📚 ThinkTotem: Turn boring books into engaging conversations

Hey Indie Hackers! I’m Claudio, a solo founder building ThinkTotem, an AI reading coach that transforms any document into an interactive chat so you actually remember what you read.

🤕 The pain

Passive reading is brutal: pages blur after 10 minutes, it’s hard to spot the key ideas, and there’s no feedback loop to check if anything stuck.
I kept skimming business books, zoning out, and realising weeks later that I couldn’t recall a thing.

💡 The solution

Upload a PDF, EPUB, web article, Word doc or even a YouTube link (≤ 4 MB for now).
ThinkTotem:

• Maps the core concepts, trims filler and builds a “knowledge graph” of the book automatically

• Runs an active-recall loop: Socratic questions, explain-it-back prompts and spaced-repetition refreshers keep you engaged and test retention

• Tracks mastery so you can skip, revisit or mark chapters “done” once you’re confident

Result: most users master a 300-page business book in 1-2 hours of chat instead of days of passive reading.

🛠️ Under the hood

• Ingestion ≈30 s for a 300-page PDF on Gemini Flash; cost $0.05–$0.10

• Chat logic, TTS and STT run server-side on Next.js; OpenAI handles voice (~$0.40 per user-hour)

• No vector DB needed—context windows are built from summaries + the most relevant chunk of the current chapter

• A tiny policy model classifies each turn (summary / question / recall) so the conversation stays on track

💸 Business model

Free tier: 3 uploads, 1 h chat, 50 messages
Paid plans just scale limits—no feature gating. Standard $30/mo, Pro $75/mo, Ultra $240/mo for teams.

🔒 Privacy

Original files are deleted after processing; only derivative summaries + metadata are stored. Nothing is used for model training and you can purge everything anytime.

📈 Current status

• MVP is live – you can try it now without a credit card.

• ~100 beta users, 0.8h average session length, 52% return within a week.

• Long-tail docs (academic papers, RFCs, dense proofs) get the most love because the tool “untangles without dumbing down”.

🙏 Ask to the IH community

1. Does the active-recall flow feel helpful or does it get in the way?

2. For founders shipping courses / newsletters: would a white-label “interactive reader” mode be useful?

3. What would make ThinkTotem a daily habit for you?

I’m here all day—happy to share the full infra cost breakdown, walk through the ingestion pipeline or brainstorm growth experiments. Fire away! 🚀