u/ArtificialSapien

On January 28th I was visiting family on a long-overdue vacation when my phone lit up. Amazon was laying off 16,000 of us. I was one of them.

I sat there for a while, watching my mom cook, trying to figure out what I was supposed to feel. Mostly I felt the floor of my old life drop out.

Then a stranger thing showed up. Dread. The thought of polishing a resume, doing six rounds of system design interviews, walking back into a corporate office, slack channels with 400 people in them, OKR docs, sprint planning, all of it. Honestly? I couldn't.

I'd been quietly building something on the side for sometime. I have ADHD. Diagnosed late, like a lot of us. I'd tried every planner, every notes app, every productivity guru with a TED talk. Setting up these apps was another task itself. Todoist wanted seven decisions before it would let me write down a thought. Notion wanted a template. Apple Notes was a graveyard. By the time I picked a folder, the thought had evaporated and the only thing left was the guilt about losing it.

So I built Blurto. The app I'd been wanting for years!

One tap on your lock screen. Or your watch face. Tap, talk, done. About two seconds from thought to captured. No folders, no tags, no interview. A little blue bird named Blurto catches whatever you blurt and automagically sorts it into the right place. Tasks, ideas, things to watch, places to go, the random observation you'd lose by lunch. Two gentle notifications a day, one in the morning, one in the evening. No streak shaming. No "don't break your chain" guilt theater. No dark patterns juicing DAUs.

I made it for me first. My brain runs faster than my tools, and I was tired of being punished for it.

A couple of days ago I did a tiny soft launch in r/ProductivityApps just to test the waters and make sure the servers wouldn't melt. The response was genuinely lovely and nothing exploded. So today I'm doing the real one.

Blurto is live on ProductHunt right now.

If any of this resonated, an upvote and a comment over there would mean a real amount to me. I'm not a 50-person team with a marketing budget. I'm one guy who got laid off in January, decided not to go back, and bet a year of his life on the idea that there's a better way to plan a day when your brain doesn't behave.

Try it free at blurto.ai. Roast it, love it, send me feedback. I'm in the comments all day.

Thank you for reading this far. Genuinely.

I tried Todoist and a bunch of other productivity apps. They're fine. But the friction got annoying fast.

Every time a thought hit, a task, a random idea, a thing to look up later, the app wanted seven micro-decisions before it would let me write it down. Which folder. Which project. Priority. Due date. Tags. Reminders. By the time I started picking, I'd already forgotten what was on my mind.

That's the part most planners don't get. When capturing a thought has friction, my brain stops handing them over. The thought turns into guilt about the thought I missed, instead of something captured I can actually do something with. So I don't only lose ideas, but my brain stops making them as much :(

At some point I went, "I'm an ex-Amazon software engineer with ADHD who just got laid off, this could be my next job!" So I started making Blurto.

I've been using it myself for a while now. iOS with an Apple Watch companion, Android. Here's what it does:

One-tap capture. Lock screen button, so you don't even open the app. Tap, talk, done. About two seconds from thought to captured. No folders, no tags, no interview.

Catches anything. Tasks, half-formed ideas, things watch, games to play, music to listen, the random observation you'd lose by lunch. No type-picker, no "is this a task or a note?" prompt. You blurt, Blurto catches and sorts.

Apple Watch complication. I get most of my best ideas mid-walk, and now I can catch them without pulling out my phone. Just one tap on my watch face.

Gentle review. Two notifications a day, that's the whole system. Morning: what do you want to commit to today, synced with your calendar. Evening: quiet reflection on what actually got done, one tap to push the rest to tomorrow. No streaks. No "don't break your chain" guilt theater.

A bird named Blurto. Calm blue, orange beak, puts on tiny headphones when you tap the mic. Sounds silly, but it makes the app feel alive instead of like filing tickets into a database.

No streak shaming. No ad-driven dark patterns. I made it for myself first, so the goal was always "does this catch the thought before it evaporates," not "how do we juice DAUs."

Routines, a browser plugin, and a desktop app are coming next. Those are the gaps I kept hitting once the basics worked.

If your brain runs faster than your tools and you're tired of planners that punish you for having a fast brain, give it a try. Happy to answer questions and receive advice on how to reach my customers and how to improve it.

blurto.ai