If you’re reading this, you may have stumbled across one of my projects, an article I’ve written, or maybe you’re just wondering what exactly Summitory is.
The short answer is that Summitory is my workshop.
Not a woodworking shop, although I wouldn’t mind having one of those someday. It’s a workshop for ideas—a place where software, businesses, and experiments are imagined, built, tested, and sometimes discarded.
Every project you’ll find here started with a simple question:
I wonder if this would work.
Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes it’s no.
Both are valuable.
Why the mountains?
I’ve wanted to live in Colorado since college.
For years my friends and I made annual ski trips to the Rockies. Every time I left, I wondered what life would be like if this wasn’t just a vacation.
Eventually, through a lot of hard work, an incredible team, and more blessings than I deserve to claim as my own, I had the opportunity to find out.
After helping build and eventually exiting SimplifyChurch, I found myself with something more valuable than I had originally set out to achieve.
Not retirement.
Not endless wealth.
Freedom.
Not complete financial freedom—I’m still working every day—but enough freedom to begin making different decisions.
The biggest one was this:
Where do I want to build the next chapter of my life?
I didn’t want a fancy office.
Like many entrepreneurs, I dreamed about having the impressive office.
Glass walls.
Modern furniture.
Downtown address.
The kind of place that tells people you’ve “made it.”
The more I thought about it, though, the less appealing it became.
I’d be paying for an image.
Paying rent to enrich someone else’s investment.
Building someone else’s equity while trying to build my own future.
That wasn’t what I wanted.
Instead, I built a small office in the mountains.
Not because it was flashy.
Because it was mine.
Because it gives me the freedom to work the way I enjoy working.
To think.
To experiment.
To build.
To fail.
To start over.
At my own pace.
I don’t build products.
I solve problems that frustrate me.
One of those problems became Looopd.
I needed a better way to manage ideas, projects, tasks, and the dozens of open loops constantly bouncing around in my head.
There were plenty of existing tools.
Most were good.
None fit the way I naturally think.
So I built one.
That’s become a pattern.
I usually discover that I’m my own ideal customer.
If something bothers me enough, there’s a good chance thousands of other people are quietly dealing with the same thing.
Why not build something for all of us?
Sometimes those ideas become products.
Sometimes they become businesses.
Sometimes they simply become better ways to work.
Every one of them teaches me something.
I like the hunt.
Of course I’d love to build the next product that takes off.
Who wouldn’t?
Every entrepreneur dreams of discovering that one simple idea that suddenly makes life easier for millions of people.
But I’ve realized something.
The payoff isn’t the only reason I build.
I genuinely enjoy the hunt.
Seeing an inefficiency.
Finding a frustration.
Connecting dots other people overlook.
Asking, “What if this worked differently?”
Then disappearing into the workshop to find out.
Software just happens to be my medium.
A woodworker shapes lumber.
A blacksmith shapes steel.
I build digital tools.
Why “Summitory”?
The name didn’t come from a branding agency.
It grew naturally while searching for a name for this little mountain office.
For a while, I kept coming back to the idea of a laboratory.
A place where things are tested.
Where experiments are expected.
Where failure isn’t embarrassing—it’s simply part of discovery.
The mountains also kept pulling me toward the idea of a summit.
Not because reaching the summit is the end.
Because every summit reveals another one beyond it.
Somewhere along the way, another layer appeared.
Every project has a story.
Every experiment has a lesson.
Every success—and every failure—becomes part of the journey.
Summitory became the word that held all of those ideas together.
A summit.
A laboratory.
A story.
Not because those words literally define it, but because together they describe what this place has become.
This is my workshop.
People sometimes ask what I hope Summitory becomes.
The honest answer is…
I don’t entirely know.
Maybe some of these projects become meaningful businesses.
Maybe I’ll work with founders who need help building their ideas.
Maybe I’ll write more.
Teach more.
Create more.
Maybe one project unexpectedly changes everything.
Or maybe dozens of small projects quietly help thousands of people solve real problems.
I’m excited by all of those possibilities.
Because this place isn’t built around certainty.
It’s built around curiosity.
A philosophy of building
The older I get, the less interested I am in building things just because they might make money.
Money creates options.
Options create freedom.
Freedom creates the opportunity to build things that matter.
That’s the part I’m after.
I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity I’ve been given—not just to make a living, but to spend my days creating in a place that constantly reminds me of the beauty of God’s creation.
Some mornings I walk into the office and genuinely feel like I’m on vacation.
Not because I’m escaping work.
Because work now exists inside a life I love.
I don’t take that lightly.
Welcome to Summitory
This isn’t a startup studio.
It isn’t an incubator.
It isn’t a software company.
It’s simply my workshop.
A place where problems become experiments.
Where ideas become prototypes.
Where some projects fail.
Where a few might succeed beyond anything I imagined.
And where I’ll document the entire journey—the wins, the failures, the lessons, and the stories behind each one.
Because at the end of the day, Summitory exists for one simple reason:
To have the freedom to try ideas and discover whether they work.
Welcome to the workshop.