After asking, “Would anyone actually buy this?”, our next step was to figure out what problem we were really trying to solve.
One of our early assumptions was that plenty of people still prefer writing by hand over typing. It feels more natural, helps them focus, and often makes things easier to remember.
Our initial research suggested there was something to this.
But it also revealed something else: the hardest part was not the writing itself.
The problems started after people finished writing.
Across the complaints and reviews we collected, the same issues kept coming up. Notes were scattered across different places, difficult to organize, unreliable to sync, or almost impossible to find when needed.
One person took notes in several meetings every day but had to move files manually, one at a time. Another bought a device partly because they wanted searchable handwriting, but the handwriting recognition was not accurate enough for them to search for their own notes.
Someone else had ideas spread across Notion, Google Docs, sticky notes, and a random voice memo they never listened to again.
Every tool helped them capture something.
But when they needed to use that information again, they still had to remember where they had saved it, when they had written it, and what they had called it.
That was when the phrase “write-only notebook” started to make sense to us.
It does not mean people never read their notes again. But when finding something takes too much effort, a lot of what gets written down simply stays there.
The notebook does a great job of taking information in. It does much less to bring that information back when it becomes useful.
We started calling this post-capture pain.
In simpler terms, the problem is not just that notes are scattered. That is only part of the cause.
The real consequence is that what people write down does not reliably turn into information they can find and use again.
This finding also started to shift how we thought about the product.
Instead of only asking how to create a better writing experience, we became more interested in what should happen next.
- Could AI organize notes without asking people to file and tag everything manually?
- Could someone ask questions across their own notebooks and get answers that link back to the original source?
Right now, these are still hypotheses we need to test. We do not know which feature would be useful enough to bring people back, and we definitely do not know whether they would pay for it.
But the research helped us see the problem more clearly.
We are not only trying to build a notebook that feels good to write on.
We are trying to stop what people write from disappearing the moment they close the notebook.
The team is still breaking this problem down for different types of users. “I cannot find my notes” sounds true, but it is still too broad to build a product around.