why i built jottie

i am a dad of two little ones. i have a day job that keeps me plenty busy. and i still somehow found time to build a notes app.

why? because i kept losing my notes and it was driving me insane.

the problem

i write down a lot of things. meeting notes, ideas, random thoughts at 2am, stuff my kids say that i want to remember, recipes, book recommendations, things to tell my therapist.

all of these notes existed in my phone. and i could never find any of them.

i'd search "that conversation" and get nothing. i'd search "project" and get 47 results. i'd search "sarah" and find a note about a different sarah.

the notes existed. i just couldn't find them when i needed them.

i tried everything

apple notes. notion. obsidian. bear. roam. logseq. i even tried keeping notes in a spreadsheet. (don't judge me.)

every app had the same problem: great for writing, bad for finding.

or they wanted me to "build a second brain" and "link my thoughts" and "create a knowledge graph." brother i just want to find the note about the restaurant my friend recommended.

so i built one

i'm a software engineer by trade. i work at a company that does a lot of ai stuff. i thought, what if search could actually understand what i'm looking for?

the first version was a cloud app. notes went to a server, got processed by gemini, came back with embeddings. it worked fine. search was good.

but something felt wrong about sending all my notes to a server. these are private thoughts. rants about work. medical stuff. the kind of things you write down because you need to get them out of your head.

i didn't want that on someone else's computer. even my own computer.

local first

turns out apple has been quietly shipping incredible on-device ml capabilities. nlembedding, natural language framework, apple foundation models.

i rewrote the whole thing to run locally. no server, no internet, no subscription required for the core features.

it took way longer than i expected. claude code is literally the only reason i was able to be productive with this side project while juggling everything else.

what it does now

you write a note. jottie extracts people, places, dates, and topics automatically. it creates a semantic embedding so you can search by concept.

you search for something. jottie finds notes about that thing, even if you used different words.

that's it. that's the app.

it integrates with contacts, calendar, reminders, maps, spotlight, and siri shortcuts. because it's a real ios app, not a web wrapper.

the honest reality

note-taking is a hard space. people are habitual. they don't want to switch apps, even with easy migration.

i shared some sobering charts on threads recently. running a profitable saas in this space is... challenging.

but here's the thing: at this point, running a profitable business is actually less interesting to me than creating a genuinely useful product.

i built jottie because i needed it. i use it every day. if other people find it useful too, that's a bonus.

the point

jottie exists because i was annoyed. i had notes i couldn't find. i wanted search that worked. i wanted my data to stay on my device.

that's why i built it. it's not more complicated than that.

if you have the same problem, give it a try. if you don't, that's cool too.