Onomojo was my company for six years. I started it in 2007 as a one-person consultancy and grew it into a small team delivering full-stack web applications for clients in fintech, mapping, media, and hospitality. Architecture, development, and deployment, from concept to launch.
The work was mostly Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, with a run of mobile applications alongside it. I hired and managed small distributed teams, and I sat across from the client myself: scoping, estimating, and owning the relationship from first call to final deploy.
Selected work
- San Francisco Soup CompanyA full ERP for a restaurant group running more than twenty locations.
- EarthPayAn online payment processor, built from the ground up.
- BiggerPocketsPerformance work that cut page load times across a large real-estate community.
- Day One BabyA course registration and management platform, integrated with Lightspeed POS.
- Discovery MapsOngoing work on a nationwide Rails mapping platform.
- RedFlagNode and Rails systems for large-scale data processing and automation.
Why it ended
Not because the work was bad. The work was good and the clients kept coming back.
A services company is two jobs: doing the work and selling it. And on a services business there is a ceiling I could not find a way around, because what clients were paying for was me. My ability to pull a team together, scope the work, and see it through was the product, and that made me the lever the whole business ran on. I did tons of work through that team and never found a way to scale past myself.
By 2013 I was exhausted by the whole thing: the sales side, the management side, the technical side, all of it at once. It was not that I was bad at it. It was that I wanted to spend my attention on the technology instead of juggling everything else that comes with running a business. So I wound the company down and went in-house.
The revival
Years later I brought the name back. The second Onomojo was a kanban-style ticketing system that tracked how a team felt about each story in the backlog, on the idea that mood and motivation are real signals about the work. It never found a market. I lost interest before it did, and it has been dormant since.
Six years of revenue and repeat engagements. I was the product, which is the one thing a services business can't scale.
The hardest thing I learned is that in a services business the founder is the product, and that is the one part of the company you cannot hire, delegate, or document your way past. I spent six years believing that if the work was good enough, growth would take care of itself. Growth takes care of itself only if the part clients are buying can be handed to someone else, and mine could not. Everything I have built since is shaped around one question: what has to be true for this to work when I am not in the room?
