A few days ago, I wrote about Great-Visions earning its first dollar.

I thought that was a big moment.

It was.

But apparently we were not done making things official.

Today, I get to introduce something I have imagined in different forms for a long time:

Great Visions Studio.

Great Visions. Made real.

greatvisionsstudio.com

Seeing those words on an actual website feels strange.

Not bad strange.

More like holy shit, we're actually doing this strange.

Because Great Visions is officially more than the name of this blog.

It is a company.

And I am incredibly excited about that.

I am proud of it.

And I am also scared as hell.

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From Great-Visions to Great Visions Studio

When I started this blog, Great-Visions was really just a name.

A place to document what happened when someone who had spent most of his working life in sales decided he wanted to learn how to build software.

There was no company.

No client work.

No portfolio.

No polished website.

Definitely no grand business strategy.

There was me, Xcode, a lot of Googling, a growing collection of bugs, and an unreasonable belief that eventually I could turn the ideas in my head into real things.

The mission at the time was pretty simple:

Learn. Build. Document it. Keep going.

And if you have read this blog from the beginning, you know the "keep going" part has occasionally been doing some very heavy lifting.

I have written about motivation.

Imposter syndrome.

Perfectionism.

AI.

Bugs.

Balancing development with a full-time career.

Starting projects.

Rebuilding projects.

Questioning projects.

Questioning myself.

Then going back to Xcode anyway.

For a long time, Great-Visions represented the journey.

Now Great Visions Studio represents what that journey is becoming.

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So, what is Great Visions Studio?

Great Visions Studio is an independent software studio focused on building thoughtful digital products.

Some of those products are ours.

Some will begin as someone else's vision and become something we help bring to life.

That distinction matters to me.

I do not want Great Visions to become a factory for random websites or apps.

I want us to make things with purpose.

Things that solve a problem.

Things that make something complicated a little clearer.

Things that are enjoyable to use.

Things where the small details matter.

Our website describes it simply:

Great Visions. Made real.

That may be four words, but they capture what I want this company to be better than a giant mission statement ever could.

Have an idea worth building?

Let's figure out how to make it real.

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We are already building

The funny thing about officially creating the company is that the work started long before the paperwork did.

Great Visions already has products.

LeasePace is currently preparing for its first public release.

It is an iOS app designed to give people a clearer picture of their vehicle lease mileage. Instead of discovering at the end of a lease that you drove thousands of miles more than expected, LeasePace helps you understand your pace now, see where you are headed, and make adjustments while there is still time.

Then there is Step By Step, a much more ambitious idea combining real-world movement with interactive storytelling.

And before either of those, there was Survive.

Survive was simple.

It was rough.

It was never released on the App Store.

But it matters.

Because it was the first time I experienced that little bit of magic that happens when something that existed entirely inside your head suddenly exists on a screen.

In a weird way, Great Visions Studio started there.

I just did not know it yet.

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And now, we build for other people too

This year brought another unexpected development.

Someone trusted Great Visions with their vision.

Our first commissioned project.

I wrote about that recently because earning our first dollar meant far more to me than the amount of the payment.

It proved something.

Someone trusted us with an idea.

We listened.

We planned.

We designed.

We built.

We revised.

We delivered.

And the finished product went live.

That project changed how I looked at Great Visions.

I realized this did not have to be only the home for my applications.

There was room for something larger.

Great Visions could build original products while also taking on selected websites, digital products, and iOS work for other people.

Not everything.

Not everyone.

Work where we genuinely believe we can contribute something valuable.

That is the studio I want to build.

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About the "we"

I talked about this in my last post.

At the time, I said that when I used "we," I was partly talking about Great Visions as the identity behind the work.

That is still true.

But I realized there is another reason I say we.

Because saying I did this alone would simply not be true.

Yes, I founded Great Visions.

Yes, I am the developer behind it.

Yes, I have spent the ridiculous late nights staring at Xcode, debugging things that worked perfectly 20 minutes earlier.

But Great Visions exists because people around me believed in this idea before there was much evidence that they should.

Friends.

Family.

People who listened to me talk through ideas.

People who gave feedback.

People who tested things.

People who encouraged me when progress felt painfully slow.

People who let me disappear into my computer for hours because "I just need to fix one thing."

Spoiler: it was never one thing.

And people who trusted me enough to let me build something for them.

There may be one founder listed on the website, but there are a lot of fingerprints on the journey that got us here.

I am deeply grateful for that.

Great Visions is founder-led.

It was not built in isolation.

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Pride and fear can apparently coexist

I expected to feel proud when this became official.

I did not expect the fear to hit quite as hard.

There is something comfortable about saying:

I'm learning.

Learning gives you permission to fail.

A personal project gives you permission to take your time.

An idea gives you permission to imagine what it could become without having to prove that it ever will.

A company feels different.

Calling Great Visions a company means putting a flag in the ground and saying:

We intend to build something here.

That is exciting.

It is also terrifying.

Because now my brain immediately has questions.

What if the apps fail?

What if nobody downloads them?

What if commissioned work dries up?

What if I make the wrong decisions?

What if I am not ready?

What if this grows faster than I know how to handle?

What if it does not grow at all?

And my personal favorite:

Who exactly authorized me to start a software company?

Apparently me.

Which seems like a questionable oversight in the system.

But there is another question I have learned to ask whenever fear starts getting loud:

What if it works?

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What if it works?

That question is much more interesting.

What if LeasePace launches and genuinely helps people?

What if Step By Step becomes the experience I have imagined?

What if another person comes to Great Visions with an idea scribbled in a notebook and we help turn it into something they can actually show the world?

What if we build five products?

Ten?

What if one of them becomes something far bigger than I expected?

What if the skills I spent so much time worrying I was learning too slowly eventually become the foundation of an entire company?

I do not know.

And for once, I am trying not to need the answer.

Because I have spent a lot of this journey looking too far ahead.

I wanted to know when I would become a "real developer."

When the app would be finished.

When I would be good enough.

When everything would finally click.

It turns out there is no moment where somebody hands you a certificate saying:

Congratulations. You may now take yourself seriously.

You just keep building.

Eventually you look behind you and realize you are standing somewhere that used to feel impossibly far away.

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What I want Great Visions to become

I do not have a 50-page corporate vision document.

Maybe someday.

Right now, I have a direction.

I want Great Visions to build original software with real-world purpose.

I want us to create products that respect the person using them.

I want interfaces to be clear.

I want details to feel considered.

I want technology to solve problems without becoming another problem itself.

I want us to keep experimenting.

I want us to take interesting risks.

I want to continue building our own ideas while selectively helping other people build theirs.

And I never want growth to become an excuse for careless work.

There is a philosophy on the new Great Visions website that I want to protect as the company grows:

Ideas. People. Progress.

Start with something worth solving.

Remember the person on the other side of the screen.

Build something useful.

Test it in the real world.

Then make it better.

That feels like a pretty good foundation.

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The future

I have no idea what Great Visions looks like five years from now.

And I think I am finally becoming okay with that.

Maybe it becomes a larger studio.

Maybe there is a team.

Maybe our original products become the majority of what we do.

Maybe commissioned work introduces us to problems and industries we have never thought about before.

Maybe an idea that does not even exist today becomes the thing Great Visions is eventually known for.

That uncertainty used to bother me.

Now it excites me.

Because for the first time, the future does not feel like something I am waiting to reach.

It feels like something we are actively building.

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A new chapter

My first blog post ended with:

This is just the first step.

At the time, I was working full-time, learning Swift at night, and trying to convince myself that taking one small step still counted as progress.

I had no idea where those steps would lead.

Since then, there have been a lot of them.

Some forward.

Some sideways.

Probably a few backward.

But they added up.

A coding journey became projects.

Projects became skills.

Skills became a commissioned product.

A commissioned product became our first dollar.

And an idea called Great-Visions became:

Great Visions Studio.

I am proud.

I am excited.

I am grateful.

I am scared.

And I think all four of those feelings belong here.

Because this matters to me.

There is a lot I still do not know.

There is a lot we still have to build.

There are products to ship, clients to serve, mistakes to make, systems to improve, and probably an absolutely unreasonable number of bugs somewhere in my future.

Good.

We'll figure them out.

That has been the story from the beginning anyway.

Great Visions is no longer something I am hoping to make real.

It is real.

Now we get to find out what it can become.

greatvisionsstudio.com

Great Visions. Made real.

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