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Show HN: I combined spaced repetition with emails so you can remember anything
Hey HN,
I am a student shipping apps in my free time. This is my 4th for the year!
Non-fic books and podcasts have been part of my life for years now but I always struggled with remembering what I’ve read or listened to. I wanted it to stick even after years.
My notes list grew large but I never really revisited them. That’s why I created GinkgoNotes.
You can enter notes you want to recall and leave it to the app to create a personalised (based on spaced repetition) email schedule. That means you’ll get your notes emailed to you a couple of times exactly when you should read them again (based on Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve) so it’s certain that you’ll remember them.
I hope this will be helpful as it was for me. Would love some feedback!
Iskren
- betimsl 2y agoI use mochi.cards and am very happy. It has a really good app and it's very privacy friendly. I recommend it to anyone who is studying or preparing for any event that requires efficient memorizing.
- OxfordOutlander 2y agoLooks awesome - would you mind expanding on the tech stack you used?
- bturtel 2y agoThis is very cool. Reminds me of Quantum Country (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30467585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30467585) but for everything else in life.
- b0a04gl 2y ago[dead]
- gravity2060 2y agoThis is so cool and something I’ve wanted for a long time, but it isn’t quite right yet (for what I personally want in an app like this.) I am your target market, and I’d buy the lifetime /annual sub in a second if it had these features: I want control of the SR sequence or, I want to know what SR algo you are using and know it is best practice model. The landing page says 4 sends, but that isn’t true SR. The next thing, I’d want to see all of my “cards” or information pieces when I am logged in, so I can see and edit and delete and keep the database clean with a total view of content. The next thing I’d need (maybe you have this?) is for the email to effectively be a flash card, where the email content is the front and a link the email takes me to the “back” of the card so I can’t use cloze delete and other techniques. The last thing is bulk upload of content via a csv so I can bulk import mochi /anki / llm generated content. I wish you luck with this and would (selfishly) encourage you to not ship so many different things, and instead encourage you to pick one and make it best in class for niche users like me who would spend and spend on premium solutions, but won’t spend on superficial implementations.
- iskrataa 2y agoCan't thank you enough for the feedback. These are all great ideas which I'll look into. I was wondering what is your experience with Anki? Are there reasons you are looking into alternatives or do you just like the idea of getting stuff by email? Thanks again!
- crashabr 2y agoYou should try Readwise
- latentsea 2y agoWhy email at this point and not just Anki?
- ozim 2y agoNot the person you asked - but for me it is that I check emails compulsively any other app I have to remember/tend to forget. Like Todoist is great but I can go weeks without opening it and I skip tasks because of it unless I set email notifications.
- latentsea 2y agoHmm. SRS is a daily commitment though. If you skip it the reviews just pile up, which tends to be painful enough that you quickly learn it's a daily commitment. I couldn't imagine getting 150 emails a day to review stuff, or that being a workable UX.
- ozim 2y agoI think 10-20 flashcards a day is better than 0. But on the other hand it might not be rate to learn something quickly enough.
- latentsea 2y agoWith the original Anki algorithm the rule of thumb is your daily review load will be 5x your rate of new cards per day. So 10 to 20 reviews per day is between 2 to 4 new cards per day. Definitely not enough for language learning, which is my use-case, but may be ok for certain other things.
- TripleChecker 2y agoNeat idea! I might consider pushing a free trial more since this feels like the type of product someone could begin to rely on and then be more likely to upgrade. A few positive testimonials wouldn't hurt. A couple minor link fixes on your homepage, see here: https://triplechecker.com/s/230357/ginkgonotes.com https://triplechecker.com/s/230357/ginkgonotes.com. 1) Blog on footer is broken link 2) Affiliates on footer doesn't take you anywhere
- iskrataa 2y agoYes, I agree with both statements. Although I'm just starting and don't have any testimonials yet, I was thinking of sending an email to users requesting testimonials in exchange for the premium plan. Just fixed the footer, nice catch! Shipping fast comes with some faulty copy pastes I guess...
- TripleChecker 2y agoThat could work. Happy to help!
- iknownthing 2y agoWish this existed when I was in school
- wrboyce 2y agoVery interesting concept! I was about to dive right in when a voice in my head reminded me that my inbox discipline is terrible and I don’t need even more automated emails that will serve only to increase my unread count (which currently stands at 16878 in my Personal inbox). Have you considered expanding this to notify via other mediums such as iMessage (if possible, this would be my preference) or the presumably easier WhatsApp/Telegram (the Telegram Bot API is pretty great, I’d imagine would be very easy)? I’d also echo the free trial sentiment expressed elsewhere in the comments, take the mythical drug dealer approach and get ‘em hooked on freebies!
- iskrataa 2y agoYes, that's definitely a major drawback for people who are not so active via email (or got their inboxes spammed by marketing haha). Will explore some options with the messaging apps, thank you! Do you think at this point it's not easier to open a specific app for that or there's a reason you prefer it to be via a messaging app?
- andai 2y agoGetting messaged is different from opening Anki, which I often avoid for months at a time. I imagine I'd be much more likely to respond to a notification just because of how strong of a habit that is.
- wrboyce 2y agoI feel like writing a specific app is not only more effort on your part but easier to ignore on mine (and more friction, a lot of people are hesitant to install new apps). Personally I'm a big iMessage/Telegram user and as such unlikely to leave things unread on those mediums (they're one of the few apps that I allow to push notifications and display an "unread" badge); my reading of your post was that a selling point of GinkgoNotes is that it appears in already established workflows.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoThis is an interesting approach. Congrats on shipping! I worry that it won't be effective. Systems like Supermemo and Anki work because of: 1) Spaced repetition (showing you the thing at the right time). 2) Retrieval practice (having your brain practice retrieving the thing you're about to forget). 3) Feedback and automation (using your self-rating to schedule the next review). You are doing #1 and #3. But you totally skip #2, because you show all the info in the email. So, unlike Anki, Supermemo or Quantum Country (which someone mentioned in another comment), there's no front/back or cloze deletion, and no retrieval practice happening. Perhaps putting the question in the email subject and the answer in the email body would work?
- iskrataa 2y agoThanks for the feedback! I agree, and this is something I thought about a lot during the design process. In my experience, just looking at the note (#1 in your example) helps a lot more than no repetitions (which is obvious of course), but it's still a huge improvement compared to my previous flow. As for repetition, I was thinking of replying to the email with what you think is the answer and letting an LLM decide if you remember correctly. Is that something that sounds effective to you?
- rahimnathwani 2y agoI was thinking of replying to the email with what you think is the answer and letting an LLM decide if you remember correctly. Is that something that sounds effective to you? The nice thing about your tool is the simplicity and low-friction due to using email. For retrieval, replies might work, but I wonder whether the people who are willing to do that work are the same people who would just install Anki instead.
- passwordreset 2y agoEmail seems like a no-go here. It would feel like spam. If you wanted a something more conversational, I'd consider doing this over text messages.
- 85392_school 2y ago
- moojacob 2y agoI really like how you can create a note from the landing page. 1) it helped me understand how the app worked better than any screenshots or videos while 2) nudging me to sign up.
- pugworthy 2y agoIt seems you've made a digital mnemometer!
- guluarte 2y agoI'm a big fan of SuperMemo16, if you could add incremental reading that would be great.
- xkbarkar 2y agoI have 3 email in-boxes. One ancient rarely used since the early 2000, my personal daily email and my work email. Between then there are some 100k unread emails. I am not the target audience for this service.
- iskrataa 2y agoI think there are a lot of people like you, so I would definitely look into other ways of communicating. Thanks for the feedback! If it was over WhatsApp, for example, would you be interested?
- exe34 2y agoI do an annual amnesty, every email goes into archive on the first of January.
- vundercind 2y agoI sometimes go most of a week without checking any email address. I’ve gone a month without looking at my personal one. It’s basically just for transactional mail, I don’t get things from people there.
- Cotterzz 2y agoInteresting. I couldn't see myself using a tool like this for bulk remembering of things. And I don't think it would be practical for that. But for specifically important things like certain words my brain like to forget from time to time, numbers I need to remember or a very important hospital appointment, this could be very useful.
- ianbutler 2y agoEmail is the only thing I have conditioned myself to reliably check so this system probably has the best shot for me. Nice job, will try it out. Ive been meaning to make a real attempt at learning Japanese.
- iskrataa 2y agoThank you! Have fun learning Japanese!
- wowsoleet 2y agoThe idea is good but: 1) Paid model, $10 for an email on timer? Copilot, Spotify and Windsurf charge the same. Won't pay on principle THIS amount of money for a service which is done self-hosted in 30 minutes with ChatGPT, neither will a normie buy paid calendar, no offense. $1 is realistic, still you're gonna be profitable and much more scalable imo. Trial period of 2 weeks is mandatory 2) I almost never read mails, plus email notifications are inconsistent if you're not inside an ecosystem, e.g. Apple/Google. For me it is not a reliable way of communication
- slwvx 2y agoCould be a good feature for AnkiWeb.net
- jdthedisciple 2y agoI made the exact same thing except with notifications instead of email. I called my app "Mnemonist". My last as just hasn't gotten around to shipping it yet...
- alwayslikethis 2y agoWith the number of cards I have in Anki, something like this is going to fill up my inbox. Recent Anki versions ship a much more advanced algorithm called FSRS which performs much better (fewer reviews for the same recall). If you haven't tried it in some time, I recommend taking another look. Also, many note taking programs have ways to export to anki, which is probably more pleasant than adding notes directly.
- tsekiguchi 2y agoReadwise also has this feature. I get a daily email with a random assortment of highlights that have been pulled in from multiple sources (Reader, Notion, Kindle, etc.) The product benefit in their case is that it's kind of like Zapier, but for notes. https://readwise.io/ https://readwise.io/
- andai 2y agoThe comments here remind me of the HN comments when Dropbox launched!
- andai 2y agoCool idea! What were your other 3 projects this year?
- iskrataa 2y agoI kicked off the year with a web app that summarises foreign books using AI. 2nd is a desktop emulator of an iPod (macOS only) 3rd is a Stardew Valley tool Let me know if you need a URL for any of them :D
- dirkc 2y agoThis looks like it might have been one of them? https://ginkgovest.com/ https://ginkgovest.com/. *edit* seems different - google search led me astray. I didn't realize ginkgo is a tree with a distinctive leave
- joshdavham 2y agoThis is a super cool idea! Also, which spaced repetition scheduler are you using for this? FSRS?
- iskrataa 2y agoYes, it's FSRS based on this article https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/Spaced-Repetition-Algorithm:-A-Three%E2%80%90Day-Journey-from-Novice-to-Expert#day-3-the-latest-progress https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/Spa... Huge thanks to the dude.
- kazinator 2y agoI can't find them who would use this over Anki or AnkiDroid. I have hundreds of items to review. I wouldn't want that in my inbox.
- iskrataa 2y agoI get you. In cases where you have that many cards, that's definitely not for you. My case is rather 2-3 quotes from a book I just read of 5ish articles per week which I find interesting and don't want to forget (so it will email them again to me after some time so I can reread). Thanks for the feedback!
- kazinator 2y agoAnki scales down to a few questions, and is a local-only app requiring no infrastructure for mail delivery. A book you read will eventually turn to twenty books you read, and then you have 40 to 60 quotes and so it goes.
- christin369 2y agoThis is really impressive! Would you mind sharing some analytics like subscriber count or DAU? I'm curious to learn more about how your platform is performing. Thanks!"
- iskrataa 2y agoThank you! Sadly, it's just at the start of the project so I don't have anything to share yet. I'll give an update after some time of collecting metrics. You can also follow me on X to be in touch with the project.
- BenMorris-Rains 2y agoCool idea, can it just be an app that sends me notifications instead of the email? Anything that goes to my email is basically a black box and I won't see it. I am an email hoarder and I don't clean them up... Once every other year or so I'll try. The only thing that helped was routing "updates" and "promotions" straight to my trash, but I miss things sometimes that way.
- Scea91 2y agoSeems like the root cause is not email. I am curious how “another app” would be better in your situation than just setting up an email rule (3 min task at most) for this mailer if you truly care about it.
- dirkc 2y agoWell done shipping your project! I like the low-friction demo on the page! I assume I'll receive an email in a few days from now? Are you using those emails for marketing/a mailing list?
- iskrataa 2y agoThank you! You're both right—you'll get your repetitions, and I'll add you to the user mailing list (unless you opt-out).
- aboardRat4 2y agoWhere is the code?
- RamblingCTO 2y agoGingko notes have been a thing maybe 10 years ago? I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but wasn't graph-based note taking? Was really cool! The idea of spaced repetition via email reminds me of readwise as well.
- iskrataa 2y agoYes, Readwise was sort of an inspiration for me too, but looked like wasted potential as they don't track or use any algorithms for you to remember, and lack support for external links/sources (I may be wrong here).
- shanusmagnus 2y agoYou're thinking of this [1]. Super duper cool idea, ahead of its time. Author seems to have transitioned to a ludicrous pricing model, but I suspect it's because the people who like it really _love_ it. I used to be among them, but then switched to org-mode . [1] https://gingkowriter.com/ https://gingkowriter.com/
- leobg 2y agoI’m curious what you mean. $9/mo for a tool targeting professional writers doesn’t sound that ludicrous to me.
- shanusmagnus 2y agoIt's all a matter of point of view I guess. Given that I replaced it with something costing zero dollars may explain my attitude. Also, the fact that it started out as basically free, and is now a recurrent expense over a hundred bucks a year. That said, the author seems like a cool guy. Hope he's finding success.
- leobg 2y agoWhat did you replace it with?
- namaria 2y agoStoring facts is a poor proxy for acquired knowledge or skill. When you are good at something, you know a lot of facts. Trying to memorize facts to get good at something is inverting the order of factors. You memorize a lot of facts about a domain because you spent a lot of time and attention in it. But finding shortcuts to memorize facts won't in fact give you the actual knowledge and skills, just a way to mimic them convincingly.
- nefrix 2y agoThis is such a smart answer. i am adding this comment so i can remember where to look when I am thinking of re-reading your comment about memory; For me, more than memorising things, is creating paths in order to find that piece of information when need it; and yes, you are right, we memorise when we need that information to apply it in a specific moment;
- namaria 2y agoI think you're making fun of me, which is fine. But memorizing in stead of learning is an anxiety driven behavior that leads to inefficient use of time. You're welcome to do it but I am trying to contribute my own hard earned lesson that you don't need to fret about retaining facts. Just spend time doing the things you want to learn about and the useful facts will be retained.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- smeej 2y agoI finally admitted to myself that a robust PKM can store and recall more information more easily than I ever could. It's quite a bit of work to process things I read or listen to into my PKM, but whenever I decide to revisit an idea, I can immediately pull up and review everything I've previously thought it would be useful to remember about it. My PKM of choice (Logseq) does have a built-in SRS, though, so maybe I should consider having putting things I really, really, really want to remember into it so they're stored in my brain as well.
- complianceowl 2y agoWhat the -- This is such a great idea! I've had this same problem for as long as I can remember, and I feel like most intellectually-oriented folks have this same problem, as well. My work firewall blocked the site, but I will check this out later :)
- iskrataa 2y agoThank you! Glad you like the concept. Don't hesitate to shoot me an email if you have any suggestions/features you'd like to see :)
- recursive 2y ago> you can remember anything Except to check your emails.
- MaxPock 2y agoI wish there's a away I could upload my screenshots then they get e-mailed at intervals
- iskrataa 2y agoFor now, I have found a workaround which is to just paste the screenshot URL if you are using one of those apps that automatically uploads them. I'll let you know as soon as the image upload is live!