I suppose this is where I introduce myself. I'm Jason, a Portuguese-American now living in Poland, and 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. 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. I also dabbled in a bunch of other related interests like video game development and 3D animation.
Me, obsessed with filmmaking
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.
Campfire straight outta' the dorm room
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.
Graduated in style
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.
Me and Campfire co-founder Jackson in Lisbon's best bar
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!
Kasia & I traveling (this picture was taken in San Marino)
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 killed the project after working on it for six months or so.
Rehance co-founder Ernesto (top left), and Campfire team in Lisbon
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.
The first ever "Startup Poznan" meetup
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 gamification features for web and mobile apps. Think streaks, XP systems, leaderboards, acheivements, reminders, recaps and wrap-ups that keep users engaged and rewarded for building a regular habit of using your app. Trophy has its first handful of customers, and I hope it's here to stay.
That brings us to 2025. It's October of that year as I write this. I'm mostly happy with my progress this year, though Campfire struggled to grow the ebook side of its business and I was forced to downsize the company and pivot back to focusing on the writing software. Trophy has been slowly growing. Startup Poznan still exists, though it hasn't produced any notable startups yet.
All that said, the foundation has been laid for some growth at both Campfire and Trophy in 2026, so hopefully that plays out.
Anyways, from this point on updates will come via other posts. If you're still reading this, you're probably in the single-digit number of people who've done so.
Cheers!