Alcoholics Anonymous began in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, when a surgeon named Bob S. and a stockbroker named Bill W. sat down together and discovered that one alcoholic talking to another could do what nothing else had managed to do. Neither of them drank again.

What started as two men in a kitchen became a fellowship that now spans 180 countries and more than two million members. There are no dues, no fees, no membership rolls, and no governing body with authority over any group. AA is held together by a set of 12 Traditions and a common purpose: to stay sober and help other alcoholics do the same.

The program is built around 12 steps — a set of actions, not rules, that members work with a sponsor. The steps move from admitting powerlessness to spiritual awakening to carrying the message. They have remained unchanged since they were first published in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939.

AA does not advertise, endorse outside causes, or take positions on anything outside its primary purpose. It simply works — one alcoholic sharing experience with another, one day at a time.

We built New Way to Live because the resources we needed when we got sober were harder to find than they should have been. The Big Book exists. Meetings exist. Sponsors exist. But a clean, honest, free place to understand what the program is asking — without clinical language, without paywalls, without ads — didn’t really exist in a form that worked for us.

New Way to Live is not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous or NA World Services. It is an independent recovery resource built by a member of the fellowship to carry the message in a new form.

Everything here is free. There are no accounts, no ads, and no data collected. The meeting finder pulls from AA intergroup websites. The step guides are grounded in the Big Book’s first edition, which is in the public domain. The daily reflections are written by a person in recovery, not generated by a machine.

The vision is simple: a mobile app that puts all of this in your pocket — meetings, step work, a sobriety counter, daily reflections — built the way AA itself works. No hierarchy. No commercial motive. Just one person sharing what helped, with anyone who needs it.

I got sober on September 17, 2022.

The program worked. But understanding it — really understanding what AA was asking, what the steps meant, what the Big Book was saying in plain language — took longer than it needed to. I struggled through early recovery the way a lot of people do: confused, looking for clear answers in places that were either too clinical or too vague.

I’m a technology professional. I’ve built products for most of my career. When I couldn’t find what I needed, I did what I knew how to do — I built it.

New Way to Live is my attempt to bridge the gap I ran into. To take what I’ve learned in recovery and make it easier for the next person to find. To raise awareness of addiction as the lethal disease it is, and to point clearly toward the solution that worked for me and for millions of others before me.

This is my Step 12.