You awake to waves gently lapping against the hull of your boat; the rhythmic sway stirs you into motion. Rubbing the sleep from your eyes you dive into the ocean for a brief morning swim before brewing your cup of morning joe. Coffee in hand, you head to the cockpit, open your laptop, and begin your day with a programming session as the sun radiantly breaks the horizon line.
This is the life for our founders of the day - who have been building Emberly while living on their sailboat, traveling (literally) around Norway, and plan to visit Southern Europe in the coming months.
“Two years ago we had saved up a large enough nest-egg to let us quit [our jobs] for a while, so we figured we would give "Emberly as a Business" a shot…Then we spent an entire year rewriting Emberly from scratch, but also using the opportunity for a complete redesign and adding new features such as real time collaboration. Now, we are finally doing a marketing push with the primary focus being on SEO.” -Leif Rudlang, Co-Founder of Emberly
Emberly is Like Notion Inside a Mind Map
Emberly is a private knowledge library with a focus on organization and structure. With Emberly, your notes and resources are kept organized within your knowledge tree, never again to ‘disappear down a black hole’.
Users organize notes, ideas, and resources within interactive, sharable mind maps. Think of each node within the mind map as a folder in which you can drop resources and notes as files and links.
Use cases are infinite - storing family recipes, notes for projects and papers, CV tools (scroll down to view an example on their blog), and anything you can imagine, really.
Click here to see how Emberly can be used to organize various aspects of your life.
From Hobby to Business
Founders Leif and Gina first began their journey building Emberly as a hobby and alternative to playing video games which surmounted into a business through collisions of several factors. The current business model is B2C Freemium Saas and has been 100% bootstrapped.
Being avid note takers themselves, Leif and Gina encountered the problem of organizing their thoughts effectively using current platforms. This was the first step for Emberly, originally a CV tool to help people visualize their skills for interviews. Leif and Gina found themselves only using Emberly because they knew they would be able to find pertinent notes in a timely manner. Check out this blog post from Leif and a sample CV skill tree so you can rock your next interview!
Emberly Philosophy - Backed by Research
Founders Leif and Gina did their research and found that there are two primary ideas associated with how the human brain functions, upon which Emberly is built. The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff by Ofer Bergman and Dr. Steve Whittaker published via MIT Press, dives deeper into personal information management and provides insight into why Emberly works.
First, humans naturally organize themselves and the world around them into a hierarchy.
Secondly, the spatial navigation sector of our brains is far more ancient and developed compared to the language sector. Because of this, it is far more efficient for us to find things spatially rather than by utilizing tags and search, which activates the language sector of the brain. The language sector is bad at multitasking, so activating it to construct a search query will usually lead to losing your chain of thoughts, and breaking your flow.
“By organizing our ideas, notes, and resources into a mind map we can find the things we need, when we need them.” -stated Leif in an email interview.
The Emberly Saga Update and Upcoming Goals
Emberly recently incorporated AI into their platform - called Emberly AI. Check out this 1 minute demo of how it works! This uses AI to automatically generate quizzes from their notes - perfect for students as well as anyone learning a new concept.
The AI update also includes multiple writing assistant systems, a new notes editor, affiliate system, and dark mode option for those of you who have gone to ‘the dark side.’
The writing assistant currently consists of four primary tools:
1: AI Writer - Takes a query and writes what you are instructing it to write.
2: AI Edit - Allows users to select text and edit it based on a query.
3: AI Continue - Can be used to automatically fill in tables and lists when you provide a reference.
4: AI Summarize - Creates an overall summary of the document.
View tutorial videos of these features by clicking here!
Emberly Advisor
A feature in the works is called Emberly Advisor - a bit like ChatGPT but with access to all the data inside one of your mind maps. This feature will be able to reason and discuss anything you have written or stored. A use case could be to recommend a recipe you have stored when you provide the Advisor with ingredients you currently have and diagnose problems with a device.
Goals for FY23 include finalizing the integrations and building of Enberly AI, growing MRR to $1,000 (which, by the way, allows them to maintain their lifestyle of living at sea. Lifestyle change, anyone?), and pursuing new marketing strategies to increase brand awareness.
Join 1000’s of Users on Emberly Today
Emberly is adding new tutorials to their blog - click here to see how Emberly can be used to organize various aspects of your life.
Emberly’s freemium version where you access 5 maps, 70 topics per map, and 2AI quizzes per day.
Once you subscribe to Emberly a plethora of possibilities ensue. You have unlimited topics, unlimited maps on the Plus Ultra plan, dark mode, file uploads, and the up and coming Emberly AI suite. As a subscriber, you also have the ability to join Emberly’s affiliate program which allows you to earn recurring commissions from every subscriber you refer. Check in the settings menu for more information.
Advice for Fellow Founders
“Take a moment to stop and appreciate all that you have accomplished, and all that you have yet to do. Life is happening right now, and although you may have dreams of a successful exit in the future, it is only through living in the present that you can truly find joy and fulfillment. Embrace the days, the experiences, and the opportunities that come your way and enjoy the ride. There is no greater happiness than that.” -Leif Andreas Rudlang, Co-founder of Emberly
Follow Leif, Gina, and Emberly on Social Media:
Emberly: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Website
Leif: Twitter
Gina: Twitter
Congrats to Emberly for being featured on StartupStage, a platform to showcase your startup and compete for features across our channels.
