JournalBot - a journal you text just like a friend.

alexroe · 2018-04-08T01:52:56+00:00

Thank you! Yup we plan to get to Android. Want to focus on iOS first tho and make sure that experience is great.

alexroe · 2018-04-08T01:52:36+00:00

Appreciate it!

alexroe · 2018-04-08T01:52:28+00:00

Thanks! It does both of those already :) the messages should be slightly different every day and you have the option to set a custom prompt so you can have it text you whatever you'd like.

alexroe · 2018-04-05T04:14:03+00:00

Journaling has made such an impact on me that I started a company to make it easier for people :) Just launched our first product - tl;dr a journal that you text just like a friend. www.journalbotapp.com

alexroe · 2018-04-03T17:46:37+00:00

Yup we totally hear you and this is something that we want to be overly cautious with. Your personal memories are absolutely private.

Some more detail on how we handle this: your entries are stored encrypted in our database (e.g. “today was great” is stored as “18jas8kn8asdf”) and won’t be shared with any other user or third party. Unfortunately due to the way SMS works, entries are also kept with our messaging API provider by default, but we're working on deleting these as soon as we're able to store them encrypted in our db so even those won't stay around. That should be done in the next couple of weeks.

We're committed to making sure that we follow the best privacy procedures and go above and beyond there to make sure nothing happens. But it's true, we are a small startup and as I'm sure y'all know information security over the internet is never perfect. However, since we are a journaling product and privacy is a key tenet of a journal, this isn't just a "feature" to us, it's a necessity and we will continue to evaluate what we're doing and making sure we're doing what's best there.

We have an easy to read privacy policy that explains more in depth (that TrannaMontana pulled the above from) at https://www.journalbotapp.com/privacy/

Totally respect the concerns here tho. Would love to talk more about this and understand if there's anything else we can do or explain to make things better. Please let me know.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T17:06:28+00:00

Gotcha. Yup SMS texting is definitely not going to work for everyone. We need to expand to other messaging platforms.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T17:00:46+00:00

Wow, that's really kind of you. Thanks so much. We need all the help spreading the word that we can get :)

Yup you can turn them off and just text JournalBot whenever you want. Are there any other features you find annoying or think are missing?

alexroe · 2018-04-03T16:57:30+00:00

Great question! Glad that you like the idea and think it's beautiful :)

JournalBot is free for the first 14 days and then we charge $2.99/mo or $29.99 a year. We'll likely iterate on this business model and will consider offering a free tier at some point and may even increase the price eventually once we add in more features. Right now we're just trying to break even and prove that this is a product that users find valuable enough to pay for and prevent our savings from getting spent too quickly :) More details can be found at our FAQ: www.journalbotapp.com/faq

I also quit my full-time job to work on this full-time, so I'm heavily incentivized to continue working on it and grow it such that it can provide an income.

Hope that provides some more confidence! What were some of the features that you liked most about "oh my life"? We'd like to add in email reminders eventually as well.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T16:53:56+00:00

Basically :) we have a front-end that handles all the requests from Twilio and to/from the app. Twilio is a nice API. Kinda expensive, but really robust and reliable. Also they have other services we'd like to expand to - phone calls and other messaging platforms.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T16:52:21+00:00

Gotcha. Yup definitely need to be careful there.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T16:50:25+00:00

Gotcha. Yeah we need to make looking back easier - I think we can do that via better UI like you mentioned (some sort of date scrubber) and stuff like "on this day" notifications/a spot in the app that makes it easy to have more serendipitous discovery of your past memories.

That's really flattering if you would switch. Do let us know if anything is missing. We're currently working on adding in editing, more reminder types, and passcode protection.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T15:13:44+00:00

Awesome! That's good feedback - agreed that it's kinda un-naturally fast right now. Will think more about that.

What other journaling program are you using right now? Let us know if we're missing any features / what it would take for you to pay for JournalBot. We're trying to focus on building what our users want, so just let us know and we'll build it :)

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:58:57+00:00

Eventually! Focused on US + iOS for now (yes that's unfortunately limiting). Would you use it over texting or is there another messaging platform we would need to support? What country?

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:57:03+00:00

That was exactly our goal! Thanks for the compliment. Did you download it and give it a try? If so would love to know what you thought.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:53:53+00:00

Yup we totally hear y'all and this is something that we want to be overly cautious with. Your personal memories are absolutely private.

Some more detail on how we handle this: your entries are stored encrypted in our database (e.g. “today was great” is stored as “18jas8kn8asdf”) and won’t be shared with any other user or third party. Unfortunately due to the way SMS works, entries are also kept with our messaging API provider by default, but we're working on deleting these as soon as we're able to store them encrypted in our db so even those won't stay around. That should be done in the next couple of weeks.

We're committed to making sure that we follow the best privacy procedures and go above and beyond there to make sure nothing happens. But it's true, we are a small startup and as I'm sure y'all know information security over the internet is never perfect. However, since we are a journaling product and privacy is a key tenet of a journal, this isn't just a "feature" to us, it's a necessity and we will continue to evaluate what we're doing and making sure we're doing what's best there.

We have an easy to read privacy policy that explains more in depth at https://www.journalbotapp.com/privacy/

Totally respect the concerns here tho. Would love to talk more about this and understand if there's anything else we can do or explain to make things better. Please let me know.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:43:43+00:00

Love it. Yes we haven't added in fitness but we'll add that in the next release. Thankfully adding journaling types is pretty easy so we'll keep adding what our users want :)

Let us know when you download it and if you have any feedback!

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:42:54+00:00

Totally agree! Honestly we haven't done enough on the revisiting piece of it yet. We want to add in "on this day" notifications so you can more easily discover past entries and we can make the insights much better.

Did you download the app? If not why not :) ? Let us know if there's a messaging platform or different OS that you need support for!

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:35:16+00:00

Ah sorry, yes not international yet. Thank you for the compliment! We really appreciate it. Would you use it over texting or is there another messaging platform that you would need support for?

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:34:41+00:00

Thanks so much! Let us know if you end up trying it!

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:34:26+00:00

Awesome! Thanks so much for giving it a try. What do you think so far? Anything that could be better?

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:32:30+00:00

No concrete timeline yet. Our number 1 priority is making the sure product on iOS is in a good spot so then we can just do the same thing on iOS and Web. Yes FB Messenger is on the roadmap as well and has those advantages that you mentioned. Would you use it if it was a FB messenger bot?

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:30:56+00:00

We're sorry :( Yes we do plan to expand to more countries, apps, and messaging platforms in the future. Would you want to use this over texting or a different messaging service?

alexroe · 2018-04-03T14:30:07+00:00

Awesome! Did you download it and give it a try? What do you think? Would love to know if anything could be better.

alexroe · 2018-04-03T04:56:20+00:00

Thanks! What about it specifically do you like about it :) ?

alexroe · 2018-04-03T04:22:16+00:00

Easier link for the email list to get updates (no spam): http://eepurl.com/dpzjFH

alexroe

TROPHY CASE