Welcome to The Lounge: An Introduction

My name is Joey.

In this space, I’ll be writing about things I find interesting and important.

One particularly large vein I’ll be mining is the idea of building personal capacity. I’m fascinated by people who manage to accomplish more than the average while appearing to have the same—or even lighter—workloads than the rest of us.

I’ll also dive into topics that I find personally compelling—music, travel, cooking, biking, web development, visual design—in ways that I hope will help both you and me enjoy and/or improve in those areas. That doesn’t mean it’ll always be serious. In fact, most of the time, it probably won’t be.

Lastly, I’m the co-founder of a software company called BugSplat, where I handle the business and product side of things. BugSplat is a fully private, bootstrapped startup. Throughout our history, we’ve had to be creative and resourceful to grow and compete in an industry where many players have raised large VC investment rounds. We’ve been a fully remote organization from day one, so I bring 10 years of experience in managing and operating a dispersed company.

Here, I’ll write about topics like marketing, sales, product design, and team management—with a specific focus on small organizations and bootstrapped businesses.

Before letting you go, I want to stress that my goal here isn’t to deliver advice from on high or to act like I have everything figured out. Much of what I’ll write about is stuff I’m still working through myself. Writing about it is part of my learning process.

Recently, I read the 33 1/3 book about the making of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The band’s story resonated with me—their strange, driven confidence born from a DIY ethos and a deep trust in one another. I loved how they channeled those characteristics into exceptional, enduring art.

This blog isn’t art. But I hope to channel some of that same confidence (which I don’t always feel) and a "let’s just build the damn thing" attitude into something worth reading.

Editor’s note: Joey’s editor here—I’ll pop in occasionally to provide context and help explain what the heck Joey is thinking. For the record, Joey isn’t suggesting that anything on this blog will have the meaning or impact of Aeroplane. He’s simply inspired by the band’s story. I mean, sure, the kid has an ego—but he’s not that out of touch.