Greg Voisen
Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen, host of Inside Personal Growth. And joining me from the middle of the desert in Nevada is Sam Claassen. He is the Chief Growth Officer for a company called Reflect App. And I came across it is for most of my listeners know, Sam, I'm an extremely curious person. And I am very deeply involved with the second brain concept and what's going on with tako wear day with Cal Newport, with all of those great authors, including Scott Young, who we just did a podcast with. And Sam, how are you doing out in the middle of the desert? There are high desert it looks like.

Samuel Claassen
Yeah, I'm doing great. It was a little cold last night. I forget the desert gets very chilly when the sun goes down. But I'm kind of out warming up now. And I guess I should probably also say my title is technically ahead of growth. I don't want Alex to think I'm trying to inflate my title.

Greg Voisen
Okay. All right. Well, I'm gonna let the people know just a tad bit about you that he's a seasoned growth and product marketing leader. With nearly a decade of experience. His expertise lies in harmonizing product marketing and sales efforts to create customer experiences. And he has done an excellent job of that apt reflect by leveraging marketing analysis, product positioning and narrative. And to fine tune the go to market strategies that he is doing for reflect his work reflect in the personal projects have been deepened this proficiency in AI, a specializes in developing custom GPT models, which had begun to be used for lead generation and sales enablement. And last year, a scaled marketing agents to six figure revenues and currently offers strategic advice through the CEO interviews and multiple Y Combinator startups. So you can find out more about Sam Claassen, and that is spelled c-l-a-a-s-s-e-n on LinkedIn, we'll put a link to that we'll also put a link to reflect notes or I should say, Reflect app so that you guys can do that. And we're going to do a screenshot here in the middle of this podcast interview, where we can actually show you a comparison between the reflector app and other note taking apps because this is quite a wonderful product, especially the voice enabled part of it, which I'm enjoying greatly. So this is my little endorsement of this. But So Sam, there is a gentleman behind this company, he's the CEO, and he happens to have had a success prior to reflect app. And I'd like for you to talk with the listeners and share your thoughts on the philosophy of kind of minimalism and how it relates to organizing one's life through the notetaking application. And really what your CEO was, is and still is creating here what the reflect app.

Samuel Claassen
Yeah, absolutely. So, Reflect was originally started by Alex McCaw. If anyone has heard of clear bit, it's a marketing analysis and analytics company, they have incredible data. So I think most major companies have touched on clear, but at some point. So that was his first company, after clear bit, he, you know, really wanted to focus on a product that was his make more of a taste product in his division. And the thing that kept sticking in his mind was note taking. So he kind of noticed this pattern among note taking apps where they would raise a bunch of venture capital money. And then of course, they'd be expected to produce a return on that investment. And the easiest way to do that, as a note taking app is to add in collaboration, and basically turn it into somewhat of a team tool. And he felt that really took away from the core product of notetaking. And so you see all of these that expand and they add all these features. And you know, you can add your team and whatnot. And suddenly it's no longer a note taking app. And so there's a joke that, you know, people always tend to go back to Apple notes. If you've seen, I think it's called the Midwest meme. Where, you know, people start at Apple notes, and they go through all the tools and they end to Apple notes. Well, there's a really great reason for that. And it's because Apple notes has remained core to note taking so they're extremely fast, extremely frictionless, but because it's part of the Apple ecosystem. They of course, you know, they don't have investors or anything that they have to add additional features. And so they can just focus on creating the best possible note taking app. And that's really what Alex wanted to do. Now. Of course, he has some disagreements with Apple notes. So that's why he's, you know, created reflecting his own vision. And so a couple of those things when it comes to note taking philosophy is network note taking, which means you use backlinks instead of folders. So to give just a really quick example of that, you know, if I used Evernote or something, I might have a folder of all of my contacts, so I would have you know, Contacts folder, and then I'd have you Greg in there. And I say, all of your projects, your podcasts, my relationship, do you all that good stuff, which is fine, but it takes a little bit of organization because you have to decide where things go, reflect and other network note taking tools, instead of creating a folder, I would just create a backlink for your name. And then you have a dedicated note to you with all of that information. But I don't have to organize it. If I am doing this interview with you, today I can backlink to you and my current daily note, I can also have a note for this podcast where I can backlink to you as the host and all of that good stuff. So that's sort of the core difference in reflect. And I think a lot of other note taking apps is that it really relies on this backlinking model instead of a folder based organizational system.

Greg Voisen
Well, it's easier to find that way. Because all you have to do is type in Greg voice and and everything that we've talked about there. I know when in these interviews, we use otter AI, because we're literally using the AI system. But when I go into otter, it's very simple to kind of find all of these interviews and all of the the audio recordings and everything, it's very well designed. What I like about this simplicity of reflect notes in my use is really this audio recording, you know, we're all sitting on keyboards all day long. And the app for the iPhone is really, and it's a recent released folks, by the way, so easy to just pick up and use and put a note in there and then link it to whatever it is that you're doing. And it's so accurate. I would say the accuracy is no, I'm not gonna give it 100%. But it's it's running pretty close at like 95%. And in mind. Now, you emphasize this minimalist design and functionality, can you elaborate on how these benefits that kind of in compared to some of the complex platforms like obsidian or Rome? You know, your is not nearly as robust, but you don't want it to be. And there's a reason for that. So I really want the listeners to hear very carefully. And I'm going to actually, this is probably a good time, I'm going to actually share the screen if you don't mind. Because you made a comparison in September 23. And one of the things you know is Sam is out there on the internet, always trying to improve how reflect is seen. And he's always doing research. And so if you just go to their YouTube channel, you're going to find a lot of Sam talking about how to use this, the functionality of it or so on. So let me just share real quickly with the audience. Okay, I want to make it actually, let's do it this way. I'm going to make it I'm going to share it in a second. And the reason is, there's a reason for that, because I don't want to share the whole screen, I only want to share just the one thing. So we'll get back to that. But if you would comment on this minimalist design functionality, if you would.

Samuel Claassen
Absolutely. Yeah. So I guess what I maybe should have mentioned earlier to is that reflect is intentionally designed to help you think better and mirror your brain. And so that's where this minimalism aspect comes in, is, we really want just kind of a home base for your thinking. And I should say, you know, all of these other note taking apps, this is a very personal thing. So we don't try to pretend that reflect is the note taking app for everyone. And I'm a huge obsidian fan myself. I think it's an incredible product. It's too complicated for the way I take notes, but it's a really excellent product. So I think reflect is a very intentional, it's kind of like a hot take of a note taking app and how minimalist it is. But the the core reason for that is just frictionless. So the more optionality you added, the more friction it adds, I think it was Malcolm Gladwell that originally, maybe not originally, but use the example of tomato sauce in a grocery store, right? It's like going to a grocery store and there's 150 Different tomato sauces. You're just going to spend a ton of time choosing which tomato sauce and you're probably not going to be any happier You might actually even be worse because you just wish you would have just been given the best one. And so reflect doesn't ever want you to, like, drop into your notes with that feeling of like, where should I go? Where should I put something. And so that's kind of where the minimalism comes in is you really shouldn't have to do any thinking about where things go, or what you should be doing. There's nothing to customize, there's, I mean, almost literally nothing that you can customize and reflect. And again, that's very intentional. So that's kind of the first reason is just to reduce friction might.

Greg Voisen
Something might add something to I think our society has an especially with software as we've used more cloud based pieces of software, as users out here, and I'm just going to call myself a user experimenter. We've come become accustomed to a lot of features, because that's what's its built in. So when you go to reflect, you actually have to detox. And what I'm finding about the detox is maybe the right word, actually, because I want to declutter my life. Right. And I think everybody listening would like to declutter their lives. But what they don't really realize is how they become so dependent, that they actually have to detox to actually use something like reflect notes. Now, that isn't a negative, it's a positive. It's a positive. Okay. I hope you take it as a positive. So how does notes kind of declutter our digitalized world in your estimation? You there? Well, I

Samuel Claassen
guess, yeah. I mean, I guess, I kind of like the detox phase, I think I'm gonna steal that from you and do some marketing stuff around, taking detox. So I guess what I see. So I do all of the personal onboarding for reflect and what I see a lot of people going through as they sort of accidentally go through this detox, you know, it's like, maybe they weren't intentionally doing it. But now they're trying reflect. So we kind of forced you into a note taking, detox and reflect. And you see people who want these very, very niche features. And it's basically them kind of coping with the detox, right. So like some examples are, like, we get a ton of asks for block level references, we get a lot of requests for people to, you know, be able to like, highlight text, and then create a unique note with like a description without ever having to leave the original note and like all of these little things that are totally fine functionality. And you can totally see why it would be useful. And they're effectively trying to recreate every workflow that they've ever had in a note taking app. But I think when you're doing a detox like that, you're stripping all of that away. And you're going instead of going from the top down and saying, What's every single functionality I can think of? And how can I recreate that you're starting from zero and saying, what is the core functionality that I must have. And so you're just starting with a blank page. And that's what we tell everyone, just start by writing down, like what you need to do in the day, or if you don't know what you need to do in the day, just start recording what you are doing in the day. And that's a great place to start. You don't have to do any more than that if you don't want to. But then once they kind of do that stuff, then they're like, oh, wow, that felt really nice. And now that I have now I have just like this clean list in my notes. Okay, well, now I'm going to try, you know, backlinking this entity, and then they see the backlink, and they're like, Oh, that's okay. Now that clicks, I have an association between today and this person that I met with or this client that I met with, and then you know, maybe you're like, Okay, well, that feels great. And then you maybe try doing a voice note. And you start to just add things slowly from the ground. But you don't really ever kind of look or even miss those other things that you were trying to recreate. And so I think that's how I would describe the the detoxes, instead of going top down with all the features you can think of, you're starting from the bottom and building up with only the core functionality that you truly need out of notetaking. Well,

Greg Voisen
what I would say is, what's interesting is, especially for the voice function, you know, we have things that flash in our mind, and we want to capture it, right. So I remember in David Allen's getting things done getting things done, you know, he said, find this ubiquitous place where you can dump everything. And what I think is really good is we've got this ubiquitous, kind of inbox, right call it an inbox where I can allow things to do. And then as you said, very easily find with the with the tags, right? So great voice and yep, boom, there it is. The other thing you did that I thought was interesting, and I haven't used much I have to admit, but I did test it. Was this, this link to, you know, Kindle, the Amazon and the books. And, you know, there's so much that people are doing out there. There's other apps that just focus in on, you know, what you're reading? How am I going to capture the news out of it? And so on? What was the philosophy behind you wanting to make that link to Amazon and being able to pick up, you know, my books, because what happened is, when I hit it, it literally pulled all this data over. You know, is this like, yeah, yeah.

Samuel Claassen
So right, right now, there's actually two ways to do it. I think what you're talking about is through the Chrome extension, and that you just sign into your Amazon account, and then it syncs all the books in your library with the notes and the highlights you make, but not the actual books themselves.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, it's just the highlights I made. Yeah. Yeah.

Samuel Claassen
Yeah, exactly. So that will just be added to your notes. So if I, you know, like, if I save, like atomic habits or something, and years later, I'm like, Oh, what was that exact sort of like, trigger action, whatever that loop was, I kind of remember, I can just search my notes and find it. Now, I mentioned the part about it doesn't sink, hold books, because I think we're quickly approaching a day when we you'll just be able to sink your literal entire library in there. And then you can chat with your books. I mean, how magically, how magical is that going to be? It's like, you know, if I just got my paragliding license. So it's like I could download a whole book on paragliding and chat with that book when I have a question. So I think we're just kind of on the cusp of being able to use some of these things. But currently, it will sync all of your library with the highlights and the notes you make. And you can also do that I should mention through read wise. So talking about those apps that really focused just on capturing reading, we are I shouldn't say we, Alex in the team looked at read wise and said, you know, we have no intention of adding in all of that functionality ever. So we're just going to integrate read wise, and then you can pull in anything from your read wise and read wise into reflect tongue twister. So I think it's from reflect standpoint, we want to make sure you're able to capture all of the information that you need to. And so books are a huge part of that links through the Chrome extension are a huge part of that. We had a bunch of people saying how hard it was to save tweets and reflect. So they added like an integration into the Chrome extension where you can save your tweets, one of our next things that we're going to be doing is a lot better file support for things like PDFs and images, where reflect will actually be able to kind of read the PDF, and you can chat with it directly in your notes and all of that good stuff. So that's the ideal world we're going for it is just any piece of information, whether it's a thought or something you read or a video, you can just instantly put it into your notes so that it's saved. And you don't have to have that kind of anxious thought in your head that Oh, I forgot something or like, Oh, what was that amazing book someone told me about and now I forgot. I think

Greg Voisen
it's so it's this. Not everybody's looking for a second brain. But a lot of people who work for a living need a second brain, they at least feel like they need it. And we're talking about tako for your fourth day right now. And he has booked the second brain and the para pa Ra. Now he talks about, hey, I've got all this stuff going around, I want to write a book. So let's just say somebody out there today wants to write a book. But they're trying to collect all these notes from all over these places where I have to put these pieces together that I'd like to combine into a book, or I want to, I want to create a video. But I want to pick up on all the parts that I want to put into the video. I see this here. I see that there. I want to collect it. I want to put it someplace. Now, if you would, for the users out there that want to use this as a second brain to help them organize their thoughts and their tasks. How does reflect integrate this concept? For more? We talked about the minimalist fashion. And you've just talked about some of the other features through Chrome extensions that are now allowing people to pull this data across to to their Is there something you can tell us that would would make it better for us

Samuel Claassen
Yeah, so I love this question because I think this is what makes the whole backlinking thing really come together. So the second brain concept, I like to think of it, I don't know what the right word is. But it's like really, truly mirroring your brain. So it's almost not even a second brain. It's sort of like you're exporting your brain, if that makes sense. And I think the backlinks are best thought of as an association between two thoughts. So that's the way our brain functions, right? It's like, we have all of these thoughts swimming around our head, some of which are people and places, and we try and form associations with them. So tomorrow, I'll be driving through Salt Lake City, and I'm like, Oh, I have friends in Salt Lake City, don't I like Who do I know in Salt Lake City. And in my head, I try and start finding those associations between like, Oh, my friend, John, from college, I think he moved out there a couple of years ago. And I'm kind of like reaching for that association. And if you imagine that in sort of like a world where you have all of these like nodes that are thoughts, and all of those thoughts are connected to certain other thoughts. And then you form this kind of web of ideas. And we actually tried to give a visualization of this and reflect obsidian does it as well, called a we call it a mind map, where you can actually see all of those notes in your notes, but in your head there, of course, thoughts and ideas, and you can see them associated. And you can see a literal representation of your second brain, which I think is very, very cool, because then you start to realize, oh, the value isn't just in the individual thoughts and the ideas, the value is in the associations between them. And so if I create, you know, like a note for you and your contact, but I don't associate it with anything, there's a huge chance, I might never see that again. Like, sure, maybe one day, I'm gonna say like, oh, who, you know, who is what podcast was I on back in 2024? And who is the host? I don't remember. And you're gonna have to like search through everything. The value would be and knowing the associations between those things. So that if I meet someone, later on interested in what we're talking about, I can be like, oh, gosh, yeah, that was the literal podcast recording here, I can see the association link, I'm just gonna send it to that person. And,

Greg Voisen
listeners, I'll let our listeners know that while you're speaking here, we're going to add into this some screenshots, so that you'll actually be able to see what Sam is talking about, because these are like little spider webs. Right, that show up? Yeah, that kind of like little I added when where all of these ideas came from, and it, it isn't something that I'm using very much I will tell you, but the reality is that you mentioned it, I think it's important that listeners know that it's a feature. Right. And, and that's what's important. Now, you know, look, you've got a lot of collaborators and competitors in this environment, I'm just going to call them collaborators, because I don't believe there's competition anywhere but one of the biggest ones, but it's kind of fallen off lately and they put AI end was really Evernote and you know, Evernote stuck in AI, you guys have a AI. But their AI basically is going to search everything in the the the vast array of notes that that I have in Evernote and I haven't gotten rid of Evernote. I still have it. But what I wanted to find out was how is how do you guys see yourself in the middle of this large arena of note taking apps, and in particular was something that was at its peak, probably one of the most used note taking apps, which is Evernote, which I think is trying to find their way again now. Because everybody's banging at their door.

Samuel Claassen
Well, and I mean, let's give Evernote some credit, right, like they are almost single handedly popular popularized digital note taking, and the concept of being able to access your notes across devices. So while I agree with like, kind of larger opinion of Evernotes decline, I mean, they were really the pioneers in the digital notates Oh, yeah. So, so I, you know, we like to give them credit and kind of like you said to we don't really think of them as other apps as competitors much because you just have to figure out what fits the best with your brain. And I think that's sort of how we see ourselves in the landscape with all the competitors is that it's a unlikely. Or let me put it this way, if if Evernote really appeals to someone in the way they think it's highly unlikely that reflect will, because they're just so different and how they function. Now, usually what happens is people come over from Evernote, and on day one, they're like, oh my gosh, I'm missing my folders, how do I do these systems. And then after the first or second week, they're like, oh, my gosh, I can't imagine going back. And that's when they realize the concept of a note taking app fitting with the way you think, now to give kind of an opposite example. So I'm a simple thinker, right. And I want to like that, I guess that sounds like a bad thing. But, you know, like, there's a lot of people out there, like, I have software developer friends, that they love making things as complex and as high functioning as possible. Like that is what they are looking for. That's how their brains work, someone like that they're gonna fit in a lot better with obsidian than with reflect, because they're gonna be highly, you know, into customizing things. They might even be hard coding their own integrations. Whereas like, we have an API, but it's fairly limited compared to what some of the other ones do. And so I think that's kind of how how we see ourselves and how we're fairly unapologetic in a good way about the product is that if someone doesn't like reflect, we're like, that's completely fine. You know, you should definitely choose the note taking app that fits with the way you think. And in that regard, I would love to see a lot more a note taking apps that operate in a similar way to reflect by which I mean, they're not a VC backed high growth company, it is more of a taste made product that is made in someone's vision and someone's taste. And I wish we had, you know, like a dozen of those small ones instead of five major players, because then everyone would have a nice kind of menu and selection to choose from that fits their brain, even though we're in a really competitive landscape. And note taking right now, I don't think we're anywhere close to that, because these products are just built to scale as far as they go. So I would struggle to even call notion a note taking app at this point. Because it just has so much functionality built in. And I still use notion I just don't consider it a note taking app, I use it, you know, for completely other purposes. How do you

Greg Voisen
rate yourself reflect app with relation to if you look at obsidian, which is why all the software engineers use it is the security? You know, we're taking our world and we're dumping it into these cloud based systems. And you're wondering, oh, well, how secure is that? You know, and I'm sure there are people out there who would want to use your application, but maybe want to make certain that there's some level of security regarding everything I'm dumping into this system? Can you give us some reassurance there?

Samuel Claassen
Absolutely. Yeah. So and our value security is like number one, I was talking with Alex the other day, we're working on a big speed improvement. And it's sort of like the priorities for a note taking app should be security as number one. Number two is basically like uptime, performance, stability, making sure like, I guess, like number one security, no one's gonna steal your notes, and no one's gonna see your notes or leak them. Number two, stability, you're not going to lose your notes. But you're not going to like open the app one day and all of your notes are gone. That's like the second most important. And then three behind that is like speed, performance functionality, and you start to get into that stuff. So security is always number one, reflect is has an end to end encryption. We undergo regular security audits, with our AI tools. So people often ask why we haven't more widely implemented AI and reflect where it just has access to your entire notes. And securities. The reason for that it's we don't want to have anyone's notes being sent, you know, back and forth between open AI because we use GPT. For now we use GPG for we just launched that today, actually. And so how we kind of met that balance and reflect is if you use the AI tools know that we are using open AI is GPT. And so anything you send or use that AI tool on, you know, open AI is not going to know that it's like Sam classes know, it's like all anonymized, but they do have access to that data. Now, we're looking forward to a day that I mean, I mean, this could happen any day now where we have a locally hosted AI that doesn't have to have any communication with open AI or any company and then we can give it full access to your notes. You can chat with all of your notes. Hopefully by that point, context. Windows are so large, they're basically irrelevant and you know, you can have unlimited data as being sent to the AI Yeah, But until then, it's a trade off. And so that's how we've met that balance. Some companies have just, you know, accepted that all of the notes are going to be sent. And that's a choice. And some people are like, you know, that's totally fine. Like, there's nothing in my notes that I really care about that with, let's

Greg Voisen
address something like, pretty simple. You know, I noticed that I can drag across a JPEG or PDF or JPEG. I haven't put a PDF in there, but I would assume that I could. So now you're really looking at expanding it even more, right? It's like, oh, yeah, I'm taking and putting a picture over there. I'm putting a PDF over there. I'm putting a P and G over there. I'm doing whatever it is, because of all of the things that you can drag into this. What is this? Where do you maintain kind of this? The balance between the offering the powerfulness of the of the features and keeping the user interface kind of uncluttered? And more intuitive? Right? Because I will say I don't find it. Because, again, how your brain functions, depending on what you've been influenced by whether it's Evernote, or it's Apple notes, or it's any of these others? It isn't initially and I told you this when I first started using it, I think this is where listeners out there need to hear me, you have to hang in because it's not extremely intuitive. Right at the onset. Now, I don't say that that's a bad piece of software that was designed. What I'm saying is, it's because of the minimalism of it, that you don't have all these other features that clouded all up. And you don't feel like someone's guiding you through the process. It's like you got to find it yourself. It's like, Where's Waldo? Right? Like, oh, yeah, he's over here. Oh, no, while those over there. Oh, he's here, you following what I'm saying? It's kind of like it's a Where's Waldo? Yeah, experience. But it's actually fun. If you're inquisitive, and you're curious, that's what you've got to be.

Samuel Claassen
Sure. And this is something that you know, for I handled growth, but really, I'm everything that's non technical, because I should have said, I'm the only non engineer on reflect. So. So like, everything from like customer onboarding, and stuff, that's all me. And that's one of the biggest challenges is, yeah, the interface is so simple. And it's not like you're trying to hide things. But also in a way you kind of are, because like, you don't want all of these buttons in front of your face when you're taking notes. And a great example is like on our mobile app, to keep things clean, the menu can actually slide a bit to the right, and there's more buttons. And like this is one of my continuous struggles is trying to teach people that you can like there's more buttons. So like to add an image, you just scroll the bar, and then I show people and they're like, oh my god, that's amazing. I had no idea that was there. So that's something I'm constantly trying to work on. If you're using reflect and you encounter one of these things, and you're like what the heck, Sam, I had no idea this existed, send me an email at Sam at reflect on app. And I will try and fix that in our onboarding because this is really challenging. To answer your original question, I mean, the, the balance of kind of keeping that minimalism, and the performance is mostly Alex just saying no to 95% of feature requests, or just waiting until he has to get beaten down on them. So I think tasks were like that. It's technically still in beta. But it's pretty much out of beta on the desktop, we still have to add it to mobile. And I mean, people really beat down Alex about tasks. They were like, This is core note taking, like, that is one of the core things, you do it in your notes. And he was like, yep, you're right. Like that's gonna we're gonna add it and he added it. But then other things like I brought up block level references. Can you still just like nope, not doing it, even though we have a bunch of people that say they want block level references. So that's the importance of of a product like this being a taste product. And having someone a founder like Alex, that is willing to say like, this is not a full democracy. Like this is a product built in my vision. If it was cracy, the app would be a nightmare.

Greg Voisen
Well, you'd obviously be making a lot more decisions about what you're going to add in what features you're going to add. Now look, looking ahead at new features, what we can expect from reflect, in your opinion, how will that trend towards keeping it minimal? And the digital organization evolve over the next few years as you see this app evolving? Because it is relatively new. And what role is reflect app going to play in In this overall world, we know it's not for everybody. So anybody listening here today, hey, I say go check it out, they give you a 14 day free trial, you really can't in 14 days, you literally can't figure out whether or not you're like this or not. But it is going to take you some time, you're going to want to spend time with it, you're going to want to feel comfortable with it, you're going to want to use it, you're going to want to integrate it in to your daily life. And I would say it for most people, Sam, the biggest challenge is transformation and change. And so the minute they come up with against something that doesn't go with the grain of how they normally do something, they literally go, well, this isn't any good anymore. You know, my 14 day trial is over. I'm done with you guys. What I really want to encourage my listeners is, don't take that attitude, take the attitude that this is something new to learn. It's something that will really help you abundantly in your organizing your life. But okay, Sam, so we've talked about all these features, or lack thereof, we've talked about reflect notes. And you know, you guys do have a future in this arena, which is vast and expansive, constantly growing, there's more people writing books about this, to go as another book coming out the end of this year, about more on the second brain and where this is going to evolve to. And I think as AI has become more and more accepted in our lives, how we organize. And I love it reflect on our life, and how we want it to be organized. You guys play a role. And as I said earlier, take the position that you need to spend time with this application, it isn't going to be an immediate like, okay, great. It's going to be oh, how do I look at this in a way that it can be more powerful for me more useful for me, and don't put resistance against it, but acceptance to it. And you will find over time that it will become part of your DNA. That's really what you want to become. So where do you see this going with Alex and, you know, things being adopted in the next year or so?

Samuel Claassen
Yeah, so now I'm kind of, I'm talking more for Sam now. Because, like, obviously, I'm not really sure what's going to happen technologically. In the next year. I mean, how fast things are moving, it can be literally anything. And I should also say for the users. If you ever, if anyone ever needs more than two weeks, we are happy to just extend the people's trial, because we totally get that note taking app is a big decision. And we're pretty anti tire kicking. So we want people to know that it's the right app for them before they commit. Now on where are things going, Oh, gosh. So this is one of my favorite questions. Because if I could just make any pitch for for everyone just start note taking and capturing everything day to day on some level, even if it's not with reflect. And the reason I feel so strongly about this is because it seems so obvious that where we are going is going to be having these immense AI assistants so we call reflects AI integration AI assistant, but I'm talking like full advanced assistants that can do effectively any knowledge task on behalf of you. So the people that have effectively exported their brain into some form of information that can be fed into AI are going to be at such an extreme advantage. I mean, it's gonna be nuts, if you can actually give an AI your entire brain of knowledge, they are going to be 100x more powerful for you than for someone that hasn't done that. So that's my first pitch, just even if it's not with reflect, start taking notes immediately if you don't already, because you will be at such a big advantage over anyone else in the very, very near future. Now, we're reflect individually where we're going, we're always going to keep prioritizing those values. So I talked about security, stability and performance, but also just this concept of frictionless and helping you to think better, that is what reflect is always going to make decisions around. So kind of the core thing I tell everyone, if you are just if you are looking for the easiest, most frictionless way to capture information, whether that is something you read an idea you have a thought people you meet anything, then reflect I firmly believe is the most frictionless way to capture that information. And that is our goal will be to remain that and get better and better at just making thought capture thought recall as frictionless as possible. And of course, AI is going to play a huge role in that.

Greg Voisen
That was a great summary. By the way, I appreciate that Sam it it, you know it, it's sometimes in words, which is what we're actually capturing, because that's our language that we're, you know, we're speaking to actually convey a message or idea or pick up a concept. You, you just really summarize that very eloquently. I want to thank you for that. And and the other thing is, is look, unless we were wired to an AI system, no matter what those thoughts were, and I know, we know, it's like put a chip in my brain and like ticket and boy, I could, you know, get it on paper. Right? I don't see it coming to that. But there's still this use a frictionless, you mentioned that like three or four times the friction as frictionless way to do it is to make it in your own pattern, how it can be the easiest to get it done. Right? How you work as an individual, how does your day bear it out to get this stuff done and captured? And I think, then the question becomes, as well, I'm capturing all this, then what do I do with it? Well, when you have those backlinks, and something comes to mind, it becomes so much easier to go back and reference the stuff you captured. And you have to equate a value in capturing to a value and recall to a value in an application that you can use the recall. So in other words, the value and capturing to the value to the recall to the value in what you do with that recall. And if I was one thing that I would tell people, if you link those three things, those are the most important things because everybody's looking to figure out how can they be more valuable? And how can they contribute? Well, if you can't think of something you can't contribute. But if you can think of something, and you became a master at that, you bring much more value to the table for the person who hasn't thought of that. So just think of it that way, reflect, reflect and put it down. And Sam, it's been a pleasure having you on insight personal growth from the desert of Nevada. This is the first time we've ever used a star link to actually have something I just saw a truck go by you in on the side here.

Samuel Claassen
Thanks. It's first human I've seen since I've been here.

Greg Voisen
Wonderful podcast. You're a great growth expert for this company. And collaborator. It's been a pleasure having me on inside personal growth. And for my listeners, we're going to put a link to the reflect app, you get the 14 day free trial. We'll also put a link to the YouTube channel where you can actually see Sam showing you how to use this and if you want to check all that out first before you get your free trial. Fine. If not, go up there and get your free trial and try this out. Sam, thanks for being on Inside Personal Growth.

Samuel Claassen
Thanks, Greg. This is great. Enjoy talking with you.