Most people who write software have done one thing for a long time. Joel Gathercole has done nearly all of them, in order, as each one arrived.
It started at eleven years old with a paper route, then pool and yard maintenance, then selling custom-made products to neighbours who kept coming back. That is the earliest version of the pattern that still runs everything at Joel & Nanz Inc.: find a real thing people need, build it yourself, deliver it without a middle layer.
By the 1990s the hustle had become technical. Joel ran his own BBS — a Bulletin Board System, hosted on his own hardware, on his own line, with his own users. It was a small self-owned network at a time when almost nobody owned their own network. That experience installed a conviction he still holds three decades later: your data and your communications should live somewhere you control. It is the reason MapleMail and MapleSecure exist today.
The 2000s were the building years. After completing certified "Start Your Own Business" training in Quebec, Joel founded Netrique Inc. (2002-2006), developing VoIP and call-centre routing when most businesses were still on copper. In 2004 he founded VieDigi Inc., engineering a touch-screen tablet prototype a full two years before Apple shipped the first iPad. The original 2004 site is still on the Internet Archive: viedigi.com, June 2004. The technology thesis was correct; the manufacturing funding never materialized. Being early and underfunded is its own education, and it is why he now ships software instead of hardware.
From 2005 to 2008 he architected, developed and supported Teldori, a technology product built for a US-based company — a cross-border enterprise contract handled end to end, from architecture through remote technical support (2005 archive). That work led directly to TriageLogic, where a VoIP engagement turned into a 20-year tenure: external solutions provider, then Head of IT, then Director of IT, architecting and securing healthcare-grade infrastructure handling extremely sensitive patient data.
In between the enterprise years, Joel ran CafeVox (2009-2012), a brick-and-mortar internet cafe, plus a computer store and multi-channel online retail. Foot traffic, point-of-sale, a public network under constant load, and customers standing in front of him with problems. That is where the empathy comes from — he has been the small business owner the Maple products are built for.
Today, through Joel & Nanz Inc., run alongside his wife Nancy out of New Brunswick, Joel builds AI agents, voice systems, and business software for Canadian SMBs who are tired of paying US prices for software that ships their data across the border. Thirty years of pattern recognition, pointed at one demographic.