A journal that's always in your pocket
I wanted a way to get my thoughts and feelings out of my head. I don't particularly like writing by hand and I already keep my phone with me all the time.
So I built a basic tool for myself.
Every morning, I get a text message with a journal prompt. I write back. Throughout the day, I pull out my phone and write more. Sometimes I send some pictures. All of this gets encrypted, saved, and I can go back and read what I wrote.
After a month or so of doing this, I realized there might be a product here. I have no idea about the market yet. I don't have lofty goals of a million dollar business.
However, I think the value proposition is the journal prompts. Thought provoking, curated, high quality journal prompts. Something that can be targeted to specific groups of people and lead them through 30, 60, or 90 day "courses".
Any thoughts on this? Am I completely wrong? The tool is useful to me, so I'll continue building it for myself - but I am curious to hear what others think. Thanks!
@djhopper01 - Several years ago I attempted to do something similar via a mobile app.
I called it Memoree.
The idea was that I could just pull my phone out of my pocket, shake it to start the app (so I didn't have to find the app on my phone), record whatever I was thinking, then have the recording saved with a date/time stamp, and geo-location tag, that I could also name.
Had several iterations of the Android app built, but I couldn't get the shaking sensitivity part done well enough to prevent the app from auto-launching in certain regular daily use-cases. So, I stopped working on it.
As for doing the journaling via text message, I'm not sure I connect with the idea yet for a few reasons:
I'm not clear as to what you mean by sending curated journal prompts. Can you provide some examples of the actual prompts?
If the prompts are related to self-improvement, I'd question why people would trust a random app/service to send them that kind of information. Maybe it would work if it was a collab with a well known influencer in that category.
Doing this via text message / SMS would get expensive. Not only for the platform sending the messages, but potentially also for the user (may eat up the data or text plans). Not everyone has unlimited text & data.
I haven't looked in the Google App store to see if there are any apps that provide the same type of functionality.
Just my initial thoughts.
Thanks for talking about what you built. I'm hoping to avoid the app part, but I've already run into issues with MMS and photo/video quality (it's terrible).
Re: #1, rather than repeating the same question or topic every day, I've been thinking about sending them on schedule (a schedule might be every day, every other day, etc.). Borrowing from examples on the internet, the prompts would go out like this:
Day 1: Describe your happiest childhood memory?
Day 2: What is a popular song that you enjoy (and why do you like it)?
Day 3: Who is the one friend you can always rely on?
The idea being to solicit different responses every day rather than something generic.
However, the prompts can get even more specific if I'm targeting certain groups of people. For example, living with a chronic illness can be challenging partly because you're always learning every day how to live with it. For example, take someone with an inflammatory bowel disease. Those prompts could lead someone newly diagnosed into tracking their symptoms, how they feel each day, what foods they eat, and how their body responds to stress. If journaling can help someone understand how to better live with their illness, I think that's a big win.
I think the rest of your points are valid as well. I'm not too worried about cost yet, but it's definitely something to consider.
Makes sense. Sounds like it could be helpful to a select group.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple ways you could broaden the appeal of the service.
Regardless, I like the sentiment of what you're trying to build. You're building something with honorable intentions, in an effort to honestly help people -- which I applaud.
I've actually wanted something of that concept myself, send myself notification on some schedule with randomness where I'd reply back and have it saved for later.
Based on the important thing is the questions to ask, but also avoid the repetition fatigue..
I did some lame attempts with like google calendar and a few apps, but didn't get anywhere useful
...
Thanks for sharing. That’s a great point. It seems like repetition fatigue might play into a bigger part of keeping one engaged. I feel like building the habit of journaling is one of the problems to help solve here.
That’s partly why I think highly targeted journal prompts might be a good way to start. For example, gratitude journals are popular. Then there are people partaking in a weight loss journey. Even more targeted is someone dealing with a new chronic illness. These are things I have experience with myself and routinely going through the “therapy” of letting my thoughts out has been helpful.
Each of these is a good niche target for marketing.
If you have a base product and you create sub products for each niche with different questions but the rest of the system might be the same...
A lot of the self development and the psychology stuff deal with deep questions in a way.
From the basic of what are the top 3 things do I need to accomplish tomorrow to things like
What can I feel greatly grateful right now? surprise someone right now? have fun right now? demonstrate love or excellence right now?
To a simple "what's on your mind? or "RUOK"..
Also the IH have the repeated questions threads like what are you doing/working/hacking on today/this weekend/... This is very journal focused in a way..
I've seen journaling that asked for a feeling attached..
All the repetition / goal based / habit building of don't break the chain...
Great points all around. Do you think there's enough value to convince someone to pay $5/month for something like this? It's a question I've been working through in my head. Any ideas for how I might validate that?
It's always a question of what the thing is, what the marketing is and what the person needs...
If you for example align this with diet, maybe you could align it and bundle with people already selling some course package...
Hey man! I thought about creating something like this before.
The website I built as a first version for non-paying customers is youngmarcus.webflow.Io
if you want to check it out. Non-paying customers would get the possibility of buying the full service from there.
My MVP idea was to send people an email every morning and they'd reply to it during the day. At the end of the month I would send them a professionally designed PDF that they could save or print.
I tried to get a couple clients before spending anything in the development of the service, but people didn't really showed a lot of interest. Most people where concerned with privacy and a lot of people who are used to journaling prefer pen and paper...
I know it's not the exact same idea, but maybe that info could help you.
Feel free to contact me if you want to talk more abut it.
Hey, thanks for sharing this is something you worked on before. The part about privacy doesn't surprise me - that's something I would want as a customer as well! Also, it makes sense to me most people currently keeping a journal would prefer pencil and paper, but you mentioning it as well further validates that assessment.
That's definitely why I think the journaling part might be more about table stakes. There are a lot of different options to keep a journal. I hope I can find something valuable in the way of journal prompts targeting specific niches.
Will definitely reach out in the future.