The current mood of today is a little more isolated and unfeeling than I would like, and to help solve it, I've found this neat little app! Designed by a guy out of Google, it helps you keep your mind clear by focusing on a daily prompt, answered by short text messages. It then compiles these text messages into journal entries you can read on the app!
📖 Alex first showed me JournalBot a short while ago, and I loved the idea
💬 Daily text message prompts for your thoughts
📱 Text your journal entries back to the app like it's your friend
🎄Now that it's approaching Christmas, I thought it'd be a nice "Secret Santa" gift to post it on PH (not so secret)
🔑 Your thoughts are encrypted, so no worries
🤖 Get clear analysis on how you're doing throughout your time journaling
More questions? Check out the FAQ https://www.journalbotapp.com/faq/
@armatav Wow what a surprise to see this on here today, what a thoughtful secret santa gift :)
Arman basically covered what JournalBot is but some backstory...
Journaling has had an incredible impact on my life starting from my anxiety teenage journals I kept in a word doc in high school and various other forms since then. While it was personally impactful for me, when talking to others about journaling it was common to hear aspirational journaling stories - it was easy to see the value in it but very difficult to get started and keep a habit. So JournalBot started out with the idea: what if journaling was as easy as talking to a friend and not via in-app notifications or in the app itself but _actually_ like a friend via normal communication mediums: over text messaging to start.
So ~2 years ago post-leaving Google I decided to work on JournalBot full time (with Tripp helping out from NYC) and get it out the door. Spent a couple of months working on it and loved every minute of it. Ended up launching April 2018 [1] and rapidly put out a few more iterations past that to address some feedback on onboarding, etc. The initial response was good, and there was signal that we were solving a pain point that people had, however upon further investigation JournalBot most resonated with (and was purchased by) people who had already had some strong journalling habit in the past e.g. DayOne or paper. Users who had not had a steady journalling habit in the past churned - it was hard to see the value in a short-period of time from journaling.
So to address that, launched a couple more features: a "streaks" capability that tracked how many days in a row that you journaled and a "on this day" feature which showcases your journal entires from this day years ago (which now after a couple of years is really powerful!). This still wasn't enough and think that a lot more could have been done here to help start habits. Jour app [3] is a great example of a product that I think nailed the journal bootstrapping problem.
After that iteration, a fork in my career path appeared and decided to join a really exciting startup as the first PM vs continuing full time with JournalBot (which was bootstrapped at the time) with the pipe-dream of keeping it up on the side. Turns out startups don't leave time for side projects so JournalBot has largely been dormant for the last two years - but still gets a steady trickle of organic signups and subscriptions.
All in all it was a good experience and learned some good lessons for next time:
* Having a free for life tier instead of a 2 week trial
* Instead of an extended friends and family beta would go the waitlist/public beta approach much earlier
* Get a way to capture emails on sign-up and not just phone numbers for marketing/user reactivation later on
* Having better refer mechanisms in some way (free days of premium or something) to encourage users sharing the product more widely
If I were to ever pick this back up in the future (or if it inspires anyone else to), here are some ideas that would be exciting to try:
* Journaling via voice (a phone call that you can get/make)
* Actual replies back to entries similar to ELIZA [2]
* Enabling users to talk to themselves via a language model trained on their corpus of entries (this could be amazing or really weird and I'd try on my own first; longer-term this could be an interesting way to pass on memories)
Feel free to ask any questions here or reach out to me alex [at] roe [dot] io!
1: https://medium.com/@journalbotap...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
3: https://jour.com/
Great job on the app @alexroe. I've been looking for something like JournalBot for awhile. Dayone and the like have just never clicked. And the clean design of the content in the app, and the ability to send photos, won me over. Already happily subscribed!
@alexroe Day One was just a bit too much. And the reminder to write felt more like an annoyance that I dismissed or ignored. Opening up Messages and quickly typing an SMS entry is hopefully just the kind of low barrier, informal method I need to make journaling a habit!
@gregstone14 Great question and one of the most important ones before trusting an app with your thoughts.
Security / privacy over SMS is definitely a challenge as you can't have end-to-end encryption, unfortunately. As such, we had to add in some extra steps where we store the entries encrypted in our db and redact them from the messaging API provider after they're fetched.
It's explained more in detail in our privacy policy under the first section (promise it is human readable and not pure legalease): https://www.journalbotapp.com/pr...
Let me know if you have any other questions!
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