This Simple Chat Bot Fixed My Life

The Problem With Reminder Apps

It’s the 21st century, we were promised flying cars, instead we need to click 7 buttons to set a single reminder.

There are so many websites, apps and chat bots out there that can help you with setting reminders. But for some reason they all make it more complicated than they need to be. Why do I have to click 7 buttons and navigate to 3 different pages in the app to set a reminder. Every time I tried one of these apps there was just so much friction that it just felt like a chore.

It’s Not About Time, It’s Friction

Less Friction = More Reminders. The purpose of the bot isn’t to save you 5 seconds every time you set the reminder. This is more about friction than it is about time. The harder your brain perceives setting reminders the less likely you are to set them.

And this is why I made Yastabot, so I don’t ever not feel like setting a reminder, it’s as easy as sending a message to my assistant asking them to remind me. Done, no buttons need to be clicked.

Once I started using Yastabot regularly a lot my stresses melted away. I never need to constantly cycle through my todo list in my head. I can trust that the bot will remind me to do something when I need to.

Fire and forget

Yastabot is a simple Telegram/Messenger reminder bot with a non frustrating and intuitive UI. The name of the game is “fire and forget”: Any format you send in will be processed and you don’t have to click any buttons to set a reminder.

Examples:

remind me at 4pm to pick up the kids from school
remind me in 30 minutes to leave for work
remind me every 2 saturdays to fill up gas
remind me every weekday at 9 am to open up the shop
remind me in 20m to check on the oven
remind me every end of month to pay the rent
remind me every hour until 9 pm to drink water

Personal

I have been working on Yastabot (telegram bot, FB messenger bot) for over 3 years now. The reason I started it all is when I read Getting Things Done. One of the main points in the book where around having a system you can trust. I got obsessed with this idea trying physical notebooks, virtual journals, notes apps, reminder apps. Until I realized that the smoothest experience possible that would allow me to not forget to do things is building my own reminder bot tailored to my exact use case.

I was working on it at a slow and steady pace and testing it on a limited user base to make sure any type of reminder or recurring reminder can be set simply. I have worked on focus groups with my users to ask them for the reminder formats that they would use in a normal conversation, all of these formats are supported today.

The Bot Today

I was able to get a few of my friends to use the bot, 2 of them have been using it over a year. They got so excited about it that they have been working on it with me for the past 4 months helping me grow it even more.

Today we have 1000 Weekly Active Users, an amazing milestone that was a long time coming. And I’m hoping we hit many more in the future!