Hello! Nice to meet you! Let’s introduce ourselves. We’re the team that developed the Progress Planner Plugin. Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt came up with the idea for Progress Planner. You might know us from other WordPress plugins. We founded the Yoast SEO plugin but sold it to Newfold Digital in 2021. After selling Yoast, we founded Emilia Capital, an investment company. While advising other companies on building products, we came up with an idea for our product: Progress Planner.
But we have had a lot of help! We built a small team of the best people to help create Progress Planner. Ari is our excellent developer, and Mijke creates all our fantastic designs. Sam is the social media genius on our team, and Iris is our kick-ass project manager and content writer. And then we have Patrice, our fabulous finance guy, and Maike and Chris, who take care of everything in the office! And let’s not forget Ravi, our mascot rooster who helps us stay focused and organized!
Why Progress Planner?
We came up with the idea for Progress Planner a little while after we left the Yoast company. We used to work in a big organization and had a team of people working alongside us. At Emilia, that team was much smaller. Marieke noticed that she had a hard time staying organized, and she forgot about tasks altogether. She missed her project manager, who reminded her of her tasks and work priorities. She procrastinated, shopped online, and filled out random quizzes to assess which Winnie the Pooh character she was (spoiler, Tigger). If only we could build a project manager for all the tasks you need to complete to maintain a successful website. That’d make everything that much easier. And that triggered the idea of the Progress Planner.
Marieke has done a lot of research on procrastination and how you can best tackle it. Above that, being a notorious procrastinator, she has a lot of experience tackling it. Marieke was diagnosed with ADHD (only recently) and spent her life developing tactics and strategies for organizing and getting things done. We’ve used all of that experience to design Progress Planner.