Why Penpoint?
Why I built an app to help me write my own book
Hi, I'm Joel, and I've spent my career making things. I got my start in film as a VFX artist on The Avengers, Thor, and Captain America, then co-founded a production studio, doing award-winning work for Disney, LEGO, Nabisco, and ASICS. I helped build some of the first consumer VR experiences and shipped all kinds of interactive projects along the way. I know what it's like to lean on tools and software to turn a creative vision into a finished thing.
But through all of it, the one thing I keep coming back to is writing. I love the freedom of it: no budget, no feasibility reports, no limits except time and language.
When I finally sat down to write, I did it the way most people do: the manuscript in one document, my characters, outlines, and worldbuilding scattered across notes I could never find when I needed them. Checking whether I'd spelled a name the same way three chapters back meant leaving the draft, hunting through a dozen tabs, and losing my place. Change one detail and nothing else caught up. My story kept slipping through the gaps, and I burned hours just trying to keep my own world straight.
So I went looking for one tool to hold my writing and my world together, and mostly I found a wall of subscriptions: apps that charged me monthly to keep hold of my own words, apps that couldn't promise my prose wouldn't be used to train an AI (looking at you, Google), browser apps that vanished the second the wifi died. The offline ones felt archaic, and if getting started meant four hours of "how to set up Scrivener from scratch" tutorials on YouTube, it was already too complicated.
So I dusted off my coding skills and built what I actually wanted. That became Penpoint: first a tool for my own overambitious 250-year-spanning saga, then a copy for my brother (a writer), then his friends, and a post on Reddit that went viral, until somehow it was a real app other people write their books in. No corporate funding, no SaaS startup, just a writer making the app he wanted and sharing it.
I use Penpoint every day, and I build it in the open, with and for the writers who use it.