In 2010 I started a company called Jumpstart Media. In 2018 I put it away to work on products at a bank. This month it is a registered company again, with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, because I have started making apps, and apps need someone behind them.
The first time around
For eight years Jumpstart Media was a small digital media and online marketing studio in Arnhem. I advised organizations on how to use new media, and then built what the advice called for: websites and webshops on WordPress, Joomla, WooCommerce and Magento, the hosting and domains to go with them, campaigns, search engine optimization, Google Ads, affiliate and email marketing, and the design and photography that made it look right. Floriade, Pluryn, Camber and Censor were among the clients.
For most of those years I did it next to a job as product owner at CROW, and in 2018 my work at Rabobank became the main thing. The studio went quiet. Since then I have been a product owner and product manager: service content and chatbot dialogs, search on the bank’s digital platform, a conversational search in ABN AMRO’s banking app, and now security that is easy to use. Different companies, the same question every time: how do you make something people can trust and actually like using?
Why a company, and why now
I keep my own notes, photos, mail and reading on servers I run myself. That is a good way to keep your data your own, and a bad way to get nice apps: most self-hosted software lives in a browser tab. So I started building the apps I wanted on my iPhone, iPad and Mac, and two of them grew into something other people use:
- Triquid Notes, a native home for your Trilium notes on iPhone, iPhone Duo, iPad and Mac. It works offline, captures fast, and summarizes with Apple Intelligence on the device.
- Tri Clipper, a Safari web clipper that saves articles, selections and highlights into your own Trilium server, with templates that decide where every note lands.
Publishing apps that people pay for means there has to be someone behind them: a name on the App Store, a support page, a privacy policy, an address to write to, and someone who answers. A hobby can do that for a while. A company can promise it. So Jumpstart Media is back in the business register, and it is the name the apps carry from now on.
What changes
The apps and everything around them move to jumpstartmedia.nl: their pages, support and privacy policies, the open-source tools, and the posts about the apps. The old links on this site keep working and lead there.
My day job does not change. I am still a product manager and product owner at Rabobank, and Jumpstart Media is what I do next to it, as it was the first time.
What stays here
This site becomes what it was always half-way to being: my own blog. The language models in the cupboard, the homelab around them, Home Assistant, Trilium and Obsidian, and whatever I build next to make them nicer to live with. Written by me, in my own time, without anything to sell.
And the promises the apps were made with come along to the company unchanged. They talk to the server you point them at and to nothing else. They collect nothing: no analytics, no tracking, no accounts. They are built with Apple’s own frameworks, so they feel at home on your devices. And where they use Apple Intelligence for their own features, that work happens on your device.
See you at Jumpstart Media, and here.