I’ve always been interested in figuring out how things work — and then finding a better way to do them.

That curiosity has taken me in a lot of different directions: technology and product development, entrepreneurship, real estate, investing, fitness, and building software. On the surface, those may look like unrelated interests. For me, they all come back to the same idea:

Take a complicated problem, understand it, build a system around it, test it in the real world, and keep improving it.

That is really what this site is about.

Building Things I Actually Use

I don’t build projects simply because I think they would make interesting businesses.

Most of them start with a problem I encounter in my own life.

I wanted a better way to understand and manage my dividend portfolio, so I began developing systems around portfolio income, risk, allocation, and long-term financial independence.

I wanted a more disciplined approach to staying lean, strong, athletic, and healthy as I got older, so I started building a training and nutrition operating system around it.

My experience with real estate and short-term rentals led me to develop tools and educational resources for property owners and Airbnb hosts.

Other problems have led to projects involving expense and tax documentation, event photo sharing, municipal emergency-response operations, off-grid power planning, and other areas.

Some of those ideas remain experiments. Others turn into full applications and operating systems.

The common denominator is that I build them to solve real problems first.

Writing and Documenting the Process

I’ve also spent years writing about the things I’m learning along the way.

You’ll find articles here covering subjects such as investing, dividend income, real estate, entrepreneurship, personal finance, fitness, leadership, technology, and lessons learned from projects I’ve undertaken.

I’m not interested in pretending that I’ve figured everything out.

Quite the opposite.

A lot of what I write is the record of figuring it out — researching something, trying it, making mistakes, changing my thinking, and documenting what I learned.

That is also what I’m increasingly doing through video.

Apps & Operating Systems

One of the biggest changes in my work has been the ability to turn ideas that once would have lived in notebooks, spreadsheets, or articles into actual software.

I’ve become especially interested in building what I think of as Operating Systems — applications that combine information, rules, workflows, data, and decision-making into something people can actually use.

You’ll find those projects in the Apps & OS section of this site.

Some are personal projects. Some are commercial ideas. Some may eventually become businesses of their own.

They’re all part of the same ongoing experiment:

Can I turn what I’ve learned into something useful?

Life Outside the Screen

Not everything I care about involves software or investing.

I’m a father, and being a dad is one of the most important parts of my life.

I’ve also been an athlete for most of my life. My background includes soccer and track, and these days I’m much more interested in maintaining strength, mobility, conditioning, and athleticism for the long haul than simply looking good in a gym.

I enjoy building things, working on projects, real estate, learning new skills, and occasionally pursuing ideas that are probably more complicated than they initially need to be.

That tendency has produced both some good stories and some useful lessons.

Why This Site Exists

BradfordMerritt.com isn’t intended to be a site about one narrowly defined subject.

It’s my home on the internet.

It’s where I can bring together the things I’m writing, building, testing, learning, and creating without pretending they all belong in the same category.

If you’re here for investing, you’ll find investing.

If you’re interested in real estate or entrepreneurship, there’s plenty of that.

If you’re interested in fitness and performance, you’ll find the systems I’m developing around those subjects.

And if you’re interested in the apps and operating systems I’m building, you can follow those projects as they evolve.

You can also follow along on YouTube, where I’m increasingly documenting the process rather than just writing about the finished result.

Thanks for stopping by.

— Brad Merritt