Lurnby
Tool for better learning and personal knowledge management
Memory should be a choice. There are many options for learning better, but it's really hard to put many of them into practice. Lurnby removes friction, allowing you to concentrate on learning, not on the excuses.
A few days after open sourcing Lurnby, things are going really well. Gained 2 paying customers and a lot of daily active users.
Lurnby now has 14 forks and 500+ stars on Github.
And someone just told me that Lurnby made it to the Python weekly newsletter. Which was a massive surprise :D
https://mailchi.mp/pythonweekly/python-weekly-issue-538?e=58091250f3
Today I made the decision that Lurnby should be open sourced. I think the goal of the tool is to make it as easy as possible for people to learn better, improve their understanding, and develop habits for lifelong learning that serve them whatever they do.
That means the tool needs to be as good as it can be, and I know for sure that there are a ton of people smarter than I, so it makes sense to allow a diverse range of people to start working on this and turning it into something really useful for the community.
As soon as I got my 2nd paying customer, I also got a notice from Heroku that I needed to upgrade my database as I was reaching the limit :D.
Profitability is moving further and further away.
But Lurnby is moving forward. I did a lot of work recently to start getting it ready for marketing and growth experiments. After a lot of beta testing and having around 6-7 Monthly Active Users, I'm confident that I've built something worthwhile and reliable. Now it's time for the real test. Getting customers :D
I've added a Terms of Service and privacy policy. Built out the settings page to allow people to choose their notifications, update and delete their accounts, and export all of their Lurnby data to use in other platforms.
And I've finally redesigned the landing page with a little help from my cofounder in another project. Would love to hear from people if it's clear and makes sense what the product is for.
The next step which is almost ready, is to build out the onboarding and notifications features. I need to rewrite a bunch of the tutorials, determine triggers and conditions, and create a scheduling function that will start sending out emails to people and hopefully reengage some old users and make sure that I make the most of any new users I acquire as I start to think about marketing.
It's fucking hard. But it's also really exciting to know that I've come this far. Considering that when I started 2 years ago I didn't know how to code at all, I'm really surprised at what I've achieved.
Just sets the bar higher though. XD
// Start Side note
Every time I start recording a demo, the app never works as I expect it. I always discover some small bug that I overlooked. I'm starting to think that these demos are the secret sauce to testing an application. Better to lost some time and footage to discover bugs in the application, than to get emails from customers about something not working :D
// End sidenote
Much of my reading (and thus learning) happens on my phone these days. For that reason, it's important for Lurnby to also function on mobile. And while I haven't built a mobile app just yet, I have done what I can to make Lurnby as accessible on mobile as possible.
In this video I show how I set up Lurnby on mobile and how I add content via email.
If you read on the phone often, then consider giving Lurnby a try. I do what I can to make it simpler for people to get more out of their reading with minimal effort.
Check out Lurnby.com for more info or message me directly, I'm happy to tell you what it's all about!
Today I checked my Patreon page and found that my supporter count was down to 0. Bit of a sad moment. I'd had $4/month coming in for 5 months. Not much of course, and still putting me at a negative considering my costs. But it was meaningful.
But it's fine. Because in that same time, I've gotten real people to take a look at what I've made and sign up. Better yet, I've got some people who are actually actively using my product.
Knowing that I'm slowly moving in the right direction and slowly discovering who my customers are makes me feel way more confident about my whole journey.
It's such a crazy feeling for me to think about how far I've come in my personal coding journey. Before I started working on Lurnby, the only coding I knew was super basic html and super hacky css. Now I'm able to imagine and release a whole feature in just a days work.
Some of the people using Lurnby had already expressed a desire to be able to easily navigate within articles in Lurnby. They wanted to be able to go back and forth as they reference certain sections and reread certain passages.
Others had just encountered glitches where the app lost their reading progress because of how IOS takes you to the top of a page with a single click.
I always like to let feedback sit for a bit and give my brain some time to think through the problem area consciously and subconsciously. This time it sat long enough and the "bug" and "request" synergized and made me realize that bookmarks were a great way to address both situations.
A day's work later - Lurnby now has bookmarks.
It doesn't feel big, but when I think back to where I was a year ago, it's huge. :D
I think it's extremely important to think about information flows in and out of Lurnby. Lurnby is all about helping people learn better, and one of the ways to do that is by removing friction.
I want people to interact with what they're reading and be active. That's why I offer multiple ways to get content in there. If it's in the system already, you have one less barrier to your learning.
But equally important is getting information out. Learning isn't just about reading, highlighting, and organizing - it's also about transforming, synthesizing, and playing. You have to work with that info, share it, recombine it, reword it, etc.
And much of that process already happens in other tools that people love to use like Notion, or Roam, or Google Docs, etc. Lurnby is about effective learning, not about lock in. I don't want to own your knowledge, I want to help you build it.
So super pleased to finally get this feature built and released!
Created a demo video of all of the features. The app is kind of hard to get started with and to better help with sharing all of the different things that you can do, I thought it would be helpful to summarize everything in a video with all of the features to date.
I spent the weekend adding a new feature to Lurnby.
I've long wanted an easier way to get my email newsletters into Lurnby so that I can start to connect ideas from them with ideas from the books I'm reading. And have an easier way to review and remember them.
Now it's possible by forwarding your newsletters to your Lurnby account.
This also makes it much easier to add articles from the web to Lurnby if you're on mobile.
Simple things, but simple things are often super powerful.
I'm taking my sweet time with Lurnby for sure, but I'm moving forward all the time. I have a lot of things that I want to change, but at the same time, I need to keep building out the functions I want so that I can learn sooner what works and what doesn't.
As always, I'm not positive this is the perfect experience, but I'm quite pleased that version 1 of spaced repetition for highlights now exists.
Definitely something I've looked forward to for a long time.
Here's a video of how it works!
