I built the system behind Raenow because I ran out of other options.
In 2013 I became co-owner of a single business. I had no experience running anything, and one was enough to overwhelm me. Then I got on top of it and took on a partnership in a second. Overwhelmed again. Then a third. That kept going until there were ten: two restaurants, a woodshop, a massage clinic, a photography company, a digital marketing agency and a property management operation among them — spread across a dozen buildings and two coasts, with flights between New York and California.
I had a partner in each one, but hardly any help on the computer side. The books, the filings, the registrations, the insurance, the websites, the IT — for all ten. Fifty-plus bills a month. And almost none of it stayed at a desk: when a rush hit one of the restaurants I was in it, front or back, thirty to forty hours some weeks. The woodshop installed in Manhattan stores overnight.
The scope grew every time. The staffing didn't. So the only lever I had left was how I worked.
What I needed was simple to say and hard to build. I had to know what I could do right now, and what I had to do right now — and trust that everything else was genuinely waiting rather than slipping. Once that was true I could leave the desk and go wherever I was needed without the dread following me. That shift, from panic to something closer to calm confidence, happened with the same amount of work on my plate. It came from the system, not from doing more.
I left those businesses in 2019 and moved to Europe to build a different life. The system came with me. Today I'm a product manager building work-management tools for thousands of people — service desks, Jira, the systems companies use to keep track of what's in flight and who's doing it. I started with one product. I oversee fifteen now.
Every task manager I tried in those years made me work around it. Raenow is the system itself, built properly, for the first time.