Jan's Story

I was scared to death to fly.
I bought a house in Italy anyway.

This is the real order of events, not the tidy version. Fear came first. Then Italy. Then everything falling apart. Then, at 68, a tech company I never planned to build.

I'm Jan Elizabeth Savolainen. Most people just call me Jan.

Where It Actually Starts

Fifty years of crippling anxiety. Then I got on the plane.

Long before Italy, I lived with crippling anxiety and panic disorder for over 50 years. Not a phase, not a rough patch. Five decades of it. Flying, especially, terrified me. If you'd told me back then that I'd one day fly across the world alone to stand in front of a construction disaster and figure it out myself, I wouldn't have believed you.

I found my way through it, slowly, and got to a place where fear didn't get the final vote anymore. That mattered more than anything else that happened afterward, because everything that came next required getting on planes I was afraid of, making decisions I wasn't qualified to make, and doing things scared instead of waiting to feel ready.

Italy

We bought a little stone house. Big, big problems came with it.

In 2021, my husband Chris and I bought a little stone house outside Ostuni, Puglia. We hired a contractor who came highly recommended; he'd even taught the course we took to prepare for the purchase.

It went badly. Very badly. He disappeared, and it turned out he was a con man who'd fled the United States a decade earlier with the FBI on his trail. I flew back to Italy alone, stood in front of a rubble pile, and had no idea what to do next. It cost us significant money we hadn't planned to lose, and it left us in debt that took years to climb out of. We got the house finished anyway. We still don't have a pool. We love it completely.

Jan Savolainen on the steps of a church in Puglia, Italy

"I stood in front of a rubble pile and had absolutely no idea what to do next. So I figured it out. That turned out to be the whole skill I needed for everything that came after."
JAN SAVOLAINEN

Starting Over at 68

I didn't know how to code. I built a tech company anyway.

Somewhere in the middle of rebuilding that house, I started thinking about everything I wished someone had told me before we started: the questions I didn't know to ask, the structure that was missing. I had no technical background. No developer team. No plan. I was in my sixties, and I'm 68 now, still building.

I didn't wait until I felt qualified. I started, the same way I got on that plane: scared, and doing it anyway.

From BY ACCIDENT (coming soon)

"You don't need to know how to code. You don't need a trust fund. You just need an idea and the courage to start."

Built With AI, Out Loud

Not a footnote. The point.

Every product in this portfolio was built using AI, primarily Claude, as a genuine creative, strategic, and development partner. I'm unapologetic about that. It's not something to obscure or minimize; it's the entire argument.

If a woman in her late sixties, with no technical background and a healthy fear of most things technological, can use these tools to build a company from scratch, that tells you something true about what's possible right now, for anyone willing to learn how to use them.

Age is not a barrier. It never was.

Experience is the unfair advantage: decades of judgment and hard-won clarity that younger founders can't buy. AI is the great equalizer that makes it possible to act on it, no technical background required.

Why This Isn't Just My Story

76 million people are facing this moment with too little put away.

I'm not the only one starting over later than planned. The numbers behind the Reinvention Generation are sobering, and they're the real reason this work exists.

76M

Baby Boomers are entering or already in retirement.

52%

of Boomers turning 65 have less than $250,000 in total assets.

30%

have no retirement savings at all.

Social Security averages $1,976 a month, and it was never designed to be a complete income. The cultural conversation about this moment has been almost entirely about decline management: how to stretch what you have, how to prepare for less. I don't think that's the only conversation worth having.

Nothing About This Was Smooth

Fraud. Developers who ghosted. App Store rejections.

I'm not telling this story as a straight line from disaster to success. Building this portfolio meant getting fooled once already and having to trust new people anyway, managing developers from a spare bedroom with no idea what "normal" was supposed to look like, and an App Store submission process so byzantine it would make anyone cry. None of it felt graceful while it was happening.

I'm including the messy parts in BY ACCIDENT on purpose. If you're going to trust that I know what I'm talking about, you should see what it actually cost to learn it.

Coming Soon, Not Yet Published

BY ACCIDENT

How I Built a Tech Company at 68 (And How You Can Too)

Part memoir, part practical roadmap. The fear, the fraud, the developers, the App Store submission process, and the step-by-step path for anyone who wants to do this too, at any age. Written openly and unapologetically with AI as a creative partner.

Follow Along

I write about all of this as it happens.

Weekly-ish stories about reinvention, fear, and building things later than planned, on Substack and in the Reinvention Room.

Read the Substack Join the Reinvention Room

I was scared to death to fly.I bought a house in Italy anyway.