Why I Built This
My brother recently opened a pressure washing business. One day I asked him how it was going. He said things were picking up, but he really needed to get on Google Business. He had already taken care of the important stuff, got his LLC, his license, set up a way to take payments. But he mentioned wanting a website too, and I got curious and started looking into what that would actually take.
That's kind of where this all started.
I was genuinely surprised. Not by how hard it was. By how easy it was.
Getting a domain. Setting up a professional email. Building a website that doesn't look like it was made in 2003. Even registering as a business, which I always assumed was a mountain of paperwork, was way easier and cheaper than I ever imagined. I had this picture in my head of starting a business being this big, complicated, expensive thing. It really wasn't. Getting a PlayStation cost me more.
Around that same time I had recently read a few books on the behind the scenes of some of the biggest, most well known companies in the world. Billions of dollars, thousands of employees. And reading about how those places actually operated, the decisions that got made, the problems they ran into, it all felt so... human. Messy. Familiar, even. Some of the situations weren't that different from things I deal with at work. Higher stakes, sure. But still.
Some of those people running massive companies were figuring it out as they went. Just like everybody else.
That was honestly kind of reassuring.
So I thought, why not try? I had spent years in IT building skills across the whole stack, and those skills don't require a lot of overhead to put to use. The barrier to entry was way lower than I ever thought. And honestly, as my career has progressed I've become more and more hands off. I didn't want that. I genuinely like working with people on their problems. I like that moment when something gets fixed and you can see the relief on someone's face. I didn't want to lose that.
Calmbit became the way for me to still get to do that. Help everyday people with everyday tech problems, and build something I'm genuinely proud of.
Fresh From Cache is the same idea in a different form. A place for tech tips, fixes, and plain language explainers on the stuff that can feel confusing or intimidating. Helpful, hopefully a little fun, and written by someone who sees this stuff every day.
That's why I decided to start Calmbit and Fresh From Cache. If you've ever thought about building something of your own, maybe now's the time.
Joel
Joel Folgner is the founder of Calmbit, an IT support company based in Molalla, Oregon. Fresh From Cache is where he writes about technology for people who use it every day.