Founder's letter.

I started Jorbox in 2012 with no plan that would survive contact with reality. I was building websites for whichever Albuquerque businesses needed one — a chiropractor, a real-estate office, a couple of restaurants. The work paid the bills and I kept doing it because I liked the daily problem of making something work for someone who could not have made it themselves.

The plan, to whatever extent there was one, was to not have a plan. No five-year forecast. No "we will be acquired by X." No "we will hit Y users by Z." Just keep building, keep the lights on, keep saying yes to the work that was interesting and no to the work that was not. Fourteen years later that is still mostly how the company operates.

The first real product was Zawjni in 2017. Looking back, the surprising thing is not that it grew — it is that I kept running it after the first six months when the growth was flat. Most product companies would have killed it; most product founders would have moved on. I did not, because killing it would have meant betting that the 800 people who had joined did not matter. They did, and they still do — Zawjni has 33,000+ members now and they are mostly people who joined in the first three years.

What I have learned from running Zawjni for eight years, and then QRLynx and Menujo since 2024, and now Lebseh and CVPoet in beta, is that the compounding return on running a single product well for a long time is enormous. It is unmeasurable in the first three years. It is obvious in year eight. Every product I have shipped is one I expect to be running in 2036. Most of them probably will be.

The other thing I have learned is that the operating model matters more than the product idea. The reason I can run five products with a tiny operating team is that every one of them sits on the same infrastructure stack we built and have refined for eleven years. New products do not introduce new tooling. New brands do not require new playbooks. The compounding return on stack ownership is the same shape as the compounding return on product ownership — invisible in year three, decisive in year eight.

I get asked sometimes what would change if Jorbox took outside capital. The honest answer is everything that matters. The principles page covers this in detail. The short version: capital comes with a growth obligation, and the moment that obligation exists every other decision bends toward it. I have watched dozens of companies make that trade. I have not seen one where the work got better afterward. So I keep saying no.

Right now Jorbox is fourteen years in. The portfolio is the focus. The client services side is small and selective, four categories that fit our stack — web development, hosting, domain registration, SEO + GEO. The operating team is small on purpose. The infrastructure is over-engineered for our size on purpose. The handbook you are reading is the operating manual on purpose — most companies our age have a press kit and no handbook; we do it the other way around.

If you found this letter through QRLynx or Zawjni or one of the brands: thank you. We are running those products for you, and we will keep running them for as long as we are physically able. If you are a potential client or partner: the contact page has the right inbox. If you are another indie operator reading this for the patterns: the handbook is open, the principles are real, and most of what worked for us came from boring decisions sustained for a long time.

I will keep writing here when something is worth writing. The blog at /blog is where the more topical pieces land. This page gets refreshed when the company changes shape in a way that matters.