Like most of America, I work full time and sometimes there just isn't enough time or energy left to pursue dreams and passions. But I have them… screenwriting is one. I've loved it since college. Something about plot and conflict and character arcs really moves me.

A year and a half ago I had an idea for my dream script. One that combines all my cinema favorites: revenge, a complicated love story, and a twist ending. Swoon. I was so excited to write it.

Except I wasn't writing.

In my free time on weekends and at night I was resting and scrolling. TikTok was my drug of choice. I felt bad about it. I knew I should have been writing, but knowing that didn't compel me to actually do it.

Then one night I'm in bed, getting my nightly TikTok fix, and a thought hit me hard:

"You're lying here, scrolling, watching other people create their dream life and work on their goals instead of working on yours."

It was loud. And it got me up. Fast.

I wrote that night. And every day after that until I finished the script. It was hard. Some days I didn't feel like writing, but then I heard that voice again.

Later I was talking to a friend and I said something like: "I wish there was an app that would pop up when I was scrolling too much. Not to tell me boring facts about screen time. Not to lock my phone and make me do some activity to get it back. But to remind me what I'm giving up."

"You've reached your time limit on TikTok" vs. "You're choosing social media over writing your script. Make a better choice." hits different.

I looked for that app. It didn't exist.

So I built Jettie.

No app on the market does what Jettie does. It watches, waits for you to go too far, then steps in with your specific goal attached.

You pick your goal and choose the tone: Kind, Real, or Relentless (I'm a Relentless girl myself). When you've been scrolling too long, Jettie interrupts with a message personal to what YOU said you were trying to do.

Not a generic timer alert.

How I built it.

I am not a developer, or good with anything techy-y (or so I thought). But this idea was itching in my brain and I had to get it out. So I used Claude to build the whole thing. Every piece of code and the app architecture.

I want to be clear: this was not passive. The strategy, the product logic, the requirements, the decisions about what mattered and what didn't was all me. And then I spent weeks in the trenches. I'm talking 12-hour days running commands in the terminal (never knew what this was before starting), building in VS Code (had never heard of this either!), debugging, testing, breaking things, fixing them. What would have taken a team months and thousands of dollars took me weeks to build and weeks to test.

What I have now is the app version of that voice I heard in my head a year and a half ago. The one that got me out of bed and made me finish my screenplay. I named it after the toughest, most loving person I ever knew because that's what your goals deserve. Someone who refuses to let you settle.