Hi, I'm Jason. I spent a decade in big tech - an engineer and data scientist at Google and Facebook, then product at Twitter and Discord - with two early-stage startups acquired along the way. When we were expecting our first kid, I left to start a solo consulting LLC so I could do school dropoff and still do the work. That was five years ago. The business now supports our family - six figures a year, with the swings you'd expect from consulting - and this year it's growing past just me.
We're in the Bay Area with a 4-year-old, an infant, and a 75-pound bernedoodle who's sure he's the third kid. pastelloclub is where that life runs into parenthood, written like what I used to do for a living: product teardowns and the numbers behind them. Three kinds of writing:
- Gear reviews written like teardowns - what held up after four years and two kids, what broke, and whether it earns its shelf space. Everything is rated on the Pastello Scale.
- Money math for parents who work for themselves - Trump Accounts, 529s, Solo 401(k)s, quarterly taxes. This isn't research; it's our accounts.
- Everyday notes - feeding small humans, surviving sleep regressions, the quiet ten minutes after they finally close their eyes.
Everything here we bought ourselves and lived with, usually for years. And when I couldn't find a tool that did the job, I built it myself - Lullaby, a feeding-and-diaper tracker for our newborn, came out of exactly this stubbornness.
How this site makes money: affiliate links (Amazon, eBay) and occasional referral links - I run my LLC's bookkeeping, payroll, and taxes through Collective, and that's a referral link. It's also just what I use. The opinions aren't for sale.
On privacy: I write about my kids but won't name them or show their faces, and money numbers get rounded to ranges I'm comfortable sharing.
Want to say hello? Write us at [email protected].