We Haven’t Been “Busy”
We’ve been working on reinventing reminders.
Tim Ferriss has said it. Who am I to disagree with Tim?
The word “busy” definitely seems to imply a sense of chaos.
After all, busyness is about activity, not efficacy. It’s a metric for speed, not direction. But we haven’t just been at speed. We’ve made tough choices. We’ve been focused.
These past few months, we haven’t been busy… we’ve had velocity.
SeeNote is now Hynt
What’s going on?
SeeNote customers were refunded late last year after we decided to discontinue development on the product.
We sat down with the prototype for SeeNote (our first product, the always-on, ePaper sticky note) and took a look at the problems we wanted to solve.
We thought back to where it all began: reminders.
We narrowed our focus back to that key pain point: missing important alerts.
After all, we made SeeNote for ourselves. I was sick of forgeting my lunch in the fridge. My c0-founder Lou was tired of leaving his umbrella at home.
There had to be a better way to keep on top of important things.
We interviewed hundreds of customers and surveyed thousands more. Nearly everyone said they’d missed an important reminder set on their phone.
Now we really knew we were onto something.
We thought: could we create a great solution using fewer components? Do we need to leverage hardware at all to make notifications better?
We found ourselves re-evaluating if we needed to make another screen. What if we could solve the problem through an app?
What if there was some way we could provide information that reaches you at just the right moment, just as it’s super actionable and relevant?
So, we tried every reminders app out there.
My phone has 16 different reminders apps on it right now, and I just deleted about a dozen.
That’s a lot of app icons. They almost all look like this: ✔️
In spite of what looks on the surface like a lack of originality, there are actually many well-designed reminders and to-do list apps.
But let’s face it: a well-designed app is table stakes.
We have to judge a solution based on how it works. And, almost all reminders apps still work the same: reminders are triggered either by time or by GPS.
The result? We still missed important stuff.
How about an alert I see at the front door before I leave? Or a pill reminder that hits me up when I’m standing in front of the medicine cabinet? Impossible using just an app.
Timers and GPS just weren’t cutting it.
We learned that the key to useful, more relevant reminders is precision. Stand-alone reminders apps can only do so much because they lack a precise enough understanding of your physical world.
It became clear that we’d need to go beyond the app.
We wanted to build a reminders experience that’s way smarter and way more useful. But what would this beyond-the-app solution look like if it used as little hardware as possible?
Hynt is an interplay of hardware and software that works with your phone’s notifications. A device and an app that work together to reinvent reminders.
Using Bluetooth LE, Hynt gives your phone a much more precise understanding of its surroundings.
How much more precise than an app with GPS?
This precision makes Hynt reminders super actionable. They alert you exactly when and where you need them.
Better reminders, powered by precision. That’s Hynt.
Hynt launches in April at an irresistible price.
Burning Questions? Check out this post on Hynt FAQs
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Special thanks to Andrew for editing this post.
