About Jot Minder

My name is Jason Wilmot. I live in Austin, Texas with my wife and two kids. I was born in Toronto, raised in Kalamazoo, and spent 10 years of my life living in Bermuda.

I love software and build it professionally. I build things to make life easier — and Jot Minder started the same way all my projects do: a problem I couldn't stop thinking about.

The problem was that my best thinking never happened at my desk. It happened halfway through a run, or in traffic on the way to work, or three minutes into a meeting I was supposed to be paying attention to. By the time I was somewhere I could actually write it down, it was gone. Not forgotten exactly — I'd know I'd had a good idea, and I'd have no way back to it. That specific frustration is what got me.

So I did what everyone does: I spread it across four apps. Voice Memos for the things I could say out loud. Notes for the things I couldn't. Reminders for anything with a deadline. A timer app for my mornings. Each one was fine. Together they were useless, because the thought always arrived when the right app was the hardest one to reach.

The voice memos were the worst of it. I ended up with dozens of recordings I never played back — a folder of my own voice I couldn't search, sorted by nothing, useful to nobody. A thought you can't find again isn't captured. It's just stored.

I started building something small: hold a button, talk, get text. Transcribed on the device, audio thrown away, dropped straight into a list. That was the entire app for a while, and it was already better than what I'd been doing.

Then it kept growing, and always for the same reason — some part of my day still didn't fit. I added typing, because you can't talk in a meeting and that's exactly when things need writing down. I added due dates and repeats, because half of what I captured was really a task. I added a journal, because the other half wasn't a task at all and deserved somewhere quiet to live. Then I put timers in a list and chained them together so my mornings would run without me deciding anything, and that turned out to be the feature I use most.

Somewhere in there I realised these weren't separate features. They were the same list, behaving differently. A journal, a checklist and a workout routine are all just things you wrote down — what changes is what the list does with them afterwards. Once I saw it that way, the app stopped being four ideas stapled together and became one.

That's Jot Minder. You jot; it minds. It's on your wrist and it answers to Siri, so the phone can stay in your pocket. It never asks who you are. And it keeps what you wrote on your own device, because a journal is nobody's business but yours.

Your feedback, advice, and encouragement is always welcome. I can be reached on email at jason@bytejelly.com.

Thanks,
Jason