I shipped a feature in Thinkora that no user ever requested. It's now one of the top three most-used features in the app.
It's called Idea Resurfacing.
The thesis is simple: most note-taking apps optimize for capture and search. Almost none optimize for re-discovery. But the failure mode people actually hit isn't "I can't find my note" — it's "I forgot I had a note." Those are different problems with different solutions.
How it works under the hood:
Notes are tagged automatically (via existing manual tags + lightweight on-device keyword extraction).
A daily job scores each older note against the user's recent activity (recent tags, recent searches, recent task topics).
Notes above a threshold surface as a small card in Morning Brew with: "You wrote this 7 months ago — feels related to today."
Design decisions worth flagging:
This runs on-device. Notes never leave the device for resurfacing. (Local-first is non-negotiable for journal-style content.)
It is not a push notification. It is opt-in surfacing inside an existing screen. The cost of a wrong suggestion should be near-zero — closing a card, not silencing a notification.
There is a "not relevant" tap that down-weights similar suggestions. No model training, just per-user score decay.
Result: usage that quietly beats features I spent 5x as long building. The lesson I keep relearning — the best features address problems users haven't named yet.
Free on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thinkora
Tags:
Top comments (0)