Twenty weeks of marketing,
software, and figuring it out.
This site is the visual companion to my internship hand-in for the Creative Business programme at Hogeschool Utrecht. It walks through what I actually delivered at the Horeca Marketing Academy: campaign emails that filled tables, SEO and WordPress work that pulled restaurants higher in local search, a SaaS dashboard for review management, and a 12-agent automation roadmap for HMA's internal workflow. Five chapters, each mapped to a CB competency. The supporting documents (Logbook, Goals, Toolkit, Portfolio Analysis) live in the Hand-in Documents folder; this page is the read-through.
The Five Chapters
// click a card to jump to that sceneHow this maps to CB Competencies
// chapter the competency is most evidenced inMarketing Foundations
My first weeks at HMA. I picked up campaigns across email, giftcards and WordPress for restaurants I'd never visited — Cheung Kwong (playful), Grandcafe Eemland (sophisticated), Den Engel (Brabants gezellig). I had to match each voice before I could write anything that actually pulled reservations in. The SEO and on-page edits on those WordPress sites were where I first saw a piece of work I made move a number that mattered to the client.
Marketing at Scale
The volume kicked in. Every piece had to feel like it came from the specific restaurant, not from a template.
Valentine's campaigns, Carnaval content, recruitment posters, website builds — 300+ deliverables across 12+ clients. Every piece had to feel like it came from that specific restaurant, not from a template.
Venneper Lodge needed a family-friendly Valentine's angle. Den Engel needed "3 Uurkes Vurraf" energy. Balance Hospitality needed 5 different recruitment posters for 5 different brands. I had to build a system for it or drown in the work.
restaurantreview.ai
Spotted that restaurants are stuck with review tools built for hotel chains — expensive, generic, none of them think about how a Dutch eetcafé actually runs. So I designed a simpler one. The UX, copy, brand and product logic are mine; Claude Code and Cursor let me take it from sketch to clickable prototype without waiting on a dev team. Four weeks, empty repo to something people could actually click through.
Mapping the Possible
Before pitching features I dug into what's actually buildable. Mapped the access policies for the platforms our clients live on — Google, Meta, TripAdvisor, WhatsApp, Eet.nu. Some doors are open, most aren't. Worth knowing before promising anything.
OpenClaw x HMA
Watching how HMA runs every day, I noticed every task follows the same loop — signal in, someone makes it, someone checks it, it ships. That observation became a 16-page roadmap with Nick: 12 specialised AI agents and a dashboard concept that hands the team back the time they currently spend on the predictable parts.
CLAW
300+ pieces of work for 12+ restaurants. One product I designed and prototyped (restaurantreview.ai, pre-launch). One automation roadmap on Nick's desk. AI tools didn't make me a developer — they let a creative business student turn ideas into things people can actually click. The design calls, the copy, the strategy: those are mine. The rest is leverage. Still here, still building.
Competencies Earned
- Switched between Cheung Kwong's playful tone and Eemland's sophisticated vibe daily
- Made 30+ posters that actually look like they came from each restaurant, not from me
- Built a bilingual NL/EN URL system for Portugalia because their guests speak both
- Wrote a 16-page Vision & Roadmap with Nick — not just ideas, actual buildplans
- Designed 12 agents that each handle a specific part of the marketing workflow
- Took restaurantreview.ai from "we should build this" to a working prototype
- Mapped out Podium, Birdeye, Reputation.com — found the gaps they don't cover for Dutch restaurants
- Tested which APIs would actually cooperate (Google yes, TripAdvisor... eventually, Eet.nu no)
- Ran SEO audits on client WordPress sites — found the missing meta tags, slow LCP, and indexation gaps blocking them from local-search visibility
- Used Claude Code to take restaurantreview.ai from sketch to clickable prototype in four weeks
- Learned enough technical fluency to brief developers, scope features realistically, and ship demos solo
- Treated AI tools as a collaborator, not a magic wand — the design decisions, copy and product calls are mine
- Ran Meta Ads for 10+ hospitality clients and stopped reporting on clicks — the only number that mattered to the owner was reservations in the book
- Set up Basic/Pro/Enterprise tiers for restaurantreview.ai with clear feature splits
- Wrote partnership proposals to TripAdvisor and Google that framed it as a win for them too
Clients Worked With
Every Deliverable, In One Place
A curated archive of the websites, landing pages, recruitment campaigns, email series, software interfaces, and automations I shipped during the internship. Hover for context, click to expand.
