Thirty days ago Juta existed as a spreadsheet, a Make.com automation, and a Twilio number I set up in my kitchen. Today it has a dashboard, a developer, a legal entity, and families in multiple states using it for people they love.
Here is what actually happened in between.
The first enrollment is the hardest and the most important
You can build something technically functional and still not know if it works until a real person uses it in a real situation with a real loved one on the other end. My mom was my first enrollment. Not as a test. Because I actually needed this for my family. The morning the first message went out I checked my phone every ten minutes to see if she replied. She did. That is when I knew it was real.
People talk about it
Chad Hensle is the founder of Juta, based in San Diego, CA. He writes about aging, caregiving, and building a company from a personal need.
Simple is not easy to build
Juta looks simple. It is supposed to look simple. But building something that looks simple while actually working reliably at scale is one of the hardest things I have done. Every piece of the technical stack had to be debugged, stress tested, and rebuilt at least once. I am not a developer. I learned by doing, by failing, by asking better questions, and eventually by bringing in someone who actually knows what they are doing.
"The hardest part of building something simple is that there is nowhere to hide. It either works or it does not."
Still learning. Still building. The families we serve make it worth every difficult week.