Pensatorium

My husband is an engineer. He kept having the same thoughts over and over and never getting anywhere with them, and the ideas that felt clearest in his head fell apart the moment he tried to write them down. So he built something for himself: a place to say a thought out loud, as messy as it comes, and get it back organized.

That first version solved his problem. Then we started thinking it might solve it for other people too.

I'm a psychologist, and I came in on the other side of it. Every thought takes up space in your head, useful or not. Some just need to be said out loud to lose their power. Others are what moves you forward. What I care about is that Pensatorium fits how people actually think, and that it takes real weight off.

What it does today: you speak (or type), and it comes back titled, filed into your own folders, with the actions and questions pulled out. Dates you say out loud become calendar entries. New thoughts connect to old ones, so you build on your thinking instead of starting over. You can ask it questions and it answers from your own thoughts, and it tells you when it doesn't have enough to go on instead of making something up.

Where we are: launched on Product Hunt in August. We are two, self funded, and for now we both keep our full-time jobs, so there isn't much time left for getting the word out. We tried a small ad campaign: plenty of people came to the site, a fraction watched the demo to the end, and not one started the trial. We don't know why yet.

Social proof is the other problem. The only people who started the free trial are friends and acquaintances, and they are not the type of people who write reviews. We have one review on Product Hunt. One is not enough for a stranger to trust it. And we are new to all this, Product Hunt, Reddit, etc. We don't know anyone here, and it's been hard to get anything moving.

If you've been through any of this, what worked?