How Curtis Boortz Redefined Entrepreneurship with Real-World AI Solutions

Curtis Boortz's journey from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur is a testament to innovation and adaptability. As the founder of ForthWrite, Curtis transforms AI adoption for accounting and financial services, blending consulting with software solutions to enhance efficiency without disrupting established workflows. In this Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight, Curtis shares his pivotal moments—from leveraging AI-assisted development to pivoting ForthWrite's focus based on real-world insights. His story is a compelling reminder that true entrepreneurship involves learning, iterating, and aligning technology with genuine market needs. Discover how Curtis turned challenges into opportunities and built a business that empowers firms to thrive.

Hi, Curtis! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

ForthWrite helps accounting and financial services firms adopt AI in a way that actually fits how their teams already work.

We do that through two complementary parts of the business: consulting and software. On the consulting side, we work directly with firms to identify repetitive or inefficient workflows and implement AI and automation around things like client intake, follow-up, routing, internal processes, and communication. The goal isn’t to force an entirely new way of working on a firm, but to understand how the business already operates and use AI to make those processes faster and more effective.

Alongside that, we’re building a communication software platform for financial professionals. ForthWrite originally began as an AI writing assistant that learned how users communicate, but our work with firms helped us see a larger problem: as AI becomes embedded in day-to-day client communication, firms need better visibility, oversight, and controls around how it’s being used.

The two sides reinforce each other. Consulting gives us a close view into the actual problems firms are experiencing with AI adoption, while the software allows us to turn recurring communication problems into something scalable.

Ultimately, we want to help financial firms get the productivity benefits of AI without sacrificing the trust, quality, or accountability their client relationships depend on.

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

This may be the cliche answer, but you really start to feel like you're running a business when you make your first dollar selling something you created. 

You can spend months building something, incorporating a company, creating a website, and talking about your startup, and technically call yourself an entrepreneur the entire time. But there’s something very different about a stranger deciding that what you built is valuable enough to give you their money.

It wasn’t a huge amount of revenue, but psychologically it changed things for me. The business suddenly existed outside of my own head. Someone else had validated that there was at least something there worth pursuing.

Since then, I’ve realized entrepreneurship is really a series of those moments: getting the first customer, having the first sales call, changing direction, and eventually realizing that nobody is coming to tell you what to do next. You just have to figure it out.

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

I spent much of my career in sales and finance, where communication and repetitive administrative work were a huge part of the job. As generative AI started becoming more capable, I became fascinated by how much of that work could potentially be automated or improved.

So I started teaching myself. I learned enough about AI, software, product, and engineering to begin building a solution to a problem I personally wanted solved. That experiment gradually became ForthWrite, and ultimately something I was willing to structure my life around.

The real jumping-off point came when the company I was working for at the time started to go under. I was suddenly faced with a choice: find another job, or go all in on what I had already built. It’s not often that you find yourself sitting on a working product with the opportunity to genuinely pursue it as a business. I knew that if I didn’t take the chance then, I’d probably regret it for the rest of my life.

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

Cursor has probably been the biggest game-changer for me.

I didn’t come from a traditional software engineering background, so a few years ago the idea that I could personally build and iterate on a real software product would've never crossed my mind, but AI-assisted development completely changed that.

Cursor has allowed me to learn while building, move much faster, test ideas without requiring a large engineering team, and understand the technical side of my own company at a much deeper level.

More broadly, I think tools like it are changing who is capable of becoming a technical founder. You don’t necessarily need to have spent ten years as an engineer to start turning ideas into working software anymore. You still have to understand what you’re building, but the leverage available to an individual has changed enormously.

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

The biggest lesson has been realizing that building something people think is cool is very different from building something they urgently need.

ForthWrite originally started as a general AI email writing assistant. I built a real product, acquired users, and even had people willing to pay for it. But AI writing was becoming commoditized incredibly quickly, and the level of customer pull wasn’t strong enough for me to ignore that.

Rather than continuing to add features to justify the original idea, I started spending more time directly with accounting and financial services firms. That evolved into a consulting arm where we help firms implement AI and automation inside the workflows they already use.
That work taught me a tremendous amount about where the real problems were. One of the clearest was communication: firms want the benefits of AI, but they also need visibility, oversight, and confidence around how it’s being used with clients. That insight helped shape ForthWrite into the communication platform we’re building today.

It taught me to be stubborn about the goal but flexible about the route. Months spent proving an idea isn’t strong enough aren’t necessarily wasted months, it's just time you've spent successfully proving which direction not to go.

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

One of the more unconventional things we’ve done is combine a software company with hands-on consulting rather than treating the two as completely separate businesses.

The consulting work generates revenue, but just as importantly, it puts us directly inside the workflows of the firms we ultimately want our software to serve. We get to see where AI actually works, where implementation breaks down, what employees resist, what clients care about, and which problems repeat across firms.

Instead of sitting outside the industry and guessing what software they need, we can help solve those problems manually first and then identify which pieces should become product.
More broadly, I try to use speed of iteration as a substitute for certainty. I’d rather test an assumption in the real world, learn that I’m wrong, and change direction rather than spend six months trying to reason my way toward the perfect answer without actually doing anything.

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

Distribution is going to be the entire business. Building is the easy part.

When you’re starting out, building feels productive because progress is visible. You can add another feature, redesign a page, fix another bug, or automate another process and point to something tangible at the end of the day.

Eventually you reach a point where the product is good enough, and continue to refine it is not going to create any material change for the business. That's when the work becomes much less comfortable: calling people, sending emails, hearing no, figuring out why people aren’t buying, and repeating that process over and over again.

I’d also tell newer entrepreneurs not to become too emotionally attached to the first version of their idea. Your job isn’t to prove that your original idea was right. Your job is to keep learning until you find something the market genuinely wants.

Want to dive deeper into  Curtis's work? Check out the links below!

• Connect with Curtis Boortz on LinkedIn: Curtis Boortz
• Follow Curtis Boortz on Instagram: @curtizboortz
• Subscribe to ForthWrite's Youtube channel: @ForthWrite_ai