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Background

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Back in late February and early March 2020, as the world began to shut down due to COVID-19, I found myself working from home inundated with constant news and a changing environment.  After making a plan to adjust to a new reality, I focused on creating new projects for me to stay focused on: a large hydroponic garden (to be automated), and a new tool to help myself and others capture their thoughts and utilize AI to automatically surface recurring concepts. 

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Recurring concepts are one way I filter my unending thought stream of entrepreneurial and innovative ideas. If a concept recurs without prompt at least 3 times, then I’ll start to put more focus into it. By “without prompt,” the concept must not be prompted by my initiation or notes, it must be triggered by an external conversation, story, or interaction. This is a daily process for me that I mostly handle mentally. I thought it was high time that I make a productivity tool for it. 

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As a side benefit, my career had also led to less and less software development, a skill I didn’t want to lose, so this project gave me a reason to dive right back in. 

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The story below is just a truncated sampling of the process I go through for my ideas/startups, new ventures and digital transformations for clients, and feedback to entrepreneurs like students at the University of Washington. Often, I’ll iterate through this process in ever more detail to build up a business plan, or refine an idea to expand into new markets. 

The Process

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Idea to Commercial Concept

The idea was to take in all my quick thoughts and longer notes, auto categorize, and extract facts from them. From the tagged categories and facts, I could explore interconnected thoughts and surface patterns that could be new opportunities.  This was the idea to help myself perform at an even higher level without the additional effort of categorizing, fact finding, and linking.

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As such, my hope was such a tool would give me the ability to see that I often record thoughts about poor performing status meetings, missed opportunities to learn at offsite meetings, and other related topics, then highlight the common facts and categories like “Leadership” and “Training” to discover a problem/solution gap more effective leadership training. 

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The question was then, who else could benefit from such a tool? Would they be willing to pay for it?  It seemed reasonable for a small fee that people who, like me, are not super organized would love the ability to dump all their current notes/thoughts into a new tool without leaving their favorite note taking app. So, that meant, my tool would start by integrating into a few big tools that captured notes and thoughts: Evernote, Facebook, and Twitter. 

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It also meant that a new user would likely consume a fair bit of resources when they join but incrementally consume very little in terms of storage or processing. My risk would be new users joining and leaving in a short period of time. 

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Looking at other self-help tools that provided unique value propositions, it appeared that $5/month was a good starting point.  With an easy entry point with a low monthly impact on personal budgets, it was likely that my cost risk would be quickly removed.  

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Feasibility Check

The feasibility check is very simplified for a project like this. The start risk would be low; the expected return was to be, in the grand scheme, low;...

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But it still remains:

• Can I build it quickly for personal use and then iterate in public gaining much needed user feedback?
• What other services exist in this space?
• What do other productivity tools aimed at professionals charge per month?

The Name

Names are always hard to find because uniqueness that makes any kind of sense is now uncommon with the whole word competing for unique names.  I don’t fully recall the thought process in finding a name but I wanted one that represented a smart repo for my thoughts.  Surprisingly a few name iterations later and I landed on Mental Stash, which as you can see was also a verbal play on mustache. 

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I still had a subscription to a great little service called ManyPixels that allowed me to visually explore many of my ideas for a set monthly fee.  I would collaborate on a design, then ask my friends to vote on the favorite and iterate again until I landed on a “good enough” design. 

The Code

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To make MentalStash, I would need basic SaaS functionality (users, subscriptions, etc), a set of objects to store notes and associated analysis, and connect to an AI service.  I know a few languages and frameworks that could easily be used. As my biggest constraint was my time, I decided Ruby on Rails would be the least time consuming framework to build my MVP. 

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To save even more time I looked around for any open source or inexpensive SaaS starter kits. It just so happened that at the time of creating MentalStash there was a sale for Sjabloon (link) which saved me weeks of developing very common components. 

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I spent about 30 hours in total constructing the MVP, which was spread over a few weeks. Utilizing Rails, Posgres SQL (and JSON fields), I had a working prototype for web entered notes.  

Outcome

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MentalStash never made it beyond alpha state as the demands of my career and family rightfully consumed my energy quota.  The coding was fun and reaffirmed my skillset,the process is always, for me, a fun exercise in the creation of technology and business, and the project kept me mentally focused.  However, to get from the initial concept into something truly valuable was going to take a significant amount of time and effort that I knew I was unable to give. 

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MentalStash remains stashed in the repo. It is likely it still has legs, enough to make a fine recurring supplemental revenue stream, but I did not have the time and energy required to build it up.

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And, honestly, Spring was arriving and the Seattle gloom was coming to an end. It became more important to my family and I that the backyard became a refuge from cabin fever. It wasn’t long after that my hydroponic garden supplies had started to arrive. An epic undertaking of things I wasn’t particularly good at - gardening, construction, and hydroponics. A sweet story for another time.

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