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Slightly OT: I built myself a journaling app that sends one email every day to remind me to write about that day; I respond to that email and the response gets

by bambax 5y ago

Slightly OT: I built myself a journaling app that sends one email every day to remind me to write about that day; I respond to that email and the response gets stored in a db as an entry for that day. The system doesn't try to be clever in any way, it just sends and receives emails; it's proven quite effective. It's been running for about two years now and there are only a couple of days missing, if that. It's very interesting to be able to go back to any day in the past and know what happened, or what I was thinking about, that exact day. The system can also be set up to handle different journals at different intervals; it helped me write a novel last year. I'm the only user and it lacks many features to be called an actual product; but sometimes I wonder if others would find it useful.

mdorazio 5y ago
Also OT: I built something very similar, but with text messages and asking for a positive thing that happened during the day rather than a journal entry (forcing myself to look for positive things in a day helped snap me out of a spiral toward depression in the early days of lockdowns). I spent a weekend getting it to the point where it was good enough to share with friends and family, and about a dozen of them signed up. My mom and I are the only ones who still use it. I guess I have two thoughts: 1) simple, habit-based products aren't nearly as sticky as I thought without some kind of social validation component. 2) dogfooding your projects with your personal network is a great way to see if they're actually sticky and just to learn more about the market in general - I recommend it.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Yes people find it hard to stick to new habits let alone tracking them in an app. Good experience building these things nevertheless.
- lambo2991 5y ago
  do you mind explaining your stack / tech a bit? would love to whip up something similar for a pet project
kylebolt 5y ago
This sounds interesting, I think the advantage here is that you've focused on 1 use case where I was focused on many habits. Keeping it focused on one niche like journaling makes more sense.
lambo2991 5y ago
do you mind explaining your stack / tech a bit? would love to whip up something similar for a pet project
- bambax 5y ago
  Sorry for the late answer. The db (sqlite) has four tables: users tasks prompts items Users have an email address and own tasks. Tasks are metadata, mainly the frequency (in days) and the time of day when the prompt should be sent. Prompts are a log: each time the system sends a prompt about a task it is logged in the prompts table. And items are entries for tasks: users replies to prompts. Every x minutes a python script (cron) scans the db to see if a prompt needs to be sent about a task: for each task, when should the prompt be sent, and when was the last prompt sent? Emails are handled via Mailgun which is used to send prompts and process replies. When a reply is sent, Mailgun creates a POST request to the system with the body of the email. Each prompt has a unique ID that is present in the respond-to email, so that replies are correctly attached to a prompt (and therefore to a prompt date and a task); it also allows to reply late: each reply is linked to the prompt it replies to, not to the most recent one. It's also possible to send multiple replies to a single prompt. Web interface for receiving posts from Mailgun and seeing the entries is coded in PHP, but it's extremely light. There is no functionality for updating entries, creating users, etc.: this is done via phpliteadministrator (very useful) or sometimes directly via SQL. There are also triggers in the db to do integrity checks when inserting or updating.
jmcphers 5y ago
This is almost exactly the feature set of OhLife, which tried and failed to make this experience (replying to a daily email as a form of journaling) into a product. It's a great idea but kind of hard to make money on. https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/ohlife-personal-journal-email/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/ohlife-personal-journal-em... http://ohlife.com/index.php http://ohlife.com/index.php
- bambax 5y ago
  Ha, interesting. Yeah it kind of rings a bell. It's amazing the domain still responds. That confirms there isn't a big market for this... Still happy to use it for myself though.

by bambax 5y ago

mdorazio 5y ago

Also OT: I built something very similar, but with text messages and asking for a positive thing that happened during the day rather than a journal entry (forcing myself to look for positive things in a day helped snap me out of a spiral toward depression in the early days of lockdowns). I spent a weekend getting it to the point where it was good enough to share with friends and family, and about a dozen of them signed up. My mom and I are the only ones who still use it. I guess I have two thoughts: 1) simple, habit-based products aren't nearly as sticky as I thought without some kind of social validation component. 2) dogfooding your projects with your personal network is a great way to see if they're actually sticky and just to learn more about the market in general - I recommend it.

kylebolt 5y ago
Yes people find it hard to stick to new habits let alone tracking them in an app. Good experience building these things nevertheless.
lambo2991 5y ago
do you mind explaining your stack / tech a bit? would love to whip up something similar for a pet project

kylebolt 5y ago

This sounds interesting, I think the advantage here is that you've focused on 1 use case where I was focused on many habits. Keeping it focused on one niche like journaling makes more sense.

lambo2991 5y ago

do you mind explaining your stack / tech a bit? would love to whip up something similar for a pet project

bambax 5y ago
Sorry for the late answer. The db (sqlite) has four tables: users tasks prompts items Users have an email address and own tasks. Tasks are metadata, mainly the frequency (in days) and the time of day when the prompt should be sent. Prompts are a log: each time the system sends a prompt about a task it is logged in the prompts table. And items are entries for tasks: users replies to prompts. Every x minutes a python script (cron) scans the db to see if a prompt needs to be sent about a task: for each task, when should the prompt be sent, and when was the last prompt sent? Emails are handled via Mailgun which is used to send prompts and process replies. When a reply is sent, Mailgun creates a POST request to the system with the body of the email. Each prompt has a unique ID that is present in the respond-to email, so that replies are correctly attached to a prompt (and therefore to a prompt date and a task); it also allows to reply late: each reply is linked to the prompt it replies to, not to the most recent one. It's also possible to send multiple replies to a single prompt. Web interface for receiving posts from Mailgun and seeing the entries is coded in PHP, but it's extremely light. There is no functionality for updating entries, creating users, etc.: this is done via phpliteadministrator (very useful) or sometimes directly via SQL. There are also triggers in the db to do integrity checks when inserting or updating.

jmcphers 5y ago

This is almost exactly the feature set of OhLife, which tried and failed to make this experience (replying to a daily email as a form of journaling) into a product. It's a great idea but kind of hard to make money on. https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/ohlife-personal-journal-email/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/ohlife-personal-journal-em... http://ohlife.com/index.php http://ohlife.com/index.php

bambax 5y ago
Ha, interesting. Yeah it kind of rings a bell. It's amazing the domain still responds. That confirms there isn't a big market for this... Still happy to use it for myself though.