The Plumber & The Programmer: How Fixing Water Filters Taught Me Everything About Building Websites (Part 6)
The era of the “link empire,” which I described in Part 5, was coming to an end. The money was there, but the sense of purpose was gone. I was creating dozens of websites that were merely advertising billboards, not solutions to real problems. I returned to my hometown of Kharkiv and started launching projects out of inertia—a city business directory, an online store for car tuning parts. Nothing sparked a fire until a chance conversation changed everything.
An acquaintance mentioned that their family’s water purification company was looking for someone to build and manage a website. The words “water purification” resonated deeply. This wasn’t about links or ad revenue. This was about something real, something tangible, something useful.
From Digital to Physical: The Water Filter Company
I went into the interview filled with a newfound enthusiasm. My task was not to build a retail site, but a B2B portal to streamline orders for their dealers across Ukraine. It was my first serious project as an architect of a real business tool. I dove into the subject matter, studying filters, membranes, and reverse osmosis systems. I was completely immersed because I believed I was doing something genuinely good.
The site I built grew in search rankings, and the office phone began to ring more and more frequently. The sales manager would politely redirect retail customers to our dealers in their respective cities. But I noticed a problem: our dealers in Kharkiv were weak, lacking their own installation teams. This small detail, this gap in the business process, would soon change my life.
A Personal Story: The Leaky Faucet and the Moment of Truth
One day, an urgent call came in from an elderly couple. Their old water filter was leaking, and all the available technicians were busy. Without much thought, I grabbed a toolbox and drove over myself. I spent two hours in their small kitchen, on my knees, replacing worn-out gaskets and tubes.
When I finished, and a stream of clean, fresh water flowed from the tap, something unexpected happened. The homeowner, a woman in her seventies, hugged me with tears in her eyes. “Son, thank you so much!” she said. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“In that moment, I didn’t receive money. I received something far more valuable: direct, heartfelt human gratitude for solving a real, tangible problem. It broke all my previous frameworks about business and sales. That was the end of the ‘programmer’ era and the birth of the ‘solution architect’.”
I realized that all my SEO skills, all my code, all my designs—all of it is meaningless unless, at the very end of the chain, there is a happy person whose problem has been solved. This revelation became the new core of my professional philosophy.
The Entrepreneurial Leap: Becoming a “Full-Cycle” Man
Inspired by this experience, I left the company to become a dealer myself. I launched my own website on Joomla and began the most interesting and educational period of my life. I became a “one-man orchestra”:
- In the morning, I was an SEO specialist and content manager, writing articles and promoting the site.
- In the afternoon, I was a sales manager, taking calls and consulting with customers.
- In the evening, I was a technician, installing filtration systems in people’s homes and apartments.
This experience gave me a unique, 360-degree view of a business. I knew exactly what questions customers asked on the phone because I was the one answering them. I knew which product features were important because I held them in my own hands. I stopped thinking like a developer who “builds a site” and started thinking like a business owner for whom a website is just one critical tool in a much larger system.
Three Key Lessons from a Plumber’s Toolbox
That decade of “field work” taught me more about web development than any book or course ever could. Here are the core lessons:
- 1. A website must solve a real-world problem.
- Customers aren’t searching for “reverse osmosis systems with a mineralizer.” They are searching for “how to get safe, clean drinking water for my family.” Your website must speak the language of problems and solutions, not the language of technical specifications.
- 2. The user experience extends offline.
- A perfect website is useless if no one answers the phone after an order is placed. The entire digital experience, from the first click on an ad to the follow-up service call, must be seamless. The website is just one touchpoint in that journey.
- 3. Gratitude is the ultimate conversion metric.
- A happy customer who has had their problem genuinely solved will not just pay you. They will return, and they will tell their friends. This is more powerful than any advertising campaign. A website that facilitates this level of service is a website that truly succeeds.
The Architect’s Blueprint
Eventually, I chose to focus fully on web development, but I will forever be that “one-man orchestra.” When I build a website today, I don’t just see code and design. I see the entire customer journey: from a Google search to a phone call, from a delivered product to, ultimately, the smile on a satisfied customer’s face. This is what “engineering” means to me. This is what I build into every project.
But this period of steady, meaningful work was about to be interrupted by events that would change everything…
To be continued in the Final Part…