Hey hacker news, I've worked on a note/wiki app nights and weekends for almost two years. While still missing some essentials and polish, I'm happy with the progress and some of my use cases: personal CRM, work notes, and a place to write/record funny things my kid says.<p>I bought into the hype a few years ago with linking apps but quickly grew tired of spinners and steep learning curves, so I started over with a text box and my HTML skills from twenty years ago. Then Chatgpt came out, giving me the tools to add a bit of magic and dig into my stance on simplicity even more.<p>I'd love to get a few more people testing. HN may not be the target user, but it's the best crowd for feedback.<p>Grug Notes is an effort I've been able to fit in after my kid goes to sleep. As someone who is not always on a computer for my work, I became disillusioned with Roam Research, Coda, and Notion. I have no ambition to build a big company, but a cash-flowing saas sounds nice.<p>Building this has been a source of flow and optimism when the rest of my life has been chaos. My entire career and current business is building carbon fiber outrigger canoes, but competing against good products made in China is nearly impossible. I've tried for 17 years. I may try for 17 more. But it's also very realistic that without some diversification into aerospace or tech, my days as a small business owner in manufacturing may be numbered. My last three years have not gone as planned personally and professionally, and the reality is that I've used programming as some form of escapism. I've enjoyed it and will keep working on Grug Notes indefinitely, but with my daughter starting pre-school next week and my regular business needing my attention, I'm at an inflection point. It's probably time I push to move beyond seven paying customers so I'm not paying server bills out of pocket. :)<p>Anyway, I'd love for anyone to take a look, and I am happy to answer any questions about Grug Notes or canoes!
I hope people find it interesting because for me it's yet another AI-powered note taking subscription that may or may not send all your data to random people all over the planet. At least you should make it E2E encrypted which would solve most privacy problems.<p>> end-to-end (...) encryption add friction<p>How?<p>> And we're building canoes over here, not storing nuclear codes.<p>The good old "I have nothing to hide."
The first thing I see is a signup without even understanding what the product is or how it's different from my existing notes.md file.<p>Why would I login before even knowing what it is?
I built Audio Diary (<a href="https://audiodiary.ai" rel="nofollow">https://audiodiary.ai</a>) which is basically a more consumer-friendly version of this. I like this though, it fulfils a different use case and I think with a bit more love on certain user flows it could have a lot of appeal to a certain type of user.
I think there's a lot of opportunity in this space with AI. It'd be interesting if you could take some metadata into account when organizing notes. For example, you might be able to guess when someone is home when they're accessing the site from a frequent IP address. This example is top of mind for me, as I just completed a move this weekend. I wish I had been better organized taking notes as I set up different home systems in the past, as it's now been a few years and I wish I had notes I could go look back on. Being able to filter my apple notes app by geolocation would be awesome.<p>I love the idea of not having to worry about tags to keep notes organized. Nice work!
I like the idea of self-organizing notes, but to me that would be more like an automatically-created semantic graph where I can write a random note and have it auto-sorted and tagged.<p>So if I write down “Bob’s first kid’s name is John” it will segment that note into a section about “Friends and Relationships,” but if I write down “FAST Stroke Acronym = Face Arms Speech Time” that note will get segmented into “Medical Knowledge”.<p>And then having some way to explore that graph of notes would be super cool.
Congrats on shipping and the effort to stay motivated and optimistic. As a fellow parent in a similar boat working on a similar app, I deeply appreciate what it takes to get anywhere when all you have is, at best, 90 tired minutes.<p>Also while it may be a form of escapism there is a stark difference between shipping something while learning new (valuable) skills, and tinkering with a novel under your desk indefinitely. Kudos on getting to that next step!
Grug notes, simplest option: text files. Org mode if you’re feeling fancy.<p>Grug notes, lowest-friction option: whatever the native notes app is on the platform you most often have around to take or refer to notes (probably your phone).
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Hug of death? Disabling uBlockOrigin & extensions -> same result.
Good job on building and releasing this. Even if it’s not polished and has a long way to go, it’s good to push for progress. Hopefully the escapism of programming doesn’t harm your ability to enter aerospace or tech markets.<p>It’s unfortunate that people on here have to post the same tired complaints on every side project people share. It’s fine, you don’t need the stuff they’re asking for. They’re not your target customers and they don’t seem to understand that. Plenty of others are upvoting the submission itself, keep on keeping on.
No question here. Big fan of your canoes here in NorCal (and so is the rest of my club). Pueo was my first boat. Currently have a PueoX, and Noio. Thank you guys for sticking it out through thick and thin.
I am getting this error on signing up.
"Shucks. That's an error.
Please try again, and if you continue to get this message, contact support"