In the early 1980s I hung out in the computer lab at Dragonskolan in Umeå. It had Norsk Data ND-100 terminals connected to a minicomputer. In the evenings I taught myself to program in Basic.

My dyslexia made it a real challenge. A single spelling mistake and the whole line was wrong, so I had to type it again from the beginning. Still, I sat there evening after evening, fascinated by what you could actually get a computer to do.

One day there was a computer exhibition in “Smörasken”, the yellow building in the middle of central Umeå. That is where I saw an Apple Macintosh for the first time. A computer with a graphical interface that you controlled with a mouse instead of typing commands. For someone who struggled with every command, it was a liberation. An aha moment.

By the late 1980s I had moved to Stockholm and was working at MicroPlus on Malmskillnadsgatan, a shop selling software by mail order.

A customer came in with a problem in his customer register. He had built it on his Macintosh in MS-File. I spent several hours trying to help him before I finally gave up.

A few weeks later I was invited to Studentlitteratur’s demonstration of Claris FileMaker II at the Sheraton hotel in Stockholm. What the customer had struggled with, I could solve in five minutes in FileMaker. I was one of five people who received the very first disk, together with a manual copied on an ordinary photocopier because the packaging had not yet arrived from the printer.

The simplicity was fantastic. Just as with the Macintosh, I did not have to type commands. I fell in love on the spot; you could call it an aha moment. I had no idea, of course, that this day would decide the rest of my working life.

After a couple of months I was asked whether I would help demonstrate FileMaker II at Sweden’s first Apple trade fair, Apple Business Forum in Sollentuna. I said yes.

There I met Börslistans Informationstjänst, BIT. They had trouble handling the reply coupons for their annual report service: thousands of recipients, different requesters and combined mailings that were unreasonable to manage by hand. I built a solution in FileMaker II and they were pleased.

That was my first FileMaker project, in 1989.

In the autumn of 1989 I started in telephone sales at BIT’s sister company Branschförlaget, which sold advertising in industry directories such as Vem är Vem i svensk finansvärld (Who’s Who in Swedish Finance).

I left my phone number with the people I could not reach. When they called back, I had no idea who they were or where in the sales process we were. Binders and phone lists were simply not enough. So I built a sales support and advertising order system in FileMaker II, one of the very first for Macintosh.

Suddenly I had full control of every customer, every conversation and every next step. I outsold colleagues with many more years in the profession, which they were less than thrilled about. When all the salespeople were given access to the system, the mood turned. My manager named the system WSS Pro – Watz Sales System Pro, where Pro stood for FileMaker Pro 1.0.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) did not yet exist as a concept. It appeared ten years later. Today my system is called Kundvårdsprogrammet, and it still forms the core of several of my clients’ solutions.

In a few years I went from being unable to spell a command correctly to having the whole company working in my system.

I left Branschförlaget and went into business for myself. At 18 I founded the consultancy Watz & Co. The first clients were media companies that wanted the advertising order system I had built.

From 1990 onwards I worked with companies on two fronts at once: their processes and routines, and the technology in FileMaker. It is a combination I have held on to ever since.

The business continued as P. Watz & Co AB, which was renamed Watzit AB in 1996. At our peak in the late 1990s we had ten employees and six subcontractors. I was managing director until 2000, when my mentor Olle Åström took over the operational role.

• Registered my first domain, watz.se, as early as 1995.
• At the end of 1995 I worked at the Bonnier-owned Affärsförlaget, selling advertising on the website of the magazine Datavärlden. Datavärlden became the second Swedish publication with advertising on the web, after Aftonbladet. They also used my CRM system, adapted for the media industry.
• Saw the AltaVista search engine from Digital Equipment before its launch in December 1995 – an aha moment. This was several years before Google even existed.
• Took the internet course arranged by KTH and Jacob Palme, professor of computer and systems sciences.
• For a period sold advertising on the Swedish search engine punkt.se at the web agency Spray.
• In the early 2000s I started the FileMaker Hosting service, where clients ran FileMaker Pro locally and connected to their databases on our servers. The service was in operation for about fifteen years, until changed licence terms from Claris FileMaker Inc. it impossible to continue legally.

The IT and telecom crash, together with 11 September 2001, led to a restructuring through bankruptcy in 2003 and a fresh start as Watzit 2.0 AB, the same company that today is called Peter Watz AB.

A heavily slimmed-down organisation with no costly premises.

Development and support for Poolia continued without interruption. No clients were caught in the middle because of the restructuring.

Some projects required me to hire external consultants. A couple of projects ended up more than ten times as expensive as estimated because of internal problems at my partners. A couple of my clients were not satisfied. I was not satisfied with the situation either. For several years this affected how I could help my clients.

In January 2023 I started using ChatGPT. It was the same feeling as at the Sheraton in 1989 and at Smörasken a few years earlier. A real aha moment, again.

Development had been moving fairly fast before that. FileMaker had started releasing updates every year instead of every 18 months. Even so, with new AI models arriving every three to six weeks and new services every day, FileMaker was still behind.

Thanks to AI, I needed to bring in external FileMaker specialists less often, because I could now build even the complex parts in FileMaker myself. AI also helps me maintain solutions I developed long ago. It has made me faster, more confident in my deliveries and independent of whether someone else has the time.

For some time now it has also been possible to develop in FileMaker with AI alongside (vibe coding). Beyond help with scripts and calculations, I have gained a sounding board that helps me plan and build, and a quality reviewer that checks that everything turned out right. The AI services can write code, but a large part of my job is understanding the client’s business and the owner’s or managing director’s goals, and sensing what the real problem is. The AI services are not there yet.

The fact that something can be built technically does not mean it is right for the business. That is where my real value lies.

I know:

• FileMaker programming
• Business development
• Business administration
• Marketing
• Communication
• Psychology

The combination is fairly unique. You usually get either a programmer or a business developer, and having all these skills in one person makes things enormously easier.

With you as managing director I talk finances, business model, margins and risk. With your suppliers, your IT department or other developers I talk data models, integrations and access privileges. No interpreter is needed in between. Misunderstandings are kept to a minimum, and misunderstandings are where most IT projects go off the rails.

The Swedish National Audit Bureau (Riksrevisionsverket, RRV) was auditing the reports of my client, the government agency KRUS. The verdict was that the report from my system was calculating incorrectly.

We started troubleshooting. After 20–25 hours we had still not found any error in FileMaker. Nothing matched the remark from RRV.

So I asked for a meeting with the auditor and the client. After coffee and pleasantries I asked him to show me on the report where the error was, since I simply could not find it. He ran his finger from left to right across the page.

That was when the penny dropped. The report was meant to be read from top to bottom. I pointed, he looked for thirty seconds and said: “OK, but then it adds up.” Then the meeting was over.

The system had calculated correctly all along. The report was still wrong, because it could be read in two ways. It cost 20–25 hours of troubleshooting for a layout I had designed that could be misread. Since then I design reports based on how the recipient will read them.

I have sat with sales lists in binders, I have sold over the phone, I have had employees and I have run companies through two crises. When I map out a database structure, I think further ahead. The structures I have designed myself have lasted more than 25 years. Three of them are still used daily by the same clients.