Indie Hackers: Do you Journal?
I have some questions:
If you use a physical journal:
- What would make you switch to an app on your phone?
If you use an app:
- What do you love about the current app you use?
- What's a feature that isn't there, that you would love to see?
If you don't journal at all:
- Is it because you don't have the motivation to keep doing it
- Or you don't see the value proposition
Last summer, I built a journaling app that was super basic and I got straight into coding without even thinking about features.
This time I want to do my research. I already have a list of what I want to implement and would love to hear what you would like in a journal.
The main goal is to create an app that is unique for each user. I feel that the difference between an app and a physical journal is that the physical one feels so much more like it's actually yours. I want to recreate that.
The market is pretty crowded so I want to make sure that there is a need I can fulfill.
If you want to follow along with my progress, follow me on Twitter: @selvarajashish (plz, I have only 4 followers 😅)
I have tried a lot of journaling apps and didn’t like any of them. I still use my devices to journal, but longing for a better app.
Here is what I want
It should have an iPad app which can handle writing using the pencil and save it as handwriting as opposed to transcribing it. (An app is not important, could be a website, but must handle pencil writing)
It should sync with other devices and should also be able to handle keyboard based text entry
It should be very focused - no folders, no distractions. Just new pages for each day.
Have the ability to export the entire journal for backup in a common format
Thanks for the reply !
An ipad app you say 🤔, its not on my radar, but I can look into it once I make the iOS version. I think converting an iOS app to ipad shouldn't be toooo hard. The note about not transcribing it is really interesting, I would've thought everyone would want it transcribed, so thanks for that!
Yup, thinking about doing this with iCloud. If the app gets enough traction, I might setup a proper database and make the website a place where you can access them (as opposed to just a landing page). Then it would be cross-platform as well (iOS, Android & Web).
It's going to be super customizable so this will definitely be an option.
Will include export as PDF. Although, this might be a bit tricky with handwritten notes but I'll probably figure something out.
One last question, what would be a price range you be okay with for a subscription? Or in other words how important is this in your portfolio of subscriptions?
I’d pay $10/month for something like this.
I plan on pricing a lot lower, so that's great to know!
One last last question: Would a structure like:
be sufficient for your use case or would you require customizability on that front?
For a journal app, it would be ideal if the title is prefilled with the date and the body is blank.
thanks!