Skip to main content

Why I Built This Writing Starter

I didn't set out to build an AI product. I spent 8 years wrestling with note-taking tools, until one day I realized: I didn't need more notes. I needed a bridge from notes to writing.

2016: A Note-Taking Life That Started With a Burp​

May 27, 2016, 11:56 AM. I wrote my first note in Evernote. It was a diary entry about letting out a loud burp during an exam. The teacher didn't kick me out, thankfully.

Since that day, I've spent more time on note-taking tools than on all the articles I've ever written combined.

2017–2023: Six Tools, Three Major Reorganizations, Countless Small Ones​

  • Evernote (2016) β€” 0 to 1000+ notes. Search got slower and slower.
  • OneNote (2017) β€” Bought my first laptop just to stop copying off the blackboard in class.
  • Effie (2021) β€” Clean, beautiful interface. Notes didn't connect to each other.
  • Notion (2021) β€” Modular, fast, great kanban boards. But you had to remember the exact title to find anything.
  • Obsidian (2022) β€” Finally, linked notes. No more folder hierarchy battles.
  • Flomo (2023) β€” Dictate ideas through WeChat.
  • Logseq (2023) β€” Daily notes with paragraph-level linking.

Every time I switched, I believed this was the one. Every time, the old notes turned into a swamp: I knew they were there, but I couldn't face digging through them.

I Tried Countless Organization Systems. I Abandoned Every One.​

Light classification, heavy search. Heavy classification, light search. I even came up with my own twelve-character rule. It worked fine below a thousand notes. Beyond that, maintaining the structure became more work than writing the notes themselves.

But the Real Frustration Wasn't About Organization​

Late 2023, I sat down to write about solitude.

I searched "solitude" in Obsidian. Dozens of notes came up. Journal entries, book highlights, a stray thought after a podcast.

I spent forty minutes reading through them. And then I didn't write anything.

Not because I had nothing to say. The opposite β€” I had too much, scattered across hundreds of notes, each one just two or three lines. Turning that into an article would take an entire afternoon just to re-read everything.

That's when it clicked: my notes didn't have a content problem. They had a starting problem.

I didn't need more material. I needed someone to pull the material out of my notes, lay it on the table, and say: "Look. You already have this. Start here."

That's Where the Writing Starter Came From​

No tool on the market did this.

ChatGPT can write for you, but it doesn't know your notes. Obsidian can store your notes, but it won't tell you what you could write about. Notion, NotebookLM, Cursor β€” they all solve different problems.

I needed something narrow: a tool that connects to my Obsidian vault, and when I type a topic or open an old draft, shows me what I already have.

Not to write for me. To help me start.

So I built it. It does three things:

  1. You type a topic β†’ it finds related notes, forgotten fragments, and possible angles from your vault, and hands you a material pack
  2. You open a stalled draft β†’ it shows you where you left off, gives you context, and suggests where to continue β€” a reconnect pack
  3. You have no idea what to write β†’ it finds a topic from your old notes that's worth picking up today

No chatbot. No feature bloat. Just three buttons.

For Anyone Who's Been Through This​

If you:

  • have migrated between Evernote, Notion, and Obsidian
  • have tried PARA, Zettelkasten, and every other system, and still ended up with a mess
  • have sat in front of a blank page knowing you have things to say, but couldn't start
  • quietly believe that what you've collected over the years should eventually help you

Then give this a try. It's not another note app. It's not another AI assistant. It's a starter that turns your old notes into material you can actually write from.

Get Started β†’

I made a video about my full 8-year note-taking journey, if you're curious: How to Choose a Note-Taking Tool: 8 Years of Real Experience

These Aren't Product Reviews, But They Show Why This Matters​

I don't have enough public user feedback from people who've actually used this product yet. So I won't put fake testimonials here.

But when I've shared my note-taking methods and Obsidian workflows in the past, I received some real responses. They're not about the product. They're about why something like this needed to exist.

1. Many People Aren't Afraid of Forgetting β€” They're Afraid of Losing​

Someone told me they put childhood memories into a cloud drive, only to have the service shut down. Everything gone.

Others said they no longer trust platforms that require an internet connection for their important content. "Exportable" often means "you'll lose something in the export."

That's why I kept coming back to local files, Obsidian vaults, and plain markdown.

2. Many People Want to Use Obsidian, But Get Burned Out By the Setup​

One person put it bluntly:

Obsidian works fine, but it's easy to go down rabbit holes. You end up spending more time finding plugins, installing plugins, and learning plugins than actually writing notes.

Another did a detailed comparison of Logseq and Obsidian, and the conclusion wasn't about which was better. It was: what regular people need is less tinkering, more writing, and a safe place for their content to live.

That's exactly what this writing starter aims to do: not add more features, but take over the hard parts β€” finding, connecting, and surfacing what you already have.

3. Some People Already Said It Clearly: Local, Fast, Peace of Mind​

These are things I've heard repeatedly:

  • "Local, free, clean, extensible, no internet required"
  • "Starts in half a second, barely touches the network"
  • "There are a thousand ways to take notes β€” just absorb what works for you"

They all point to the same thing: people want safety, continuity, and sustainability. Not a fancier editor.

If This Resonates​

If you care about local safety and low-friction tools, I'd love to hear from you.

I'm less interested in "is this product impressive?" and more interested in:

  • What kind of content are you most afraid of losing?
  • Where do tools tend to trip you up the most?
  • What repetitive task would you most want AI to take off your hands?

Want to try it? Share your experience here πŸ”—. Your feedback could shape the next feature.

Join Us​

  • Product Feedback:
  • πŸ’¬ Have a question? Check out the FAQ for quick solutions: Click here

Thank you for choosing GPT AI Flow, together building the essential tools for the super individuals of the future!