The Smart 30-sec Journal: 9 months, 2 people, 350+ testers, & 2k subscribers later
Joyster is now live! If you haven’t done so, go ahead and download Joyster on iOS or download on Android . To learn more about Joyster, read below 👇🏼
The people 👩🏼👦🏻
We are not your typical startup, we are a team of 2. One Product Designer and one Software Developer Engineer, working from home in Vancouver Island. In November 2019, we decided to create a product that would help people keep track of their mental and physical symptoms in a smart, convenient, and personalized way. This product is now called Joyster.
Joyster uses machine learning to understand how your mental and physical symptoms are doing over time, as well as what habits are affecting your life in a positive and negative way. It’s about knowledge, self-awareness, and living the best life you can, personalized to you.
The why 📈
Joyster was created due to my own personal experience with panic, anxiety, depression, and migraines. I spent almost a year tracking my mental and physical symptoms daily, to visualize trends at the end of each week. This consisted of one massive excel sheet that had 20 pages. I sought out apps, journals, and trackers to help me better understand myself, but nothing really worked. This was when I decided to create Joyster!
Joyster is a product that’s based on scientific research and CBT practices. It’s a very personal product to me and we poured our heart and soul into it. The world can be pretty awful sometimes and most days we don’t even understand ourselves or what is going on around us. It can be hard, even impossible, to understand what’s influencing our digestion, mental health, pain, well-being, etc. Joyster was created to do just that — -check in with yourself, understand how your surroundings affect you, what foods affect you, and who makes you happy. It’s your interactive side-kick. A place where you can visualize yourself, your well-being, and your holistic story.
The journey 🗺
Joyster took 9 months from start to finish. We started with a simple prototype that was tested with 12 individuals to validate the idea. It was incredible to hear the excitement and positive feedback received during this early phase. We took all the feedback and made changes to the designs that were implemented into a beta version for iOS and Android. We literally got the BEST beta users (thank you, if you were one of them). We split out the beta into two phases. The first phase had 50 individuals and the second phase had 250+ testers. We received so much great feedback and love from the community. We implemented all the feedback received, which resulted in our final V1 launch. We hope you love it.
The Product 🚀
Okay, cool. Soooo…what’s Joyster? Glad you asked! Here is a taste of what you can expect to find inside.
30-second check-in journal ⏰
Joyster has perfected the 30 second journal. It is a guided journal experience where one can easily input all symptoms they would like to track (ex. anxiety, migraines, indigestion, acne, etc.), the rating of each symptom on a scale of 1–5, their feelings, activities they did, food they ate, and the people they interacted with.
Data visualized over time 📈
Has your anxiety gone up in the last few weeks? Has your knee pain gone up or down in the past few days? Is physio working? Is therapy working? This is where data visualization helps. Joyster visualizes your symptoms trends in a simple graph by week, month, 3 months, and 6 months. It’s a window into your well-being.
Building healthy habits 🏃🏽♀️
Joyster’s insight section is by far the most loved feature from our testers. The insights uses machine learning to help users identify positive and negative habits in their life. The algorithm takes the entry and calculates what is helping or harming your well-being. An example may be that every time you go for a run, your anxiety is way lower when you check-in. The insight here would be that Cardio is a positive impact on Anxiety. Joyster does the work for you, so you no longer have to contemplate what is working or not working in your routine. The more journal entries the user has, the smarter Joyster will be.
Learning mindfulness and self care tips 🕵🏻♂️
This is the biggest value proposition for our users. The ability to take 30 seconds 1–3x a day to check in with yourself has massive benefits emotionally, intellectually, and physically. What did you eat? Who did you visit? What activities did you do? Joyster will then give you self-care tips that are personalized to help you live your best life.
Track activities, meals, and social interactions ⛹🏽♂️🍔👯♀️
Joyster prioritizes flexibility and personalization. Users can create their own meals, activities, and interactions.
Privacy 🔒
We do not use any of our user’s data. Every journal entry is completely private to each user. Trust is a huge part of our brand and we want our users to feel like they can trust us as a company and Joyster as a product
We are so excited to share that we are live! If you haven’t done so, go ahead and download Joyster on iOS or download on Android . The first 10 days is on us, no up front payment necessary 😃
