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Ask HN: Roast My Startup

8 pointsvbond24 comments

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/

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I asked ChatGPT 4 to roast your startup and to not be kind:

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!

Haha, that's both entertaining and useful! :D

I like the idea, it's clear to understand. However your business is at the mercy of these large messaging platforms (for now) - I'd build a standalone client as well - as you only have text chat, it's not a big additional effort, and you could cater to people not using these platforms. I'd change the "can you remind me of my long-term career goal" example with something not so unrealistic. Good luck!

The Poe app by Quora could be inspiration for this.

I'm highly skeptical because there's been lots of apps that promise an external memory - Asana, Evernote, Notion, Obsidian. Most fall short. But the gap between Obsidian falling short and what I'd like it to do isn't worth $99 per year.

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.

I haven't considered uploading business cards to Evernote.

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.

You need a clearer pitch.

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.

Thanks rabidonrails, really good feedback!

How about this:

Store everything you need to remember in one place. Get instant answers about any of it. Works in your messenger app.

How about some version of "Your AI companion that remembers everything and answers your questions via Messenger.

Evernote failed to make a business of productivity app, what makes you think you can make a business out of it? Or are you happy having a niche business? Who is your ideal customer, have you talked to them? Are they willing to pay for this or are you going to insert ads/sponsored content?

> Evernote failed to make a business of productivity app, what makes you think you can make a business out of it?

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.

Sure, maybe the better way to phrase the question is: How is OP evaluating if there is actually a large enough paying market for this product to make a business out of it? Evernote showed there was not enough of a market for it to justify increased investment, so OP either needs to identity that there is more of a market for their version of productivity app or they need to have realistic expectations about operating a niche business (if enough of a market for such a business exists for this at all).

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.

Thanks coderintherye, all very good points.

If I'm not mistaken Evernote had tens of millions of users.

I'd assume a note-taking app with a better UX has the potential to have at least the same ballpark. I think Evernote's mistake was raising too much money and not differentiating the product from competition...

That said, I really have no idea about conversion and monetization of such an app, because I couldn't find anything comparable.

Compared to Evernote, Remindful doesn't require you to manage your notes, can store complete documents and articles and answer questions about any part of the content.

Moreover, it would be able to actually remind you about important dates and things.

So far people I've spoken to said they need something like this, but at the moment the MVP is not quite ready to be able to charge for it...

Nice work getting this out there!

>> 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.

Well, I have some confidence in the problem - people do forget things, pretty much everyone does...

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?

Indeed your view makes sense. I'm very much one of the people you mention, I forget things all the time, and use search in Notion to find the things most relevant to me. I also don't over-organize my notes, but rather use something simple much like the PARA method[0], and so would challenge the organization piece of your argument.

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/

Thanks Andy, didn't know about PARA!

I intuitively feel like even the simple PARA method is already way too advanced for most people...

It requires good organizational skills and discipline.

> 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)

How about this:

1. Imagine you can instantly save any piece of information you might need later on 2. You can ask about anything you've stored, just to recall it, or even particular details or summaries 3. Get reminded about things without cluttering the calendar

Does it resonate more somehow?

What would be your biggest objection to using it?

Looks good! I would like to see more examples of what it can discover / remember / remind me. I think putting together persona specific examples would be good. Startup founders, parent of young children, university student and so on. I want to see what it can do for me.

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!

This is perfect, thank you!

Really gives me a clear direction for improvement.

I don't think it's difficult to understand.

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.

Yes, that's a really good point, thanks!

how is this different than Todoist or Things3?

Some unorganized thoughts:

When I look at it, it sounds like it is "text based siri with a memory."

When siri has memory, siri must do it through a specific app interface that is often not always directly clear how to query. Siri does not have memory, the reminders app has memory.

I'm not sure you have any secret sauce that apple can't copy in a couple weeks.

I am not clear what value it has over siri to make it worth $100 a year.

I don't think any of the voice assistants have really caught on as a generalized assistant, but I could be wrong.

I Suppose your 5 second intro is:

AI Personal assistant with a memory.

I suspect you will find one use case that people really want, and then you will pivot for that niche.

The way my mom uses siri is for very specific use cases after I have told her that siri can do it. So she uses it for timers, messaging when her hands are busy/dirty, initiating calls, and google searching. She wouldn't think to do anything else with it. She never would have used it if I didn't give her a personal lesson.

There is probably a real onboarding/education problem. Learning about a product is a pretty high upfront cost to using it. Hyper optimzing for 1 case this does really well and slowly onboarding someone to the more powerful features might be a way to get people into it.

What problem does the app solve immediately? How does it make my life better immediately? How does it do those things immediately and better than competitive products.

With the notes app, I know exactly where everything is and can organize things the way that makes sense to me. Having a nebulous cloud of stuff with a nebulous interface makes it hard for me to imagine using it.

A lot of the stuff shown is actually structured data that I would like to see a real representation of. I would want to be able to see a calendar of birthdays, I would want to see a bio sheet on the people the app knows about. I would want to see a list of pending appointment and todos, etc. Importantly, not in a text based format.

Strides is an app that I have used before for keeping track of habits I want to form. It is the interface that provides value to me. It's like a dashboard for my habits.

So what are the features that Things, Strides, Siri, Google Calendar, Notes, etc. have that would make them the chosen apps over this one?

It is the presentation of the data involved and ease of managing it and viewing it that gets me to use them.

I don't think I've seen an FRM (like a CRM for social relationships), but it looks like in the examples, that is kind of the object of the memobot queries.

FWIW, seeing an index of explicitly supported and thought out use cases in a documented format would be helpful.

The maximum that it might be able to do and creative use cases it might handle is much less interesting than the minimum it will definitely do.

One major significant flaw of non discrete interfaces is that any time the intention to do something does not result in that thing happening, it makes someone not want to go to the app for help. I don't know how you are measuring failure to perform task based on misunderstanding, maybe repeated queries for similar things or requests that result in low confidence behavior? That seems like a very important metric.

Maybe an option for more technical than conversational responses would be nice. If I had a list of career goals, I would want bullet points rather than a comma separated list, for example.

Also it might be useful to bold or italicize proper nouns in your system that can be referred to. for example: MOM, LONG_TERM_CAREER_GOALS, REMINDER.

Emphasizing the things your app can do or manipulate in the responses might make it more flowy to use.

WOW, just wow.

Thank you hayst4ck, this is just amazing!

Definitely a lot to think about.

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