I am a student shipping apps in my free time. This is my 4th for the year!
Non-fic books and podcasts have been part of my life for years now but I always struggled with remembering what I’ve read or listened to. I wanted it to stick even after years.
My notes list grew large but I never really revisited them. That’s why I created GinkgoNotes.
You can enter notes you want to recall and leave it to the app to create a personalised (based on spaced repetition) email schedule. That means you’ll get your notes emailed to you a couple of times exactly when you should read them again (based on Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve) so it’s certain that you’ll remember them.
I hope this will be helpful as it was for me. Would love some feedback!
Iskren
I am your target market, and I’d buy the lifetime /annual sub in a second if it had these features:
I want control of the SR sequence or, I want to know what SR algo you are using and know it is best practice model. The landing page says 4 sends, but that isn’t true SR.
The next thing, I’d want to see all of my “cards” or information pieces when I am logged in, so I can see and edit and delete and keep the database clean with a total view of content. The next thing I’d need (maybe you have this?) is for the email to effectively be a flash card, where the email content is the front and a link the email takes me to the “back” of the card so I can’t use cloze delete and other techniques. The last thing is bulk upload of content via a csv so I can bulk import mochi /anki / llm generated content.
I wish you luck with this and would (selfishly) encourage you to not ship so many different things, and instead encourage you to pick one and make it best in class for niche users like me who would spend and spend on premium solutions, but won’t spend on superficial implementations.
I was wondering what is your experience with Anki? Are there reasons you are looking into alternatives or do you just like the idea of getting stuff by email? Thanks again!
The OP said he's using Ebbinghaus' "forgetting curve" which is not exactly a SR algorithm but something similar, there is an actual formula associated with it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve
The paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534678.3539081?cid=996605471...
Various implementations: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs
Some benchmarks of various srs algorithms: https://expertium.github.io/Benchmark.html
Could you please share your SR tech stack? Are there good apps etc., that can make the process a bit easier? The pen-and-paper approach I used in uni for learning kanji / new languages has scarred me somewhat, so I am eager to try something tech-heavy.
During my research, I found this Reddit post which was in lots of help, especially for beginners.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/17u01ge/spaced_repeti...
They expand their work on their GitHub as well.
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/Spa...
Also, the jump between $4/mo to $59/mo could use more explanation to justify the price gap.
It's worth considering listing GinkoNotes on AppSumo if you decide to offer a lifetime deal. I think it would do extremely well.
I suppose it's not immediately obvious that it's a one-off purchase, so I'll be working on the design aspect of this.
Thanks for your interest and suggestions!
What is your expected rate of acquisition for a new language?
40*365 ~ 14 000 new cards a year - that's a ten thousand word vocabulary with four thousand cards to spare for grammar, idioms etc?
I try to target 35 a day, and expect to hit that at least 80% of the time.
I worry that it won't be effective. Systems like Supermemo and Anki work because of:
1) Spaced repetition (showing you the thing at the right time).
2) Retrieval practice (having your brain practice retrieving the thing you're about to forget).
3) Feedback and automation (using your self-rating to schedule the next review).
You are doing #1 and #3.
But you totally skip #2, because you show all the info in the email. So, unlike Anki, Supermemo or Quantum Country (which someone mentioned in another comment), there's no front/back or cloze deletion, and no retrieval practice happening.
Perhaps putting the question in the email subject and the answer in the email body would work?
I agree, and this is something I thought about a lot during the design process. In my experience, just looking at the note (#1 in your example) helps a lot more than no repetitions (which is obvious of course), but it's still a huge improvement compared to my previous flow.
As for repetition, I was thinking of replying to the email with what you think is the answer and letting an LLM decide if you remember correctly. Is that something that sounds effective to you?
The link can literally encode the answer in the URL, which you can just hide the raw url it in the emails’s HTML. (Fox examples, put it as base64 chars in query parameters)
Then you can host a (static) webpage that renders the text. This lets you host any users text w/o an interactive site. No live database, no ops burden, etc.
If you wanted to get fancy (which users of such a product probably would probably want) throw in “success/failure” links so your users can report the results and get changed frequency of spaced repetitions based on their success rate.
Just use CSS to hide/show the answers, or a little bit of JavaScript for just that. Or scrolling, if it is text only. Or links to the answer an http server.
I was thinking of replying to the email with what you think is the answer and letting an LLM decide if you remember correctly. Is that something that sounds effective to you?
Have you considered expanding this to notify via other mediums such as iMessage (if possible, this would be my preference) or the presumably easier WhatsApp/Telegram (the Telegram Bot API is pretty great, I’d imagine would be very easy)?
I’d also echo the free trial sentiment expressed elsewhere in the comments, take the mythical drug dealer approach and get ‘em hooked on freebies!
Will explore some options with the messaging apps, thank you! Do you think at this point it's not easier to open a specific app for that or there's a reason you prefer it to be via a messaging app?
Personally I'm a big iMessage/Telegram user and as such unlikely to leave things unread on those mediums (they're one of the few apps that I allow to push notifications and display an "unread" badge); my reading of your post was that a selling point of GinkgoNotes is that it appears in already established workflows.
A couple minor link fixes on your homepage, see here: https://triplechecker.com/s/230357/ginkgonotes.com.
1) Blog on footer is broken link 2) Affiliates on footer doesn't take you anywhere
Just fixed the footer, nice catch! Shipping fast comes with some faulty copy pastes I guess...
It's also very useful for things like passphrases.
Sometimes, you just need to memorize things.
http://www.carstenbuus.com/da/00007-jagten-paa-det-graeske-s...
https://www.academypublication.com/issues2/tpls/vol05/04/25....
> Abstract — There are disputes over the role of memorization in language learning. Memorized language, a mainstay of education for almost all of recorded history, was widely repudiated for suppressing creativity, understanding and enjoyment in learners. This paper aims at highlighting the fact that, despite these criticisms, memorization is a helpful strategy which can be employed by the learners and teachers in their process of language learning and teaching. It is discussed that memorization: 1) provides the learner with linguistic data; 2) is the first step to understanding; 3) enhances association in memory; 4) causes cognitive development as a learning strategy; 5) helps noticing; 6) provides rehearsal; 7) is especially helpful in early stages of learning. It is also pointed out that all these become possible when memorization is accompanied and complemented by other strategies and techniques.
Just those, huh?
This is just a tiny part of learning the language, but it's a great tool for quickly learning letters and new words.
why does everybody keep pretending this is a dichotomy?
For me, more than memorising things, is creating paths in order to find that piece of information when need it; and yes, you are right, we memorise when we need that information to apply it in a specific moment;
My PKM of choice (Logseq) does have a built-in SRS, though, so maybe I should consider having putting things I really, really, really want to remember into it so they're stored in my brain as well.
But memorizing in stead of learning is an anxiety driven behavior that leads to inefficient use of time. You're welcome to do it but I am trying to contribute my own hard earned lesson that you don't need to fret about retaining facts. Just spend time doing the things you want to learn about and the useful facts will be retained.
The product benefit in their case is that it's kind of like Zapier, but for notes.
The idea of spaced repetition via email reminds me of readwise as well.
That said, the author seems like a cool guy. Hope he's finding success.
The only thing that helped was routing "updates" and "promotions" straight to my trash, but I miss things sometimes that way.
I am curious how “another app” would be better in your situation than just setting up an email rule (3 min task at most) for this mailer if you truly care about it.
This is such a great idea! I've had this same problem for as long as I can remember, and I feel like most intellectually-oriented folks have this same problem, as well.
My work firewall blocked the site, but I will check this out later :)
I am not the target audience for this service.
If it was over WhatsApp, for example, would you be interested?
I'll give an update after some time of collecting metrics. You can also follow me on X to be in touch with the project.
I called my app "Mnemonist".
My last as just hasn't gotten around to shipping it yet...
I have hundreds of items to review. I wouldn't want that in my inbox.
My case is rather 2-3 quotes from a book I just read of 5ish articles per week which I find interesting and don't want to forget (so it will email them again to me after some time so I can reread). Thanks for the feedback!
A book you read will eventually turn to twenty books you read, and then you have 40 to 60 quotes and so it goes.
I'll let you know as soon as the image upload is live!
1) Paid model, $10 for an email on timer? Copilot, Spotify and Windsurf charge the same. Won't pay on principle THIS amount of money for a service which is done self-hosted in 30 minutes with ChatGPT, neither will a normie buy paid calendar, no offense. $1 is realistic, still you're gonna be profitable and much more scalable imo. Trial period of 2 weeks is mandatory
2) I almost never read mails, plus email notifications are inconsistent if you're not inside an ecosystem, e.g. Apple/Google. For me it is not a reliable way of communication
Also, which spaced repetition scheduler are you using for this? FSRS?
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/Spa...
Huge thanks to the dude.
*edit* seems different - google search led me astray. I didn't realize ginkgo is a tree with a distinctive leave
2nd is a desktop emulator of an iPod (macOS only)
3rd is a Stardew Valley tool
Let me know if you need a URL for any of them :D
Except to check your emails.