Joanna Marrie JSTJO · Los Angeles

Hi — I'm Joanna. My friends call me Jo. Yes, JSTJO.

I started building my own tools for a simple reason. Anyone can take the things you make away from you, but they can't take away what you learned while making them. Money goes. Jobs go. Situations change. Your knowledge is the one thing that stays.

When you can't control what's happening around you, the only thing you can control is yourself and what you do.

That's not a slogan I wrote for a website. It's what I actually did. I couldn't control most of it, so I found the part I could — a keyboard, a blank file, and enough stubbornness to keep going back to it. The rest of this company grew out of that one habit.

It's why the software works the way it does. Everything runs offline, because a connection is something someone else controls. Nothing needs an account to start, because a login is a door somebody else holds the key to. When we build a site for a client, the domain goes in their name — not ours. Those aren't four separate engineering opinions. They're the same belief showing up four times.

My background isn't computer science. My bachelor's is a Bachelor of Arts in Family and Consumer Sciences with a focus on Consumer Affairs — the study of how people choose things, why they buy them, how they use them, and when they give up on them. From there I went on to earn a Master's in Business Administration. The code I taught myself, badly at first, then less badly. Consumer Sciences taught me to watch what people do instead of what they say. Business school taught me that a product nobody can afford to run is a hobby.

It's never too late to rebuild. I think we're all rebuilding a little every day, out of whatever the last version of us left behind. It's a matter of CTRLing your world.