Bio

I suppose this is where I introduce myself. I'm Jason, a Portuguese-American now living in Poland, founder of two startups. My first is Campfire, an ebook platform focused on genre fiction where every novel comes with a collection of extras like short stories, maps, and character profiles, used by over 40,000 authors every month. My second is Trophy, a SaaS tool and API that provides Duolingo-style reengagement emails and push notifications to mobile and web apps. I also created and retired Rehance, a tool that makes it fast and easy to add a useful AI assistant to any website (it got zero customers).

Now in a bit more detail.

I grew up in Connecticut to a Portuguese immigrant family. Went to school, read a ton of fantasy novels, and then became obsessed with filmmaking. Spent around six years of my free time on that (from ages 12-18) but also picked up an interest for computer science in high school.

Went to Northeastern University, studied CS (immigrant families do not permit film studies degrees 🙅) and came up with the idea for Campfire in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. The goal was to build a piece of software for creative writers to flesh out the worlds underpinning their novels, and this ultimately grew into what Campfire is today—a top-tier software for novelists, and an eBook platform that includes bonus worldbuilding and related content that can't be found anywhere else.

On the personal side of things, I traveled quite a bit during the summers of my time at university, and became quite enamored by the "digital nomad" lifestyle of working from a laptop while traveling the world. When Campfire started to become successful, I fast-tracked graduation from Northeastern (getting it done in 3.5 years rather than the originally planned 5) and moved to Portugal six months later.

I spent two years in Lisbon working on Campfire, seeing friends and family, improving my Portuguese, eating excellent food and drinking excellent wine. And traveling a good bit! My only regret from this period was not going out of the way to meet more people working on startups and bootstrapped tech businesses. I did try a couple of times, but found little luck, and quickly gave up.

During the summer of 2022 I met my girlfriend Kasia on a solo trip through the Balkans and after almost a year of going back and forth between Lisbon and her home country of Poland I packed my bags and joined her. She also loves to travel!

At the tail end of 2023 I came up with the idea for Rehance and built it with my friend and co-worker Ernesto. We saw the AI wave coming and realized that every piece of software will, fairly soon, have "copilots" just like how we use GitHub Copilot for our programming. So we built out a simple tool for small software businesses and indie hackers to add an AI assistant to their websites and apps. It didn't get any customers, so we paused the project after working on it for six months or so.

Kasia and I moved to Poznań in the summer of 2024, and I came well-prepared with a new domain name: startuppoznan.pl. I started up a group of entrepreneurs and indie hackers via a Meetup group, and am hoping that with a bit of encouragement we can incubate some cool companies.

And here are some pics from the first couple of real Startup Poznan meetups:

In the second half of 2024, I also joined forces with Charlie Brinicombe to found & build Trophy, a SaaS and API that provides Duolingo-grade re-engagement emails and push notifications for web and mobile apps. Think streaks, reminders, recaps and wrap-ups that keep users engaged and rewarded for building a regular habit of using your app. Trophy has its first customer, and I hope it's here to stay.

Looking forward to 2025, I hope to grow all three of my major initiatives (Campfire, Trophy, and Startup Poznan) without taking on any new ones. I'll keep this page mostly up to date as time goes on!