Ty Jacobs and three colleagues started FourthFrame eight years ago to supply software talent to its clients and to develop software products for the marketplace.
While Jacobs says
FourthFrame has built a solid business doing just that, it's the success of the company's project management division � Simple Genius Apps -- that last month allowed Jacobs to quit his day job to devote full time as division president.
"A few years ago I started doing iPhone development and I developed some game apps," says Jacobs, who runs Simple Genius from his Pataskala home. "But there wasn't a whole lot of money in (iPhone) game apps unless you write Angry Birds, right?"
Then, the iPad was announced -- and it was a game-changer, Jacobs says.
"I knew it was going to be a whole new frontier for software, and so I started trying to think about what kind of niche I wanted to fill in that new space, and ended up settling on project management software because I have lots of project management experience."
The first Simple Genius app � SG Project -- launched in May 2010 and provided task-based project schedule management. Jacobs soon added an application for action item management and another for risk management.
"I was the first to offer a real project management app on the iPad," he says. SG Project Go was recently added for iPhone and iPod users.
Earlier this year, Simple Genius launched SG Project Pro � which combine those apps into a complete suite of tools. Since then, more than 17,000 units of the suite have sold in 65 countries, allowing Jacobs to quit his job as a director of IT business operations for Columbus-based NetJets and devote his full attention to Simple Genius.
In the near term, Jacobs says the company will develop some updates to the existing iPad applications and then begin working on a Mac version for desktops and laptops. In the long-term, Jacobs wants to grow Simple Genius beyond his one employee � himself.
"My vision is a software development company that has 10 to 20 pretty high-end software development jobs."
Source: Ty Jacobs, Simple Genius Apps
Writer: Gene Monteith