Small business is personal
By Jame Mackson · October 17, 2026
I've co-owned petite salon with my wife for 15 years. My role has been CEO, with a focus on business management. For roughly the past ten years, we've worked alongside Tom and Haley Fruen.
That belongs near the beginning of my story. Software is a large part of what I do, but business ownership is a large part of how I think.
A business is personal because the decisions belong to someone. You have to choose what deserves your attention, what can wait and where to put your effort. Advice can help. Tools can help. You still have to decide what makes sense for the business you're trying to build.
I want the technology I build to respect that responsibility.
It's easy to get excited about what software can do. I do. I enjoy connecting systems, working through a difficult problem and making an idea usable. But a tool's capabilities are only part of the question. I also want to know how it fits into someone's day. What does it ask them to learn? What does it help them understand? Does it give them more control over their work?
Those questions are part of why I'm building Conversated. I'm working to connect content, business knowledge, customer relationships and AI. I want those connections to be useful to the person running the business. The ambition is to make knowledge easier to put to work and reduce the effort of keeping everything connected.
I have plenty still to figure out. Building a platform means making choices about what belongs together and what deserves attention first. Being a business owner gives me a reason to keep asking whether those choices help the people who will use it.
Humble Good carries a related belief: that useful technology and shared opportunity should reinforce each other. I'm interested in what independent businesses and experienced people can build together, and in how the people contributing to that work can benefit from it.
For me, empowering a small business starts with taking its owner seriously. They know things about their work that a product designer may never see. A good conversation can reveal more than a list of features.
Fifteen years of ownership hasn't given me a formula for everyone else's business. It has given me a stake in the question. I want to build tools that help people make their own decisions and have more room to pursue what matters to them.
That's the work I want to keep doing.