I am an unabashed fan of thoughtbot, and I have long felt like I'll have "made it" if I woke up one day and had an agency that was like theirs.

This podcast gave me the reassurance that I am on the right path.

If thoughtbot can make $20 million a year, then JMG can definitely get to $10 million.

I came across this episode of The Knowledge Project the other day, and I instantly downloaded this episode with Jason Fried.

The more I read and listen to interviews with Jason and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, the more I want to model JMG after them.

Some takeaways from this episode:

• The businesses Jason admires are not big name ones that everyone has heard of (except for Stripe). He admires businesses who have been around for 5+ years, such as his local grocer.
• The expectation of himself is to do the right thing day after day. That’s an admirable goal, and one that makes more sense to me than straight up making billions of dollars.
• He said he tries to understand what “enough” is. That really is what owning a business should be about, right? If we have enough, then anything beyond that is greed, no?
• He spoke about how, at one point, Basecamp set numbers and metrics and then aimed to hit them. Ultimately, that led them to doing things that “weren’t them”, such as giving money to Facebook for ads. If your company is profitable and making you and your customers happy (again, returning to the “enough” point made above), why do we set pointless goals for ourselves? Can’t we find satisfaction in something more tangible (like how something feels) as opposed to hitting a made up number?

I would love JMG to be as “successful” of a company as Basecamp in every sense of the word. As our company grows and continues to find success, I am proud of our ability to stay true to our roots and build a business that does things the right way.

Jason Fried is always a fascinating and insightful person to listen to, and this interview is no exception. He has a lot to say about how awful work can be (but doesn't have to). I'm definitely going to read his new book as a result of listening to this podcast.

However, what really got me thinking after hearing this podcast was the way that Jason uses his strong, personal convictions to run his software company, willfully eschewing the conventional wisdom that comes out of Silicon Valley.

I've long held the opinion that raising large amounts of money confuses me. I've always thought it was because I didn't truly understand how investing and finance works, or maybe it was because I bootstrapped all of my businesses and wasn't aware of a different way.

But after listening to the way Jason justifies the decisions he makes with his company (not having a bunch of benefits that keep people at work, paying for people to go on vacation, etc.), it made me smile and think about some of the decisions we've made at the JMG, and how the vision of the company I want to run does not need to fit the mold of the typical software company.

When running a company, it's crucial that you listen to your own gut and to skate to where you think the puck will be.

After all, isn't that what entrepreneurship is all about?

I had the pleasure of switching roles and being in front of the camera this time. I can honestly say that I have, at one point, used all of these apps to become a better athlete, and I actually use two of them (Runmeter and Check The Weather) on a daily basis.

It was also nice to get a little plug in for the Jed Mahonis Group as well.

We finally launched the new version of the Jed Mahonis Group's website. I've actually been working on this for a few months now, figuring that we needed something more complex than our last single-page design.

The biggest feature of our new site is a responsive layout. This lets us show an optimized layout for any screen resolution (whether it's on a 27" desktop monitor or an iPhone). In addition, we're now able to better explain our app development philosophy and showcase our apps.

I also really like how the site really lets our personality shine through. Just look at the about page to see what I'm talking about.

The Jed Mahonis Group launched its second app today: the Half Staff App.

We decided a few months ago that in order to build our portfolio up, we should focus on core app technologies that companies would like to have in their own apps. Coincidentally, for Christmas this year, my girlfriend bought me an American flag.

After some simple Googling, I found a few websites that offered a service like this, but they mostly a) served to sell flags and b) looked like garbage. In addition, none of them offered direct push notifications (although there were a couple that offered e-mail and Twitter notifications).

The biggest challenge in this app was implementing the server API. After monkeying with tools like RestKit, I just opted to use some standard Apple methods to send a basic POST command to my API.

Besides that, it's a relatively simple app: we have a custom CMS that we can add new days in, then push the changes to a static JSON file. On launch, the app loads that JSON file and migrates changes into an internal SQL database.

There are a few changes I'd like to make (specifically, I'd like to combine the push token call and the database call into a single call), and we are working on a way to implement state-level notifications, but for now, I'm very proud of the way this app turned out.

It's only 99¢ on the App Store, so get it today and let me know what you think.

Thanks to the help of our stellar Android developer, the Jed Mahonis Group is happy to announce its first app on Google Play! The Android version of the Random Celebrity Generator comes in two flavors: Free and Pro. The free one comes with ads, naturally.

In addition, we updated the iOS version to 1.1 and added 300 celebrities to the mix. Get it today at randomcelebritygenerator.com!

We launched the Jed Mahonis Group's company webpage yesterday. I still have some work that I want to do on it, primarily in the copy-editing and photography portions, but I think it's a great start.

And frankly, it looks much better than the old splash page we used.