billQ was the first application that came out of the company I co-founded with Zack Gilbert (@zackgilbert) called Adams/Gilbert Co.

It was built to solve a personal need of the both of us: keeping track of our increasing large number of bills after graduating college. Many people struggle with this same problem, sometimes using a calendar, or to-do lists, or post-it notes, or just trying to keep it all organized in their heads. We thought there was a better way.

billQ is designed somewhat counter-intuitive to most web-apps in that our goal is that the less you have to use it, the better it is. We didn't really want people to have to think about billQ, we wanted it to just work and fade into the background. It would do all the hard work of remembering your bills, when they were due, and who owed what, and you would just get a text message or email when you needed to pay it.

It proved to be the right approach. We have thousands of users, keeping track of hundreds of thousands of bills, and personally for us, it's one of the few web apps we both continue to use after all these years. Maybe it's because we built it, or maybe it's because it just works. Either way, we learned a lot from it and we hope to release a completely new version, rebuilt from the ground-up, sometime in 2012.

My responsibilities for this product include a little of everything. I'm primarily responsible for the design of the marketing website, marketing materials, communications, icons, web application UI, desktop app UI, Dashboard Widget (remember those), and some customer support, along with business responsibilities. Zack is the Product Engineer responsible for coding out most of the front-end and all of the backend along with maintaining the server infrastructure (an increasingly large task).