In college, I carried around this little stack of flashcards in a leather binding.

Bible verses. Tiny cards. Jammed in my pocket.

I would pull them out in line at the cafeteria, on the bus, or waiting for class to start. Flip, read, repeat. No system. No algorithm. I was just trying to hang on to words that were shaping me.

Then I stopped.

I don’t know when it happened. Maybe work. Maybe building a company. Maybe just getting pulled forward by life. But somewhere along the way, I dropped the habit that had once meant a lot to me.

Over a decade passed. One day it hit me with that weird mix of nostalgia and loss.

I missed that little stack of cards.

Not for the aesthetic. For the feeling that I was choosing what I wanted to keep.

The forgetful one

I am a very forgetful person.

Not in a cute sitcom way. In a “remember the idea, forget the details” way. Concepts dissolve. Verses fade. Books turn into vibes that my brain files under “good (I think?).”

At some point, you start to mistake the symptom for the identity. The person who reads a lot yet reaches for something and comes up empty. The person who has to rebuild mental models they’ve already built once before.

Buying a better memory

All the apps. All the systems. All the promises.

Most of them worked fine in the mechanical sense. Cards showed up. Reviews happened.

But things kept breaking.

The tiniest bit of friction wiped out my consistency. If I needed to remember to open the app, game over. Any habit that requires remembering the habit is doomed to fail.

Beyond that, nothing in those apps helped me figure out the interesting frontier just beyond what I already knew. Nothing showed me the places where my understanding was thinner than I assumed.

It felt like I was collecting knowledge instead of growing it.

Companion for curiosity

What I wanted was the spirit of that old leather stack, but with a brain.

Something gentle. Always nearby. Something that helped me remember what mattered without feeling like I was clocking into a job.

I couldn’t find that feeling, so I spent the last year trying to build it. It’s called Etch.

Etch has two instincts. One helps ideas stick. The other goes exploring.

You capture the things you care about and they show up on your home screen at just the right moment so they actually stick.

Then, Etch looks at what you know and goes exploring on your behalf. It might notice you know hablar and comer and write you a tiny lesson about Spanish ‘-ar’ verb patterns. Or it might connect your saved Seneca quotes to that note you wrote about how you spend your time.

It feels less like another productivity tool and more like having a companion for your curiosity.

I kept it

When something lands, I drop it into Etch. When something sparks, Insights feeds it. When life gets crowded and I can’t read much, the system still keeps me connected to the ideas I care about.

There are mornings when I unlock my phone, and the Etch widget flashes a question I haven’t seen in a year, like some tiny line from a book I only half‑remember reading. And my brain answers it before I’ve even had coffee. It lands clean, like muscle memory I didn’t know I had. Quiet proof that something I cared about didn’t wash away. It stayed. I kept it.

It’s the same feeling I had with that old leather stack except now it actually sticks.

Make memory a choice

If you have also felt that quiet frustration of doing the work only to watch it fade. If you miss the feeling of actually keeping what matters.
I built Etch for that.

Think of the first few things you want to hold onto for real. A principle. A quote that hit different. A concept you don’t want to lose.

And when you’re ready, download Etch from the App Store and start etching them in.