And I have an update on what is happening with CoachAccountable.

But first it seems fitting to take a little time to introduce myself and share with you a little about who I am, in particular concerning my role and relationship to this fine and waylaid  endeavor.   A lot has changed in the two and a half years since anyone last posted here on the CoachAccountable blog, and I believe the most personal tidbit about me that one can find in our archives thus far is a passing mention of my fondness for Dance Dance Revolution (still true, by the way).

I’ll begin with some back story: when our team was last on the trail in any publicly visible way back in the fall of ’09, it was myself, Lee Robinson, and Rob Fieldhouse giving it our all, bootstrapped but proud.  A few months of trying to approach the market unsuccessfully revealed that we three didn’t have what it would apparently take to make it work, and we put things all on an indefinite pause.  We were over being poor chasing the dream.

In the fall of 2010, we swapped interests in our jointly held ventures: I exchanged my ownership of PlaygroundCreative to Lee and Rob for their ownership of CoachAccountable.  It was a most fitting arrangement: they were full-on doing the agency thing, and we all agreed it would take some serious rebuilding of CoachAccountable to make it fit for the market–a quest fit only for me (as programmer) should I ever choose to take it on.

Today the three of us are doing quite well.  Rob got poached by one of the Playground clients, and thus became a Creative Director for an international brand, Brown Shoe (a position generally reserved for the pinnacle of a designer’s career, Rob took the position while still under the age of 30).  Lee, after a good period of running Playground, led the charge for an agency in St. Louis to procure a massive contract for another international brand, and upon winning it was hired on to lead the team to much fanfare (she was told that the quality and breadth of her portfolio is largely unheard of at her stage in the game).

As for me, I’ve been doing my thing solo programmer-for-hire as JPL Consulting, enjoying a run as CTO of DealNation as well as working on many interesting projects.  Like Lee and Rob, I am prospering, and the bootstrapped days of being poor seems long gone.

Which makes an interesting situation for CoachAccountable: I no longer need it to work, and I’ve got bandwidth and financial breathing room to give it another go.  I’m 4 years wiser since first laying down the foundations of the software, and there’s an undeniably greater allure to pursue it as the sole owner vs. one-third owner: I’m free to call the shots and be responsible for the outcome to no one but myself.

All of this is to say that CoachAccountable will be relaunching, and as the solo driver of that I’d like to let you know a little more about who the heck I am.

Back when we were blogging before, we were all very careful to put forth the proper public persona for the company, which is basically a fancy way of saying we too insecure to authentically communicate with our natural, personal styles, preoccupied instead with “getting it right” and “looking professional”.

Since then I’ve come to love blogging and openly sharing exactly who I am and what I’m about.  I’ve written a lot detailing both my personal exploits with an emphasis on travel and transformational philosophy, as well as my professional views exploring the art of being a great programmer for hire.  My professional blog has been featured a few times on Hacker News and Slashdot, which has granted me the profound privilege of contributing thoughts and ideas to a large audience of my programmer peers.

Most of how I live, what I value, and how I roll can be gained by reading my personal and professional blogs alluded to above, but if you want the broad strokes, here they are.

I’m 32 and married to the love of my life, Tracy.  She has 2 businesses, private yoga instruction and professional wedding and portrait photography.  Together we create adventures that take advantage of the freedom that comes from us both being self employed.  To wit, as I write this we are 7 days away from moving out of our apartment and starting on World Tour, a 16-month long trip of us traveling and living at various places around the world.  Yep we like to travel.

I love programming, and have been pridefully deepening my craft in web development for the last 9 years.  After one time having over 80,000 hits on one of my blog posts in a three day period I’m fascinated by the possibility of becoming a famous nerd, or in other words a thought leader in my trade, following in the footsteps of my heroes who have made great contributions to the field.  People are starting to reach out to me for advice on their situations, so I seem to be on the right track.  I reckon I might be writing a book, one post at a time.

Finally I am completely fascinated and enamored by the power of coaching and what I would call other applications of the transformational arts to better individuals and humanity overall.  I don’t do it in a professional capacity but I do do it informally with friends.  You better believe I’ve got a few that I’ll be working with as I develop the remix of CoachAccountable, to be certain it’s the best possible software for empowering real coaching relationships.  I can’t wait, and they’re excited too.  You’ll meet them later.

So that’s me; that’s who I am as I work to mold CoachAccountable into a great product ready for prime time.  I’ll have more to say on what’s next soon, and I’m excited to make great contributions to both coaches and coaching.  If you want to know more or want to ask me any questions, by all means reach out with an email, john at coachaccountable dot com.

Cheers,
John