
Show HN: JournalJerk – In 2017, keep a journal—or else - colinmcd
https://www.journaljerk.com
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vanderreeah
While there is no way I'd use this service - I value my privacy to an abnormal
degree and am not interested in a hard copy of my journal - I'm baffled by the
negative feedback so far. This service clearly is not for me. But to say that
it is therefore a bad service is logically inexplicable. Do people not have
the imagination to conceive of a situation in which (for some) amusing
negative rhetoric may have a marketing value? Is it so hard to find something
to admire in the audacity of this idea? I have no use for menstrual cups, but
I wouldn't scream "But I don't even menstruate!" in a thread started by
someone trying to sell them.

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jamesmunns
Hey Colin,

I really like the idea of this! I have a couple questions:

* Do you support any sort of formatting for the contents of the book? e.g. Markdown, LateX, ? Or is it all "subject": $email_title, "text": $email_body?

* Do you have any estimate on how much text fits in a 5x8 book? Does your printing service scale the width of the book based on contents? Aka, if I wrote "walked dog, ate food", every day, would I get a pamphlet? Is there some kind of upper limit?

* Do I have to buy all my cheat days up front? It seems like you could charge "absolutions", maybe even at the end, maybe something like $0.50 for non-prepaid days? It might help people throw good money after bad :)

Thanks for sharing!

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CaveTech
You don't display any details at all about the final product. Always refer to
it as a "beautiful journal" but fail to picture anywhere.

If anyone was even interested in the premise in the end they want the
deliverable... So show it.

~~~
colinmcd
Hi CaveTech,

Great point with a simple answer. I don't have any print samples yet. Turns
out the Printing On Demand companies I was working with enjoy taking of
several weeks on either side of Christmas. I'm pretty miffed about this
myself, frankly.

To further put your mind at ease, I have extensive experience working with
printing-on-demand and dropshipping services. I've built out complete pipeline
integrations with IngramSpark, Ingram LightningSource, and ZenPrint from
scratch. If you keep the journal, you will get your book. Guaranteed.

~~~
swapneeld14
This is a very creative approach for to charge monies first and give discount
on application usages..

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EwanG
I don't see anything at the site about who is "really" doing this, and am more
than a bit concerned someone could spend January collecting $29+ subscriptions
from folks with New Years resolutions, and then depend on folks forgetting
about it come December. Particularly among those who drop the habit...

~~~
colinmcd
Hi Ewan,

I definitely understand your concerns. Here's some answers:

I'm doing this. My name is Colin McDonnell, my email is colinmcd94@gmail.com.
I'm not a scammer.

The service definitely defies some expectations, since its entire goal is to
induce a given behavior through (mostly) negative reinforcement. Clearly I
(that is, "The Jerk") benefits if people drop the habit. That's part of the
incentive. It's why the service is personified as a Jerk...you're not supposed
to like him and you certainly don't want him to have your money.

Also remember, there's a positive reinforcement too, in the form of the end-
of-year book. And $29 is a GREAT price for a custom hardbound book with
shipping. Here's a comparable service that charges $79:
[https://www.storyworth.com/holidays](https://www.storyworth.com/holidays). We
expect to make the vast majority of profit from the cheat day markup.

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krrishd
To piggyback off of the idea to journal in 2017:

I built [http://write.surge.sh](http://write.surge.sh) a few weeks ago and
have been using it to keep my own journal and have been successful (unlike the
last few times I tried).

It's mainly worked because:

\- it's duration-bound (every journalling session I do is 15 minutes only, you
can set a different duration)

\- inactivity within that duration erases your work so I have to keep writing
for the whole session.

I was going to post it on Show HN but I'd love people in this thread's
feedback on it as well. Source code is also on GitHub:
[https://github.com/krrishd/write](https://github.com/krrishd/write)

EDIT: also worth noting based on some criticisms of existing stuff in this
thread, everything is locally stored and exportable/importable as JSON, the
app is completely client-side.

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oddlyaromatic
I see this as really good idea for people who are motivated by this kind of
accountability. I think the concept of journal and the privacy of such things
is kind of leading some commentors astray. I see several use cases that would
not be private as such... Or at least would be private but not embarrassing. I
love the sense of a finished product at stake, I personally have often been at
my most effective creatively in "show must go on" deadline situations. I
miiiight become a customer if I can refine my own plan for how I would use it.
(eg, I'm considering a poem a day, since that is in my wheelhouse and is broad
enough that even 2 words can count.)

Best of luck to you, journal jerk.

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cdevs
I love it. So far the negative feedback is privacy but for a project that
isn't at a full serious company point yet why is everyone else taking it so
serious? Write some funny stuff about the day it doesn't have to be a deep
dark secret, if that's what you want do it on your own.

Also I enjoy the idea of mean services for procrastinators like me, if only
start farm would yell at me for being late to pay my insurance would stop
getting cancelled since I can't pay ahead and their site sucks ass.

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mcgrath_sh
This seems similar to DayOne. I left day one when they went to their second
version where they wanted to keep my journal on their servers. For similar
reasons, I won't be signing up for your service. I know your journals are
cheaper than self printing (I think you said $29 vs $79) but my privacy and
controlling my journal data is easily worth $50 if I wanted a hard copy.

Best of luck going forward!

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mark212
I laughed out loud when I saw this and thought "Genius!" I love the negative
reinforcement and I love the cheat day upgrade. Being a huge type snob / nerd
/ jerk, I, too, would love to at least have some exemplars of the finished
product (maybe even a size? perfect bound? saddle stitched?) before plunking
down my money. But the psychology is a home run. Kudos.

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benoliver999
I probably won't use this because a) privacy (not your end, but mine! I use
gmail for this sort of thing and they don't need to know my secrets) b) I
don't struggle to journal

HOWEVER I really like the idea of the halving fees, and replying by email
makes life so easy. Best of luck with it.

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coldshower
Great idea, and I like the approach. Something like this can be tricky to pull
off.

I did something similar, but as a 30 day meditation challenge:
[http://tinyurl.com/gskmt7d](http://tinyurl.com/gskmt7d)

Note: my site isn't operational at the moment.

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oliverdunk
What a great idea. I'd suggest enlarging your appeal though by branding it as
a sort of log. People could track projects, write what they've learned about a
particular skill etc. rather than focusing on journals only.

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j7ake
Can this be automated as a script such that if I forget a day, the computer
will automatically write something like "walked the dog, was nice"?

~~~
dasboth
With the success of things like recurrent neural networks for text generation,
an entirely computer-generated journal would be interesting in itself.

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oliffur
Love this idea, just signed up for this, but I'm getting a relay error on
sending emails to jerk@journaljerk.com or reply@journaljerk.com... So
effectively I can't write anything

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readme
"If you actually pay that, I won't hesitate to send you a book of..."

i'm tempted.

~~~
colinmcd
Try me.

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ortuna
Nice work! Fun service, Keep it up!

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bbcbasic
Reminds me of the rich jerk in terms of selling style

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gravypod
So you want someone to pay you 27 bucks to take their deepest darkest
secretes, all of their lifes troubles, and store them on your servers of
unknown levels of security then you want to print that out (automatically
revealing it's contents to at least one person printing everything), then
finally you want to ship it through an unspecified postal service.

Yea maybe I'm paranoid but I don't think I'd be writing much other then "had
coffee" or "walked dog". I'd definetly not say who I'm in love with, what I'm
working on, how my social life is going, what experiments I'm working. Sadly
that's exactly the kind of contents that you want in a journal.

Edit: My bad, 29 dollars, not 27.

~~~
colinmcd
Hi gravypod,

Good points all around. I've added an FAQ (journaljerk.com/faq.html) that
addresses some of the data security points.

As for the printing and shipping, there's of course nothing we can do about
that. I'm printing through IngramSpark, which was a highly automated printing
pipeline. It's unlikely someone will pick up your book, especially with
malicious intent. As for shipping, I'll likely use UPS or USPS Media Mail,
depending on the season and pricing. I'm quite certain they don't read what
they ship. But your points are well taken.

Colin

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fluxsauce
The word privacy does not appear anywhere on the site. Nope.

~~~
dang
Please don't be a jerk on HN, especially when responding to another user's
work. Asking a polite question would have more than sufficed.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

~~~
fluxsauce
Apologies, the tone was stronger than intended.

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znpy
Read the first two words of the page.

Thought "fuck you".

Closed the page.

Try and make something actually useful.

~~~
mark212
really? you took the time to write that as feedback for this project, and
couldn't think of something more constructive to say. How about "I was put off
by the negative tone. I see what you were going for there, but it came across
as too strong for me."

