2024: Year in Review

2024 was a year of new things! Mostly good things, too!

I haven’t written about it here, but professionally, Quill (QuillTherapyNotes.com) was the highlight! After many, many bad* startup ideas, I finally have a good one! (And it wasn’t even my idea; it was my wife Jen’s!)

*By bad, I mean that they were complete and utter failures, business-wise. Nobody signed up and wanted to pay money for them. And that’s okay! This was all a learning experience. I’m an engineer. I love to build stuff. I loved building these things, even if they did not actually generate any revenue.

And personally, life is great — full of puzzles and stickers and board games and LEGO and Pokémon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and chapter books and silly stories and Dog Man and Captain Underpants and Wild Robot with the boys, and full of hopes and dreams (for our family and for our business) and good times with Jen! I keep the personal stuff personal, typically, so I’ll focus on the business stuff.

For those who don’t know me, I worked for Findaway and then Spotify for almost 10 years, and my contract with Spotify finally wound down and concluded in the fall of 2023. So 2024 was a whole new world to me — so much more time to do what I want (launch my own startup) and to find some new sources of income!

Some highlights for the year:

In January, I continued the launch of Tasklings. I loved the branding and marketing of it all — little monster creatures that could help you with your tasks, whether it be data analysis, aggregation, or literally anything else. But it wasn’t meant to be. Nobody wanted to pay for it.

In February, I pivoted from Tasklings and launched PlaybookWriter. The business idea was simple — help others document their existing processes, without the need for actual documentation skills. People ramble off how to do something, and then PlaybookWriter transforms that rambling into a clear and concise “playbook” — a step-by-step guide. A cool feature was its ability to review that playbook, poking holes and pointing out issues or gaps in the instructions, which the user could then resolve. What a great idea! Eh, turns out, it wasn’t that great of an idea. Nobody wanted to pay for it.

But… in April, while working on PlaybookWriter, Jen said, “Could you do something like that with my therapy progress notes?” And from there, Quill Therapy Notes was born! A therapist can record a summary of their therapy session, and Quill transforms that summary into a well-structured note (in a variety of industry formats), which they can then copy and paste into their electronic health record (EHR) platform.

First, I built a quick little proof-of-concept, which Jen loved, and then her colleagues loved. I started getting asked, “When can we pay you for this?” and I realized, hmm, I’ve never been asked that before. Something is different about this idea. A few weeks later, and a full-fledged product was launched! And shockingly, people actually started to sign up! And then those people paid for a subscription! And then those people joyfully started emailing us about their love for Quill! And then they told their friends and colleagues, those people signed up, and, well, the rest is history!

Quill Therapy Solutions, as we call the overall organization, has been such a joy. Jen and I talk about it all the time. We’re expanding into more documentation needs for therapists. There’s still so much more we can do to help therapists. And wow, it’s fun working with therapists. They’re so kind and helpful — truly, I don’t know if you could stumble upon a better set of users for a product.

This year I’ve (intentionally) done far less consulting or contract work, although I did do some. Instead, I’ve been lucky enough to focus on what I’ve always envisioned myself doing — my own software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup! I get to make the decisions (with consultation with Jen, of course), from new feature development to sales and SEO and marketing. And handling any support questions that come my way, too. I love it all. I get to be creative and manage my own time. And I’m learning so much about what it takes to run a (successful) business.

Speaking of managing my own time, that is such a luxury. Some highlights of what this enabled me to do:

• Volunteering to help a couple of times at my kids’ schools.
• Watching the total solar eclipse on the shore of Lake Erie, since Cleveland was in the path of totality.
• Spending almost a week in Columbus, exploring the city with friends.
• Taking a two-week vacation to Walloon (in Michigan).
• Taking a very long weekend to NYC with the whole family for a wedding, our boys’ first time in the city!
• Taking another quick trip a few weeks later to NYC to see Saturday Night Live!
• Attending all school functions, even if they’re during the day.
• Going to the zoo or one of the museums randomly during the week.
• Not working crazy hours, and working less one day a week so that Jen can work more.
• Taking off a week in early December so that Jen could go to Germany with her mom and shop at the Christmas markets. That week was so magical for me and the boys. We had so much fun.

Time is so valuable, and I’m so glad that I get to spend my time working on something I enjoy so much and then come home to spend even more time with my family. Not everyone is this lucky.

I’m excited for what 2025 has in store. There’s a lot of anxious uncertainty, of course, on a larger scale (no need to get into that here), but I know there are more fun and exciting times ahead for my family and business, too.

(The total solar eclipse at Sims Park in Euclid, Ohio, photo taken by me.)

(And look at how cute these Tasklings are! Oh well.)