How do you approach a product that has already been made so many times? As someone who’d been building software and keeping a journal for years, I knew what I wanted to create here, something of this scale. I knew that it would not be trivial to conjure up. Digital journaling isn’t exactly known for filling bank accounts. Between note apps and journaling apps, there are thousands of them, yet I couldn’t find one that I wanted to use.
It started after using the existing choices. I began my digital journaling by using OneNote. Without markdown backing it, I quickly left and headed to pure markdown, eventually landing on Obsidian, like many technically inclined journalers. It left me wanting some things. I wanted easy sync across devices and some AI reflection capabilities, so I ventured out into the journaling application wilderness.
I tried more than a few, including the big ones, and they felt like productivity tools. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted. Their underlying message seemed to be to optimize myself, to gamify my writing. My purpose when writing isn’t to optimize something, it’s to explore and question. For one of the apps, I also had the sense that I was putting my most personal thoughts into someone’s business data instead of my own journal.
Sites have to track usage and all of these online applications are a business, including mine. It doesn’t need to feel like that. I began to play with the idea of being up front about everything, an idea that is slowly vanishing as the internet ages. This isn’t groundbreaking. All businesses are up front about certain things. Except that it’s often because they need to be, for legal reasons. It is rare to find something that is truly honest about everything. If there’s anything that I want to be that way, it’s my personal journals.
This concept guided me for the first month or two of work. Yet, it still felt a little off. My application was fundamentally honest, but it was also just turning into another version of everything else. I tried to work the problem out. Scanning for a book on first principles, I looked over at my bookshelf and saw the row of journals there. Three of them were travel journals, the others were daily journals. Sitting beside them was someone else’s journal from nearly two thousand years ago, Meditations, the original Stoic journal. Towards the bottom of the shelf, a pregnancy diary that my wife kept. What connects people to their writing? The answer was in front of me the entire time, it’s the notebook.
The original journaling notebook is the template that I will build off. Journals can be so many things. Travel journals, religious journals, gardening journals, bullet journals, it’s a long list. The idea that journals can have a theme is appealing to me. It guides your hand and helps answer that one question that all writers face on a regular basis: what do I write about?
It’s more than just the theme. The journaling notebook is the light that keeps me on track. In a notebook, nothing is hidden from the writer. The page means everything and nothing all at once. It’s all there is but it’s only there to hold your words. In a notebook, everything is opt in. The notebook would never take your participation for granted, it can’t. Nothing is secretly tracking your notebook (assuming you’re not a spy). Everything is on your terms. Everything is transparent. This is the feeling that I’m trying to replicate with Innerholm.
Every design and privacy decision gets assessed against this razor. It’s much more work than I originally anticipated, but I’m getting there, one page at a time.