Today, after a year of polishing, we are launching reflect.app, our networked note-taking tool.
Read on for the story behind the scenes and why we built this company.
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With Reflect you write one note a day and it's organized automatically so all topics get put together whether itโs people, books, meetings or anything.
You connect topics with backlinks and they automatically form a graph.
This mirrors the way the human brain works. We think and remember through association.
One thought leads to another, which leads to another...
It's also how we retrieve information. "I can't remember what that person's name is, but I remember which city they live in".
The other way that our memory works is through time.
New thoughts don't replace, they append.
So that's why Reflect is designed around an infinite scroll of notes representing each day.
You put everything in today's note. Your journal, meetings, links, research.
Over time something magical happens.
Your notes start becoming an extension of your mind. Almost like a third hemisphere. You start referring to them all the time.
"Where did I go in March?"
"Who do I know who works at x company?"
"How has my mental health improved over time?"
This isn't unique to Reflect fwiw. There are lots of good note-taking apps out there with similar principles.
And that's great. We all think slightly differently. While some apps will work for some, others will make sense to others.
What's important is that you journal.
So when we set out to build Reflect, we started with product values. Values are always a helpful north star when figuring out what to prioritize.
Our four values are: Speed, Security, Reliability, and Less is More.
Okay so Speed ๐. Clearly very important if Reflect is to be used as an extension of your mind. Any latency will bottle-neck your thinking.
There's only one way to get sub 20ms speed (i.e. perceived to be instant), and that's to move everything client-side. Including search.
Security ๐. There's nothing more personal than your notes.
That's why we decided to go with end-to-end encryption.
While it adds a huge amount of complexity and limits what we can do on the API front, we think it's worth it.
Reliability โฑ๏ธ. The stakes are high. Your notes are an essence of you. They have to be available at all times, online or offline. That much is obvious.
But also reliability has much further implications.
Your average note-taking app's lifecycle looks like this:
1. ๐ ๏ธ Build prototype
2. ๐ธ Angel round
3. ๐ Scale up
4. ๐ค Raise A round from VCs
5. ๐๏ธ Add more 'team' features for growth
6. ๐ข Can't IPO, so investors push for an acquisition
7. โ ๏ธ Gets shut down
We want to be reliable. We want to stick around. We do not want to sacrifice everything for growth.
Our ambitions are modest. We simply want to build a profitable company that helps people take notes.
Let's talk about: Less is More.
Here's another pattern:
Companies grow. Every incoming PM wants to make their mark. New features get added. None get removed.
Over-time products tend to become more and more bloated. This makes them harder to learn and slower to use.
We're a big believer in Less is More. We build for the 80% of use-cases everyone has.
We're going to be great at them. Actually not just great, but beautiful. And delightful.
And now, of course, now I'm going to talk about all the features we have. ๐
Let's just say... building a fully featured note-taking app is HARD.
You have to think about WYSIWYG, offline sync, conflict resolution, encryption, mobile apps, integrations....
But we've done it. We've spent more than a year of heads down building and polishing. And now we're finally ready to show the world.
Give us a whirl. We have a weeks long free trial. And let us know what you think.
reflect.app
Alex MacCaw
@maccaw
๐ฎ๐ฑ โก๏ธ ๐จ๐ปโ๐จ Building @reflectnotes ๐ฐ Investing earlgrey.capital ๐ค Founded @clearbit Tea, Earl Grey, hot. ๐
