I remember when I was building a prototype product as part of a semester-long project in 2.009 (a mechanical engineering class) at MIT. I was part of a team of about a dozen engineering students working furiously to finish our new imagining of a safer walker. You know the things: metal frames found in senior care facilities with bright yellow tennis balls fashioned to the ends. But with this new walker, an unfortunate fall victim could drop the seat to the floor and scoot onto it. The seat could be driven back up to a seated position – which we had learned was typically enough for the person to recover from a fall. Continue reading →

I have an experiment for you to do: figuratively close your eyes (I still want you to keep reading) and imagine what a business looks like. What do you see? What are the employees doing?

Did you see men in suits “businessing” around making money in some non-descript way? That is exactly what I don’t want for Mostly Epic. Matt and I said at the beginning that we wanted to help and enrich the lives of our friends and family. In fact, if we had a mission statement, that would be it. I want to look back at the work we’ve done and say, “Yes, we’ve directly made <name of friend or family> happier, healthier, and heck maybe even wealthier.” Continue reading →

Quitting your job sucks. But despite the pains, we still do it.

The average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years, according to the most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees is about half that. – Jeanne Meister, contributor at Forbes

So for all of us born in the 80’s or later, the average time with a company is a little over 2 years? That’s a pretty crazy statistic, but not Continue reading →

LDG – the ultimate in nerd drinking

Matt and I are not strangers when it comes to working together. We built a few small projects including LDG, a “larping drinking game” website, for a friend’s bachelor party. I won’t go too much into it, but if you’re interested, just ask me about it. The result was Continue reading →

Good, cheap drinks and wild ideas equal a good recipe for a new project. That’s how the idea for Yipper started.

Matt and I worked at the same company, Vecna, before we left and eventually founded Mostly Epic to build apps. There was a Bertucci’s near Vecna that happened to be one of the only decent restaurants in Alewife. This Bertucci’s functioned as the meeting place for almost every work-related activity: interviews, on-boarding talks, afternoon touchbases, post-work drinks, and so on. In July, Matt and I sat at one of high tables near the bar and ordered their “happy hour” ciders. It’s illegal to have happy hours in Boston but Continue reading →

People have many different reasons for wanting to start their own company. I’ve heard about wanting to be you own boss or a life where you choose your own hours or some other freedom from the 9-5, monkey suit, corporate America. Being honest with myself about where my motivations lie for starting Mostly Epic means facing and identifying what I want out of a career and out of life. Continue reading →

After a six month journey to create Mostly Epic, code some apps, and release our first mobile application, Yipper, Matt and I have decided to take a look at what got us here. When I told some friends that we pushed Yipper to the app stores, a number of them said, “Gosh, I don’t know where I would even start if I wanted to do that.” That got me thinking, why not share what we did? Continue reading →