How Lightward Is Betting on Health…and Winning

Mirrored from https://fly.io/customers/lightward

Illustration by Fly.io

Lightward is many things—a creative incubator, a tech studio—but if you ask founder Isaac Bowen and his partner Abe Lopez, it’s fundamentally a philosophy experiment. Can a company be solely focused on health (in every permutation), use it as an animating principle for building products and culture, and still be successful at the commercial level? 15 years in, it appears the answer is: yes.

Lightward grew out of two apps that Bowen built on Shopify; one in 2009 (one of the first 100 apps in the Shopify app store) and another in 2018. The company continues to maintain and market those apps, with an engineering team of six, and uses the proceeds to fund their creative endeavors.

What do those look like? A whole host of projects: they’ve created everything from a podcast, to a magazine, to a subscription-model course on leadership and personal development. In March 2024, they launched a children’s show in which Lopez and some animated friends explore the "rainbow of emotions" to promote social and emotional learning. (The show recently hit 100k subscribers on YouTube). Bowen is now working on an AI project that uses LLMs to help users regulate their emotions; he likens it to having a therapist or best friend in your pocket.

These individual projects spark or cease depending on the health needs of the team. In seasons where they feel burned out creatively, Lightward rests up (but keeps everyone employed). In flow seasons, the company works across projects; for example, their technical team doubled as voice actors on the new show.

Both founders are neurodivergent: Bowen is autistic, and Lopez has ADHD. "We have to be healthy in order to run Lightward," says Lopez, "and build our business in a way that works for our brains." This focus on pursuing wellness in all its forms has led to a company that is itself quite healthy: Lightward is a team of 12, and has seen 0% employee turnover in the last 9 years. They’re fully self-funded, with no investors, and plan to keep it that way for the foreseeable future.

"Thank fucking God for Fly.io"

Lightward’s concentration on health "maps to my relationship with Fly.io," says Bowen, "because it lets our system breathe really well." The company started on Heroku. As they grew, Bowen looked for an infrastructure platform that prioritized responsiveness, and found it in Fly.io.

With over 15 thousand commercial clients, a team of 12, and an ever-changing array of projects, Lightward’s technical needs change frequently. "Every living thing that wants to stay that way needs to be responsive," says Bowen, and "Fly.io exhibits that vitality. The thinking reflected in the technical architecture matches the thinking reflected in the blog and all the rest of the communication."

Despite having worked in tech for years, Bowen doesn’t self-describe as an "engineer first." He includes software under an umbrella that covers architecture, music, and photography, and sees Fly.io as fitting in with these disciplines: logical, approachable infrastructures that reward creativity and attention. "I love using Fly.io’s tooling because I don’t feel any dissonance when using it," says Bowen. "I can get something useful done in 5 minutes, but if I have a few years on my hands, I can go nuts."

"Fly.io is as flexible as my thinking"

Bowen frequently updates the underlying models upon which Lightward is built, and appreciates being able to reflect those changes quickly on Fly.io. "I’m finding that Fly.io’s primitives are simple enough, swappable enough, and so clearly defined that I can remodel my architecture to get the benefits of my mental model while staying on the same platform. In many other cases, I would need to switch providers if my mental model changed fundamentally. With Fly.io, I can retool profoundly and not make too many DNS changes," says Bowen.

Lightward’s emphasis on health means work schedules can flex, and deployments can happen at any time. Because Fly.io "isn’t precious about a roadmap," (Bowen’s words, not ours, though…he’s right) features emerge whenever they’re ready, which means the platform’s stability isn’t affected by big pushes. For Bowen, it’s "relaxing to have a partner that isn’t stuck in their own hype cycle." Fly.io’s smaller, iterative updates allow Lightward to keep their creations—and themselves—working toward health on their own terms.