From a factory floor to building Chirply in the open.

Who's building this

Jon is a factory-floor dropout from Indiana who taught himself CNC machining and then enterprise software engineering — the unlikely path of factory technician → corporate trainer → CTO. In 2015, on a work trip to Kolkata, he met Aunkita, an engineering graduate from West Bengal who'd been shipping API-based software while still in college. She became the operational backbone of everything we've built since.

The proof: Tier5

In January 2016 we co-founded Tier5 with two rented computers, one developer, and zero clients. Through organic marketing alone, we grew it into 70+ employees, 30+ SaaS products, and 15,000+ customers around the world — $25M+ in verified revenue by 2019. We learned how to build software people actually pay for, at scale, without a war chest.

And we did it the hard way. Tier5 was a real software company — we hired, trained, and led a full-time engineering team shipping production software yearsbefore “AI coding,” coding agents, or vibe-coding were things anyone had heard of. Nobody was prompting their way to a product back then. That engineering muscle is exactly what we're now pointing at Chirply — this time with AI in the loop instead of on the sidelines.

Funnels that did the numbers

Along the way our funnels earned ClickFunnels' Two Comma Club — the award for putting at least a million dollars (two commas in $1,000,000) in verified revenue through a single funnel. We didn't just get it once.

×3Two Comma Club$1M+ through a single funnel — earned three times, for three different funnels.

×2Two Comma Club XThe $10M+ tier — a single funnel past eight figures. We have two.

×1Two Comma Club CThe $25M+ tier — one funnel, twenty-five million dollars and up.

Why Chirply — and why in public

Local businesses and agencies deserve the same technology advantages big companies have, without the big-company price tag. That's the thesis behind Vaughn Labs, and it's why we're building Chirply: the all-in-one CRM, dialer, inbox, and funnel platform — one login instead of six tools.

We're doing it in public because we've got nothing to hide and everything to prove. You can watch the roadmap ship in order, see the founder count and price climb in real time, and hold us to it. Founders get in first, at the lowest price it will ever be.

The bet: agent-first

Chirply is built agent-first — AI agents do the building, senior engineers drive every decision — and it's built for agents too: designed for AI to operate end-to-end through a full API and a built-in MCP server, with a UI humans find sleek and effortless. We think that's where software is going. We're building the proof, transparently.