Journel: AI to help people reflect deeper and better understand themselves

Giving people a way to jot down unfiltered thoughts from all devices and get guiding questions back

Disciplines

Founder, Head of Design

Industry

Mindfulness

Duration

2 months

AI to help us rather than harm us

In 2024, I started Journel because loved the practice of journaling and wanted to see if I could use AI to provide people access to deeper personal understanding of themselves.

After doing generative research with people across three different generations, it was clear that people believed in the power of journaling, but faced these three roadblocks  

1) Users didn’t know how to get started with journaling—they weren’t sure what to write
2) Even if they started, they weren’t sure if they were doing it correctly—it felt weird writing to a void
3) Even after writing a few entries, they weren’t sure how to make sense of their writing—so they abandoned the practice

I lead research, design, and partnered with an engineer to create an MVP web app for Journel.app.

AI to help us rather than harm us

Business Outcomes

New Features

Prompts to help people put pen to paper  

Takes the guesswork out of how to start and gives user freedom of choice into what they want to write about. Remember, starting can be the hardest part

AI soundboarding to help users go deeper into their writing  

Guided questions to help people explore deeper and get more of their unfiltered thoughts out to examine. After all, there is no correct way to journal or explore one's inner dialogue.

AI Summaries and Writing trends

A gamified approach to understand mood themes over time and a backlog to see summaries of past entries. A feature pen and paper definitely doesn't have.

What did we Learn?

Human Pain is a bigger trigger than potential Benefit  

Although many users I talked to expressed interest in journaling, there was not as much consistent usage in this group after the first or second entry.

When I re-interviewed users, the ones who found the most value were those who came to Journel after experiencing something negative like job stress or a major life event. They found the most value in being able to go a layer deeper into their own thoughts.

On a human psychology and UX level, users most often accessed our tool as a reaction to pain rather than a proactive mental health routine.

Don’t wait to capitalize on an idea you have conviction in

The initial idea for Journel was conceived a year prior to work on this project. Back then, my app audit showed only a few major journaling apps and none of them capitalizing on AI features.

After getting caught up ramping for a new job, I put the idea to the side until Apple released journaling on iOS which proved to be validation that journaling was now in the early majority of the adoption cycle.

By the time my founding engineer and I put together a sprint to stand up an MVP, my audit showed at least 8 other AI journaling tools in the space. While you don’t need to have first mover advantage, it certainly proved to be an uphill battle in fighting for adoption coming in late.

Sometimes you need to know when to walk away

Our initial launch had a lot of positive reaction from users coming from Reddit posts, some VC conversations, and our immediate circles. We even had some engineers reach out to us to see if they could contribute to the project.

But looking at our Posthog data, we could see that usage was inconsistent past the third entry. Part of our hypothesis was this web app wasn’t sticky enough so we were contemplating building a mobile app.

What was a hard truth for us to swallow was that ultimately it would be hard to build a Product differentiation against incumbents and hard to build a moat around our business.     A connection who worked at Headspace also revealed to me that Headspace was adding an AI journaling module to their offering for free in two months—validation that we were onto something, but bad news that we’d have a bigger hill to climb when that happened.