Pre launch reflection

For about a year I've been quietly building a mind-map app

called Sensemaker. This week I'm finally comfortable enough with

it to tell people.

The story is small and specific. I'd come out of long

brainstorms — alone or with a team — feeling busy and accomplished

because I had 60 sticky notes. A week later I'd open the file and

have no idea what we'd actually decided. The notes were the

exhaust, not the engine.

So I built the missing step. You lay out your ideas on a canvas

the normal way — drag, drop, group, connect — and then click one

button. Sensemaker reads not just the text but the structure —

which boxes you put near each other, which you connected, which

you pushed to the corner — and writes you back a short narrative,

200–600 words, that says: here's what each cluster is arguing,

here's where they pull against each other, and here's what the

whole map is implicitly building toward.

It’s multilingual , It's web and I may be realsing later also a desktop version. There's a

free tier with no credit card.

A few honest things from a year of building:

- The first version of the AI feature generated social media

  posts. Demos went well. Nobody came back. Turns out the

  feature people actually wanted was synthesis, not amplification.

  Rebuilt the whole thing.

- I integrated Stripe before checking that Stripe accepts

  Israeli businesses (it doesn't). Pivoted to LemonSqueezy in

  four days. Lesson learned, scar earned.

- Speech-to-text inside the brainstorm panel is the feature I

  almost cut. About half the users now use it instead of typing.

If any of this resonates — strategy work, research, podcast

prep, content planning, lesson planning, anything where you need

to think clearly across many notes — I'd love for you to try

it and tell me what's broken.

Coming soon

(Comments are open. So is my DM.)