About

InkSynth started during my daughter's first year of life.

New parenthood comes with a strange kind of time. You are never really free, but you are also never continuously occupied. There are gaps: twenty minutes here, forty minutes there, that do not fit neatly into anything. I wanted to do something productive with them. It could not require long uninterrupted stretches. It could not become a second job. I already have one of those.

AI was becoming genuinely capable around that time, so I started exploring what could be built with it. I figured it might be something I could develop into a business with my fragmented free time. The more I looked, the more I kept running into the same problem: for a small business to get any traction online, it needed visibility. A web presence. Content. Something for search engines to find.

That turns out to be its own industry, and not a particularly convenient one. The agencies are expensive and slow. The software built to replace them is not much better: bloated subscriptions, interfaces that require half a day just to orient yourself, tools designed for marketing departments rather than people running actual businesses.

I reached out to local agencies for quotes anyway. A few never answered. A few gave me numbers that would have been a stretch for an established business, let alone someone just starting out. The message was clear: this is expensive, technical, and not designed for us.

I started talking to friends and colleagues who ran or had run local businesses. The stories were consistent. Either they had tried to figure out the online side and burned out, or they had built something minimal and walked away, or they had never started at all because it felt too complicated. A lot of them just gave up on having a real web presence.

This bothered me more than it probably should have. I watched a lot of local businesses around Fort Wayne close in the early 2020s. The ones that survived were often the ones with some visibility. The correlation was hard to ignore.

At some point it all converged, and I built the tools myself. Mostly to solve my own problem. Then I kept building because the problem was not just mine.

That is InkSynth. A set of tools built by someone who ran into the same wall and decided to go around it. Then kept building so others could too.