Our Story

I once drove 18 hours through the night to see my girlfriend (now wife), and when I crashed on the family couch, I couldn't fall asleep until I had told her all about the amazing stories and ideas I'd listened to on my trip there. That's who I am — if I hear something worth sharing, I need to share it.

We got married, and as time went on, the idea of beginning a podcast ruminated in the back of my mind, until one day I casually looked up what it takes to begin a podcast. I realized I already had the equipment I needed (the bare essentials), and so the next day I had a friend over to record violin and as an afterthought, I just handed him the mic: "Want to be my first episode? Tell me your story!"

36 episodes later, burning out a handful of times and essentially quitting, only to come back with too many ideas and wanting it to be bigger and better — I faced a decision. I'd only created timestamps and chapters for half my episodes, and I loved timestamps. Was it worth going back through everything?

Yes. I'm obsessive, and I binged about 20 of my own episodes, manually timestamping every single one.

Once I finished all the timestamps, I naturally thought: "What if I put all these into a spreadsheet?"

The plan was simple: share the spreadsheet with my audience. I was about to post it everywhere—but the night before, we had dinner with a former professor of mine, a lawyer. I casually mentioned the spreadsheet. She stopped me:

"CJ, don't put that out there. Have you researched who's done this type of indexing before?"

I hadn't. I just thought it was kind of cool.

"If no one has done this, this is intellectual property. You could patent this."

She referred us to some attorneys. We debated for a whole month on whether to go through with it. After a lot of prayer and encouragement from friends and family, we knew this was what we needed to do.

A patent is one thing. Defending it is another. What better way to defend it than to build the tech yourself?

To be clear, I never set out to build a platform. I just wanted a way to index media ideas and share that capability with others. But over months of building, it hit me: I was creating a social media platform.