Every product starts with a feeling before it starts with a plan. Ember started with the particular feeling of having too many tabs open, in the browser and in my head.
If you've ever stared at a full plate and felt your brain just refuse to pick up the fork, you already understand the problem Ember was built to solve. The trouble isn't that you don't care, or that you don't know what matters. It's that everything is shouting at the same volume, and choosing where to start feels heavier than the work itself.
I built the first version of Ember for that exact moment.
What inspired it
Ember grew out of my own experience with ADHD, though you don't need a diagnosis to recognize the feeling. The overwhelm of a busy week. The Sunday-night dread. The mental list that loops without ever resolving into a first step.
When AI tools started getting good, the dominant pitch was always some version of "let it do the work for you." Automate it. Hand it off. Step back. Something about that never sat right with me. I didn't want a tool that replaced my thinking. I wanted one that helped me find it, that took the noise down just enough for my own judgment to come through.
That's the idea behind Ember: AI as an extension of you, not a replacement for you. A spark, not a crutch. Something that helps you start, focus, and follow through, then gets out of the way so the next move is yours.
Where it's at
Ember is pre-launch right now, and I'm building it as a small family of focused tools rather than one big do-everything app. Each one is private, simple, and made for a specific person in a specific moment.
- Ember: Focus is the daily companion the whole project grew from. You brain-dump what's on your plate, and it hands you one calm next step instead of the whole mountain. Built for the ADHD and executive-function brain.
- Ember: Balance is a private weekly check-in for teens and students. Share how the week feels, and get back what to tackle, what to let go, and a grounding reflection.
- Ember: Forward is a tool for school counselors to run personalized career and college exploration with any student, aligned to the ASCA Mindsets & Behaviors.
- Ember: Alongside (coming soon) is a gentle check-in kit for parents and advocates tracking a child's wellbeing over time.
- Ember: Circle (coming soon) is a set of complete, standards-aligned small-group curricula for school counselors, built on the ASCA National Model.
Focus, Balance, and Forward are the ones I'm building first. The rest are close behind.
A deliberate choice runs through all of them: these are tools you drive, not agents that run on their own. They're private. The reflection tools don't even ask you to log in, and nothing happens without you. The AI is there to extend your thinking, never to act in your place. For tools that touch focus, school stress, and a kid's wellbeing, that line matters to me.
Where it's going
The near-term plan is simple: get Focus, Balance, and Forward into real hands, learn what actually helps, and let that shape everything else. I'd rather ship a few tools that genuinely change someone's week than a long menu of things that almost do.
Beyond that, there are two directions I'm excited about.
The first is going deeper for the people Ember already serves, especially school counselors. Counselors do enormous, often invisible work with almost no time to do it. Tools like Forward and Circle exist to give some of that time back, with the standards already mapped, so a counselor can spend their energy on the student instead of the paperwork. There's a lot more to build there.
The second is a separate track entirely. There's a real opportunity in AI agents, the always-on, automated kind that monitor and act over time. But that's a fundamentally different thing from Ember, with a different audience and a different relationship to the person using it. So it's going to live as its own project under Empty Bar LLC rather than getting bolted onto Ember. Keeping them separate is how I make sure Ember stays true to what it is: calm, personal, and in your hands.
The bigger picture
Ember is the first product to really capture what I want Empty Bar to be about: technology that helps people reach their potential instead of handing it over. Warm tools for real moments. Built for students figuring out who they're becoming, adults wrangling a noisy mind, parents paying close attention, and counselors carrying more than their share.
It's early. Some of this will change as real people start using it, and that's the point. But the core won't: a small, warm light that helps you find your own way forward.
If that resonates, you can follow along, and be first to try each tool as it's ready, at emptybar.app.
The right tool changes everything. I'm building the ones I wish I'd had.
Ember is a product of Empty Bar LLC, Hastings, Minnesota.