I built an AI journal to fight my own depression — TreeHole
I've lived with depression for a long time. The hardest part was never the bad days themselves — it was having no one to tell, at the exact moment it got heavy. And journaling, the thing everyone recommends, has too much friction right when you have the least energy to do it.
So I built TreeHole.
It's an AI you can tell anything. You just talk — type or voice — and it quietly turns those conversations into a private journal. You don't have to sit down and "write." You just get things off your chest, and the entry writes itself.
The part I'm most proud of: when you're struggling again, TreeHole surfaces your own past entries — the times you felt exactly like this and made it through anyway. It's proof, in your own words, that you've survived this before. The version of you that already got through gets to sit with you now.
A few things that mattered to me while building it:
Privacy first. Everything is end-to-end encrypted (AES-256-GCM). No real signup — just a username. Voice is processed on-device.
It knows its limits. If someone's in crisis, it points them to real helplines. I'm not pretending an app replaces therapy.
Low friction. Auto read-aloud, multi-language, works on iOS, Android, and web.
I want to be honest about what this is and isn't. It's not a cure, and it's not a therapist. It's a way of pushing back against depression that has actually worked for me — so I built it properly and shared it.
Where I'm at: it's live on iOS, Android, and the web (treehole.chat), with subscriptions and native features shipped. Now I'm figuring out the harder part — reaching the people who'd actually be helped by it, without being gross about marketing something this personal.
If you've ever built something that came out of your own pain, I'd love to hear how you found the people it was meant for. And if you want to try TreeHole or tear the idea apart, I'm all ears. 🌱
The feature that stood out to me wasn't the AI—it was resurfacing your own past entries.
A lot of mental health products focus on helping people express how they feel today. Yours also lets them borrow perspective from a version of themselves that already survived a similar moment. That feels like a much more distinctive promise than "AI journaling."
Thank you — you put the heart of TreeHole into words better than I have.
The AI is really just the invisible plumbing: it turns casual conversations into personal records and finds the relevant ones later. The real value isn’t receiving more AI advice; it’s being reminded of your own lived experience — what you felt, what helped, and the fact that you made it through before.
I’m rethinking how I describe TreeHole around exactly this idea: not “AI journaling,” but letting your past self offer perspective to your present self. Really appreciate this insight.
I'm glad it resonated.
Reading your reply gave me one thought about what happens once someone's past experience becomes part of the product itself. I'd rather explain it with TreeHole as the context than try to squeeze it into a few comments.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?