I'm Rick Pastoor, the founder of Cirrux. Is this whole thing run by one guy? Yes, it is. What started as a side project in 2025 grew into a full-time thing. But before I tell you how I think about that, let me briefly tell you how I got here.
I'm a software engineer at heart. My first company was building web apps, co-founded with a friend during my studies. We turned that into a successful business, building custom web applications for clients. We built the first generation native mobile apps for iOS and Android, we built games in Flash and we created fun integrations with early Twitter.
After that, I joined Blendle as a frontend engineer. After a few months, this turned in to a product role, where I was responsible for leading six teams of engineers to build the platform to help people find and pay for the best journalism in the world. A lot of fun.
While I was working at Blendle, I started writing and publishing articles about productivity and self improvement. I'm skipping over a few things here, but this ultimately turned out into a book called GRIP, which I self-published in 2019, and sold over 130,000 copies worldwide.
Working on GRIP made me think a lot about time and calendars (the calendar is the centerpiece of the book), so naturally I started working on a calendar app. It was called Rise, and together with a brilliant team we spent a few years learning the ins and outs of managing time, integrating with all kinds of other apps, building highly responsive UI and a thousand other things. I wrote a long piece on what happened with Rise [which you can find on the old website](https://risecalendar.com/).
That brings us to Cirrux, because after wrapping up Rise, I started thinking about what to work on next. Building a full workspace, after spending so much time on just the calendar, was not high on my list initially. But after after seeing the huge shift in demand for native European tools, I figured that this was a real opportunity to truly build something new and different in a space that is notoriously hard to break into.
Folks ask me a lot: you're working on this solo, how sustainable is that? And what happens when you're not around? Questions that make a lot of sense. My answer: I believe that the next generation of companies don't have to be built by hundreds of people anymore. My goal is to build a small and passionate team that leverages the leading edge of AI to help do a lot of heavy lifting. Secondly: there's a lot of things that I'm doing to guarantee the longevity of the company. I'm leveraging an optional escrow service to ensure source code access if something would happen to me or the company, which is especially relevant for larger companies. I'm exposing data via open standards where possible, which makes it easy to always have a local copy. I'm building integrations to sync Cirrux data to local storage and taking extra care of building APIs and export options so you're not locked in. And finally: by bootstrapping the company that aims to build a sustainable business, I'm not pressured to grow faster than I can support or do dramatic things to close a next funding round.
The last few months have been a lot of fun, and I'm grateful for all the support from the community. Can't wait to see where this grows into. If you have questions or thoughts, feel free to reach out. Happy to chat.
—Rick Pastoor