bootstrapped company.
https://bearblog.dev

Co-founder of Botsy - Personalised AI tutors for high school students over WhatsApp.
https://botsy.org

2018 - 2020

Startup Mentor at MEST's Accra incubator - I mentored and assisted first-time founders go from zero to one.
https://vc4a.com/mest/

Front-end engineer and 12th hire at GetMyBoat - In a nutshell: AirBnb but for boats.
https://getmyboat.com

2015 - 2018

Video game designer and developer at Sea Monster Entertainment - Augmented reality, virtual reality, and educational games.
http://seamonster.co.za

2013 - 2015

Junior web developer at Vaimo - E-commerce systems for big brands such as Vodacom, Cape Union Mart, and Poetry.
https://www.vaimo.com

Projects

My personal blog where I write about tech, big ideas, climate impact, and slices of life.
https://herman.bearblog.dev

Bearlytics - An open-source and easy to self-host analytics platform.
https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearlytics

A bunch of small tech projects, from opportunity cost calculators for home ownership, to a trust-less system for sending secrets like passwords and API keys securely.
https://herman.bearblog.dev/projects/

Education

Bachelor of Information Science in Multimedia and Computer Science from the University of Pretoria

References

Available upon request