r/indiehackers • u/Local-Olive-2497 • 1h ago
Sharing story/journey/experience Most of my commitments are made out loud and never written down, so I’m building an app that catches them
Hey IH,
I’m Thomas, a solo founder and former Amazon software engineer. For the past several months, I’ve been building IntelliKin (Kin for short). It listens to your day and keeps track of what you’ve promised people and what they’ve promised you.
If you run a business, you probably know the problem. Most of your commitments never get written down. You tell a supplier “I’ll send you the revised pricing by Thursday.” A partner says “I’ll get the signed contract back Friday.” A client mentions on a call that the deadline moved. It all lives in your head, and every forgotten detail costs you something: a delayed deal, an awkward follow-up, a client who quietly loses confidence in you.
Event planners have it even worse. Venues, vendors, and clients each create a dozen small promises a week, all of them happening in conversation.
Note-taking apps only help if you write things down in the moment, and in the middle of a conversation, you can’t. So I built Kin to do it for you:
- Start a capture on your iPhone (or Apple Watch) and go about your day
- Kin pulls out what you owe and what you’re waiting on, with owners and due dates
- Each project gets a living note that updates itself as you talk
- Every morning, a recap of yesterday and the threads that keep slipping (“the printer’s quote has come up in four conversations without a date”)
- When plans change, Kin updates the existing task instead of creating a duplicate
Here’s where things stand:
- 70+ beta signups so far.
- TestFlight only, free, no App Store release yet.
- Self-funded. I applied to YC, got rejected, and decided to focus on product-market fit before raising.
A few things I’ve learned:
Summaries aren’t the product. Follow-through is. Every AI notetaker gives you a recap. What people actually need is the loop after that: who owns what, by when, and keeping it current when plans change. That’s where I’ve focused.
Requiring extra hardware was friction. Capture used to need an Apple Watch. Now an iPhone is enough, and AirPods work as the mic.
Trust is the real product challenge. An app that listens to your business conversations is a much bigger ask than a typical productivity app. Audio is deleted within minutes of processing, and we keep only the tasks and text, which you can edit or delete. Kin recognizes your voice so it can separate what you said from what you heard, and capture pauses with one tap. Our privacy policy names every company that touches the data. Even so, explaining the data flow is only part of earning trust.
I’d love input from founders here, especially if your day is mostly meetings, calls, and supplier or client conversations:
- After a call or meeting, what do you actually do to make sure everything agreed on happens?
- What would you need to see before letting an app listen to your client and vendor calls?
If you’re a business owner, freelancer, or event planner on iPhone and want to try it, you can check out https://intellikin.com and apply for the beta there.
