Why Notka exists.

Hi – I'm Marek. One person, building Notka at night, next to a day job and a family. No investors, no growth team. Just me, and this.

Working on myself is something I genuinely enjoy – systems, habits, journals, years of them. The one thing none of them ever gave me was a second reading of my own week. I'd arrive at one interpretation and be sure of it; the people closest to me would offer a different one, and that other angle is where everything useful came from. Not advice – a different perspective on what I'd already said, with the conclusions left to me. That is the part I wanted on schedule.

It doesn't help that my head runs many threads at once – projects, hobbies, passions, people, half-finished ideas. A nonlinear mind doesn't fit a linear journal. My archive became a graveyard: hundreds of entries I was never going to re-read – old anxieties, abandoned plans, the person I was at 1am.

So I built what I needed: a journal that writes back. You talk – messy, thirty seconds or five minutes, wherever you are. Notka gathers the threads and answers with letters: your week, witnessed. Your month, its plot. Your facts, next to your opinions of yourself. That other angle, on schedule, from something that actually read all of it. You don't ask. It arrives.

Notka is actually older than it looks. In January 2025, on a holiday, I built myself a suite of fairly advanced Apple Shortcuts that did what Notka does today – caught my rambling voice notes, structured them, even folded in metrics from my Apple Watch. I lived on it for a year: hundreds of changes, watching the models get better – and learning that the prompts matter even more.

In December 2025, those shortcuts became Notka – and I've been its only user since. It helps me exactly as much as I use it – well and often – and it keeps getting better. I'm sharing it now because a concept that survived a year and nine months of daily use has earned the chance to work for someone else – and because it's only with feedback from people who aren't me that I can turn it into something truly premium. I've always wanted my work to help someone beyond me.

Here's what I won't bend on.

Notka is a witness, not a cheerleader. If every week gets a gold star, none of them mean anything. A hard week will read as a hard week – and when Notka says you've moved, you'll be able to believe it.

Your thoughts stay yours. Your voice is transcribed, then deleted – there is no bucket of recordings. Your words never train anyone's models. Export is free, and leaving is allowed.

No tricks. No streaks, no badges, no guilt screens. No countdown timers or fake discounts. Notka emails you when there's a letter worth reading – never to drag you back into an app. If Notka earns a place in your life, it'll be because the letters are good.

And honestly: with enough setup, a power user could get 60–70% of this out of ChatGPT, and I'd rather say that myself than let you work it out later. What doesn't survive being rigged up is the rest: letters that arrive without being asked, each one written out of the shorter ones below it, and a memory that notices something coming back for the third time when you've forgotten the first two. That remainder is worth more than its share of the percentage – it is the part that only works if it runs for a year without you.

Notka isn't perfect yet. But believe me – it will keep getting better, steadily, letter by letter. It's a slow business, on purpose: it doesn't need you addicted to survive. It needs to be good enough that a few thousand people are glad it exists.

That's the whole plan.