It's almost 2025, and so I (Jon) hastily wrote up a year in review for 2024. Quill was such an exciting development during 2024, and of course, you all made that happen!
Here's an excerpt of the Quill-related parts:
I haven’t written about it here, but professionally, Quill 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.
You can read the whole thing here: https://jonsustar.com/posts/2024-year-in-review/
(A photo of the total solar eclipse taken by Jon in 2024.)
