Hey HN
Been working on this really hard for quite some time. Need a reality check.
Remindful is an external memory for people with busy lives.
It's like an endless notebook where you can get instant answers about anything you have stored. It works in messenger apps like Whatsapp.
I'm guessing this is in the category of "Productivity Apps", the closest competitors seems to be apps like Evernote.
If you use something like Evernote - at some point it becomes really hard to find stuff, you need to start categorizing, creating folders or labels, etc...
With Remindful you don't have to categorize and search, just ask questions. This is the main differentiator.
Would this be too far out for people to understand?
Website: https://remindful.ai/
Oh, Remindful, you must be the lovechild of a one-night stand between Evernote and Siri, born into a world that never really asked for you. A true underdog story of a startup that thinks they're reinventing the wheel, only to realize they're actually just a square trying to roll uphill.
An "external memory for people with busy lives"? That's the most convoluted way to say "a glorified notebook with a search function." You're like the hipster of productivity apps, insisting on reinventing something we've had for decades just to slap a minimalist logo on it and call it "innovative."
And you want to integrate with messenger apps? What a unique and groundbreaking idea! It's not like the world is already cluttered with chatbots and virtual assistants trying to simplify our lives and failing miserably. You'll fit right in with the other clutter that's been desperately trying to be relevant.
But let's not forget the grand finale - your main differentiator. Instead of categorizing and searching, users can just ask questions. Because typing a question is so much different than typing a keyword. It's like giving someone a map when they're lost, but instead of telling them how to read it, you just tell them to ask the map where they are. Genius.
In conclusion, Remindful, you're the walking embodiment of a "solution in search of a problem." With your grand ambition and lukewarm innovation, you'll be sure to join the ranks of other productivity apps that collect digital dust on our smartphones. Best of luck!
There's two productivity tools I find magical:
1. ChatGPT wired into my command prompt.
2. Dash: https://kapeli.com/dash
Both are fairly cheap, but I guess what I need is speed of access over quantity of storage. It's where most notekeeping apps fail, especially Asana, Notion, Evernote.
Notably both of them work well because I don't have to fill them in. Both dash and ChatGPT are prefilled. To remember a birthday or contact details from a business card, I'd have to put that in. Have you tried uploading business cards to Evernote? I paid for that feature but it still wasn't worth the trouble.
Perhaps because the fastest way is just to add them to the calendar (talking about speed of access).
The idea behind storing notes in a messenger is that it is a simple mental shortcut for "fire and forget" approach to note-taking.
The AI is already pretty good so that it can automatically decide what to do with it.
When I read your pitch lines I don't understand what you're talking about (maybe a little tongue-in-cheek)
>>Never forget anything important again - well ok, this sounds good. So this is something that will improve my memory?
Get unlimited external memory with instant recall - external memory? so I guess what you told me above wasn't what I thought. So now there's this external thing where I save things? I guess like a notebook? but if I forgot about it how do I recall it? So now I see something important that I would have forgotten but I can put it somewhere else and instantly recall it...how?
>>As simple as texting a friend. - I don't understand how this is relevant. So there was something I thought would be important so i put it somewhere (and I'll remember I put it there) but then also it'll be like texting a friend?
It does seem like this could be cool but I'm not sure I understand it other than a notes taking app.
How about this:
Store everything you need to remember in one place. Get instant answers about any of it. Works in your messenger app.
I believe there are nuances in interpreting questions like these. Maybe this was meant to highlight what differentiates OP's business compared to Evernote. Just because someone couldn't do it, doesn't mean it's impossible. Everything successfully done might have had enough numbers of failures before someone showed how it's done.
It's not meant to be harsh, rather just realistic, productivity apps are a dime a dozen (there's literally hundreds of submissions like this over the years on HN). OP needs to know what makes their submission different.
>> I'm guessing this is in the category of "Productivity Apps", the closest competitors seems to be apps like Evernote
This is the part that stood out to me most. You seem unsure of your competitors and so you'll have limited understanding of your market and target customers. I'd start by validating the user's problem and then ensuring the product does that.
As a heavy Notion user, I'd also be curious how I can leverage what I've already built there.
Compared to Notion where you need to organize your stuff (if you're using it for private notes) - Remindful takes this extra work away.
You just store anything and then ask to recall it back.
This is based on the assumption that many people are not great at organizing their data.
Does this make sense to you?
To me, the value proposition would be anything incremental you can provide above and beyond simple search, but also something that isn't broadly accessible through other means (web search, GPT-like solutions, etc)
[0] https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
Also mention privacy and where the data is stored, is it shared in the model somehow, who has access to my data and so on. That is important as this is an app for your most personal data and possibly secrets!
Really gives me a clear direction for improvement.
It's some sort of ubiquitous note-taking/searching bot.
I like it.
The biggest obstacle for me to use something like this is the potential of losing all my notes if the company goes bust, so it would be nice to know there's a download/export option.