journaling
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YC-backed Stoic is a journaling app with a focus on understanding your feelings
The process of using the Stoic journaling app is simple: You open the app in the morning and the evening, when you’ll be prompted to answer a couple of questions and perform a few simple exercises.
For example, this evening the app asked me to rate my current level of fulfillment and to identify what made me smile today, while also pointing me to guided exercises like journaling and breathing.
Stoic is part of the current batch of startups at Y Combinator (it’s taking the stage today at Demo Day). Founder Maciej Lobodzinski told me that his goal is to help users understand the different factors influencing their mental and emotional state.
“The core of the app is: We have this insight and we see what influences your mood and what you feel,” Lobodzinski said. He suggested that this is very different from the “super transactional” idea embedded in my other mental health and wellness apps, where “you pay for my app and you feel better.” In his view, “You should feel how you feel. It’s okay, how you feel, but you should know why you are feeling this way.”
So once there are a couple of weeks of data in the app, you should be able to look back and see how you were feeling on a certain day, and if there were activities that made you feel more or less fulfilled. Over time, Lobodzinski hopes to add more insights about “what influenced you, why you feel this way, why you are productive.”
As the name implies, Stoic is inspired by Lobodzinski’s interest in classical Stoic philosophy (he’s not the first to suggest that the approach has direct applications in the tech industry), and the app even includes quotes from Stoic philosophers.
“It’s an extremely practical framework,” he said. “When I talk to users, there are entrepreneurs, investors, traders — people who found out about the app because they were looking for how to deal with their stress …
If you are stressed with your everyday life and you can get the advice of the emperor of Rome, who dealt with much more serious things, it’s amazing how much better you can feel after that.”
At the same time, users have the option to receive quotes from different schools of thought — not just Stoicism but also Buddhism, Taoism and Catholicism. For some users, their app experience won’t be explicitly focused on Stoicism, but Lobodzinski said that even then, it forms the “spine” of the app’s approach.
The basic app is free, but Stoic charges $27.99 per year for a premium version that includes iCloud syncing and additional content.
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Throw out your diary, Jour is a new app for guided journaling
Since Jour, a new app for private and portable journaling, dropped on the App Store two months ago, it’s racked up 80,000 users. No paid marketing or public announcements. Just organic interest in discovering a better way of journaling than pen to paper.
“We can reinvent and redesign what we call journaling and the journal,” Jour co-founder and chief executive officer Maxime Germain told TechCrunch. “If we do it right, it will go mainstream.”
New York-based Jour has raised a $1.8 million seed round from True Ventures’ Kevin Rose. Similar to the meditation apps that have skyrocketed in popularity recently, Jour’s guided sequences are meant to facilitate the journaling process and encourage writers to mindfully reflect and record their lives. With its seed funding, Jour will create a library of audio sessions and written questions meant to spark inspiration.
“Meditation apps have shown there are some self-care habits we can use in our life to feel better, to feel less anxious,” Germain, a French native who relocated to New York seven years ago, said. “But the journal is a way to capture moments and people’s authentic selves. It’s all the stuff you might not be sharing on social media.”
Jour, at its core, is an app battling mental illness. The business joins a number of other well-being apps and venture-backed startups targeting the mental health crisis. From brick-and-mortar therapy clinics to chat apps to emotional wellness assistants, venture capitalists are waking up to the emotional struggles rampant across the globe.
“Ten years ago when I first started using meditation apps I think there was a certain type of stigma; like you need help so you’re meditating,” True Venture’s Rose, a founder of Digg, Oak, a guided meditation app, and Zero, an app for tracking intermittent fasting, told TechCrunch. “Now, it’s just crossed over to the mainstream.”
“I’m hopeful we are finally getting to a point where we can have open conversations about mental health,” Rose added.
Jour co-founders (from left to right) Maxime Germain, Justin Bureau and Bobby Giangeruso
As Jour deals with an influx of new users, it’s keeping the entire app and all of its features free, though eventually, the team plans to add a paywall to some of the guided content. As for anyone concerned about the safety of your anxieties, hopes and dreams, Jour’s founding team, which includes Germain, Bobby Giangeruso and Justin Bureau, built the app with zero-knowledge encryption.
“I would feel very uncomfortable if the rest of the people on my team could read my most intimate thoughts,” Germain explained. “We built [Jour] with an encryption key that stays on the phone, all the data is encrypted with that key and if you lose that key we can’t recover the entries that we save on the servers. Only you have access to that key, it’s stored on the phone, it encrypts the data and even if the data is compromised we can’t get it.”
Phew. The last thing we need today is our diaries getting hacked.
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Fabric offers an alternative to Facebook sharing with a private timeline of personal moments
Fabric, a personal journaling app that emerged from Y Combinator’s 2016 batch of startups, is relaunching itself as a Facebook alternative. The app is giving itself a makeover in the wake of Facebook’s closure of the Moves location tracker, by offering its own tool to record your activities, photos, memories and other moments shared with friends and family. But unlike on Facebook, everything in Fabric is private by default and data isn’t shared with marketers.
Instead, the startup hopes to build something users will eventually pay for, via premium features or subscriptions.
The idea for the startup came from two people who helped create Facebook’s core features.
Co-founders Arun Vijayvergiya and Nikolay Valtchanov worked for several years at the social network, where Vijayvergiya built the product that would later become Facebook Timeline at an internal hackathon. He also worked on products like Friendship Pages, Year in Review and On This Day, while Valtchanov developed integrations between Facebook and fitness applications.
After leaving Facebook, both were inspired to work on Fabric because of their interest in personal journaling – and that became the key focus for the original version of the Fabric app. But while other journaling apps may offer a blank space for recording thoughts, Fabric automates the process by pulling in photos, posts from elsewhere on social media, places you visited, and more, and put those on its map interface.
The longer-term goal is that Fabric users will be able to look back across their personal history to answer any kind of question about where they had been, what they did, and who they were with – but in a more private environment than what’s available on Facebook.
Facebook could have built something similar, but its focus has been more on how personal profile data could be useful to advertisers.
Despite numerous check-ins, posts where you tagged friends, shared photos and more, there’s still not an easy way to ask Facebook about that great Indian restaurant you tried last March, or who was on that group beach trip with you a few years ago, for example. At best, Facebook offers memory flashbacks through its On This Day feature (now available at any time via the Memories tab), or round-ups and collages that appear at various times throughout the year.
As a search engine for your own memories, it’s not that great.
What’s New
This is where Fabric comes in. It will automatically record your activities, checking you in to places you visit, to which you can then choose to add friends.
While the idea of automatic location gathering may turn off a good number of users, the difference is that Fabric’s data collection is meant for your eyes only, unless you explicitly choose to share something with friends.
Fabric doesn’t use third-party software for its location system – it’s written in-house, so the data is never touched by a third-party. It also uses industry standard encryption for data transfer and storage, and login information is stored in a separate system from the rest of your data as an added precaution.
Notably, Fabric doesn’t plan to generate revenue by selling data or offering it to advertisers for targeting purposes. Instead, the company hopes users will eventually pay for its product – perhaps as a subscription or through premium upgrades. (It’s not doing this yet, however.)
“The whole motivation behind Fabric is that many meaningful parts of your life do not belong in the public sphere,” explains Vijayvergiya. “In order to be able to capture these moments, user trust is essential and is something we have baked into our company culture. Internally, we refer to ourselves as a ‘private-first’ company. Everything on Fabric is private by default. You have to choose to include friends in your moments. We don’t share any data with marketers, and we don’t intend to share personally identifiable information with advertisers,” he says.
Since its 2016 release, Fabric has been downloaded 70,000 times by users across 117 countries, and has seen 112 million automatic check-ins.
The new version of the app has been redesigned to be something users engage with more often, as opposed to the more passive journaling app it was before.
The app now offers an outline of your activities, which it also calls Timeline. Here, you can add people, photos and memorable anecdotes to those automated entries. You can jump back to any day to see your history with any person or place that appears on the Timeline.
You can also turn any moment into one you collaborate on with friends, by allowing others to add photos and comments. That is, instead of broad post to a group of so-called “friends” on Facebook, you share the moment with those who really matter. This isn’t all that different from how people use private messaging apps and group chats today – in order to share things with people that aren’t necessarily meant for everyone to see.
In addition, Fabric allows you to add your friends to the app, so you can be automatically tagged when you both spend time together in the real world. This also simplifies sharing because you won’t have to think about which posts should be shared with which audience.
For instance, Vijayvergiya says, “this means you can add your mom as a friend, and only share with her the moments you spend together in the same place.”
The most compelling feature in the updated app may not be check-ins or sharing, but search.
In Fabric, you can now search for past events in your life similar to how you search the web. That is, you could type in “restaurant rome 2017” or “camila los angeles birthday” and find the matching posts, Vijayvergiya suggests. And because you can import your Facebook, Instagram, and Camera Roll to Fabric, it’s now offering the search engine that Facebook itself forgot to build. (You can import your Facebook Moves history, too, ahead of its shutdown.)
Fabric’s search will also be available on the desktop web, where it’s currently in beta.
Fabric’s real challenger, as it turns out, may not be Facebook, though. It’s Google Photos.
Because of advances in image recognition technology, Google Photos (and some other photo apps) have built advanced search capabilities that let you pull up not places, things, people, and more, using data recognized in the image itself. Users can also share those photos with others, collaborate on albums, and leave notes as comments.
The difference is that Fabric offers import from a variety of sources and encourages journaling. But that may not be enough to attract a large user base, especially when automatic check-ins rely on the app’s use of background location which has some impact on battery life.
Fabric is a free download on iOS.
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