Two years running an independent operator and building the software for it: what being my own customer taught me, why the hardest data to get is your own, and why a Kansas well can beat a Permian well on IRR.
I started building Joltly to fix problems inside our family business. Two years later I am doing both jobs at once: I run an independent oil and gas company, and I write the software it runs on.
When I first came into this industry I did not understand how a joint interest billing worked. I could not get a revenue statement without asking more than once. I did not know how to have a useful conversation with a vendor about an invoice I could not read. I was in the dark on most of the process it takes to operate a small company.
I did not come into this industry knowing how any of it worked. I came in needing it to work.
I posted the short version of this as a thread on X. This is the long one.
I’ve spent nearly 2 years building software for the oil and gas industry while operating an independent oil and gas business. Here are 5 things I’ve learned along the way.
Five lessons have stood out. These are the ones I would want to hand to someone starting where I started.
Being your own customer gets you 70% of the way
I did not figure this out alone
The hardest data to get is your own
Cold calling works. Relationships compound.
The best well is not the biggest well
The biggest advantage I have had building Joltly is that I started by solving my own problems. I never had to guess what to build. I was the one who was frustrated.
Most of knowing what to build is pattern recognition, and the fastest data points are the ones you generate yourself. When the same thing annoys you for the third month in a row, you are not speculating about a market. You are looking at a backlog.
But it gets you most of the way, not all of it. The last stretch came from customers. Our wells, our operators, and our purchasers are one version of this industry. Somebody else gets statements in formats I had never seen, codes to a chart of accounts built by a CPA twenty years ago, or runs a non-operated book where every number arrives in a document they did not write. I did not know any of that from my own desk. I knew it from theirs.
I have been fortunate to build relationships with people who have spent decades in oil and gas, including Ed LaFehr, the former CEO of Baytex Energy. They gave me time they did not owe me, and they think about this business at a scale I could not reach on my own. That is the real value of a mentor. Not answers. A bigger frame, and somebody willing to push you inside it.
A lot of that is my dad, Steve Chamberlain. He left a legacy of people who have, in turn, supported my own start in this industry. Doors opened for me that I did not knock on.
I am aware of what that is worth, and I would like to be that person for somebody else eventually. If you are early in this industry and trying to understand how any of it fits together, I am easy to find.
This one I believe is specific to our industry. I have worked in places where data is simply available. Here it is siloed, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental: vendor lock-in, software written before anybody expected it to talk to anything else, and formats that assume a human will retype them.
The result is that routine questions turn into projects.
Should be a file you open. Too often it is three emails and a phone call, and it arrives as a PDF nobody can total.
Every purchaser formats a check stub differently. Severance and transportation get netted in a different order on each one. Working out what a well actually paid you is reading, not accounting.
The hardest version of the question. Not what the bank balance is, but which well, which account, and which partner’s share.
None of that is a mystery. It is just locked in documents. This is the lesson I am actively trying to fix, for myself first and then for everybody using Joltly.
I believe in cold calling, in marketing, and in putting yourself out there. Most of my network in oil and gas exists because I went to conferences, picked up the phone, and asked for the meeting. If you do not have the connections yet, that is how you get them. NAPE is an incredible place to start.
What I did not expect is how much faster the second kind of growth is. One genuine relationship with the right person can open more doors than hundreds of calls, because that person introduces you with their own credibility attached.
Some of our customers have become real friends. I can call them and argue about OU football and why BYU is beating them in the rankings. We spend thirty minutes shooting the breeze and five minutes on business. Those are the calls that turn into referrals, and they never feel like work.
This one comes from the operating side. It is easy to look at production and assume the bigger well is the better investment. Initial production rates are the number everybody quotes, and they are the number that tells you the least about what you will earn.
Take Kansas. You will not see the initial rates that come out of the Permian Basin. That does not mean the economics are worse. A smaller well can take dramatically less capital to get online and still generate an attractive return. In some cases a modest well with low costs produces a better IRR than a much larger one.
Capital sits in the denominator. A big number on top of a bigger number is not a better business.
Three things decide it, and only one of them is the size of the well.
Drilling and completion capital is the number the return is measured against. A cheap well forgives a lot.
A high initial rate that falls off quickly and a flatter well can land in the same place. The shape of the curve matters as much as its first point.
Operating cost per barrel is what decides how long the well is worth keeping on. This is also the number most operators can see the least clearly, which brings us back to lesson three.
You cannot evaluate any of that without clean numbers by well. Which is why the back office is not administrative overhead. It is the instrument panel.
Lessons one, two, four, and five are things I try to live with. The third one is the one I decided to go after with software, because it is the only one on the list where the difficulty is artificial. Nobody benefits from a lease operating statement being hard to open.
Two years in, that is still the job: run the company, and make the back office stop being the reason you cannot answer a question about your own wells.
Invoices, joint interest billings, revenue statements, and the close — by well, in one place. You can run the software, or we can take the month.
Get quick answers to common queries in our FAQs.
You only pay for what you use — no seat fees and no modules you don't need. Pricing is a monthly platform fee plus usage on documents processed, ACH payments, mailed checks, and the workflows you turn on. We size it to your actual monthly close so it scales with the work, not your headcount.
A smaller operator running 25 documents, 10 ACH payments, and 2 mailed checks a month would be priced on that exact volume. A larger operator at 100 documents, 50 ACH payments, and 10 checks pays predictably more. You always know what you're spending because it tracks the actual close.
Joltly connects directly to QuickBooks and Quorum On-Demand Accounting, and supports file-based export workflows for systems like PakEnergy and Integra. It manages accounts, items, vendors, partner mappings, JIB clearing, revenue liabilities, and netting accounts inside your existing setup.
Both sides of settlement. On expenses: invoice review, GL coding, approvals, JIB creation, ACH and check payments. On revenue: statement OCR, partner distributions, remittance emails, and netting between JIB receivables and revenue payouts — so your team replaces spreadsheet work and email follow-up during close.
Yes. Your wells, partners, revenue interests, GL mappings, approval flow, export formats, and partner-facing statements are configured per operator. Most customers go live on their existing chart of accounts and ERP setup — no rebuild required.
Faster than most teams expect. Your AP workflow can be live in less than a week — and you don't need to change your current accounting system. Revenue typically takes about two weeks. The only thing we need from you is a sample revenue statement so we can train the AI on your format.
We set up a Microsoft Teams channel or email channel for your team — whichever you prefer. You'll also get the founders' phone numbers for text messaging when you need a fast answer.
