Clipmate
We built Clipmate. Thousands used it.
Clipmate brought bookmarks, screenshots, and links into one place, with AI to help people find them again. We built it outside work and shipped it on iOS, web, Chrome, and Raycast.
I worked on product design, the full UX, feature decisions, and building the app, with shared product ownership.
THE STARTING POINT
It started with a conversation about notes.
One day, we got talking about how we took notes and kept important things organised. That sent us down a rabbit hole of apps. We kept finding a feature we liked in one and a better workflow in another.
Every missing piece meant another tool. Soon, the things we wanted to keep together were scattered everywhere.
We wanted one place for notes, bookmarks, podcasts, videos, tweets, articles, screenshots, and to-dos. Clipmate grew out of that ambition, but we built a few smaller apps along the way.
We’d been working on pieces of this already.
A Notes app helped us explore capturing and organising information.
Tweekmarks organised saved tweets, before Twitter offered bookmark folders.
A screenshot app helped make a crowded camera roll easier to search.
Scholarsound turned research papers into narrated audiobooks with chapters. Students and scholars could add notes and bookmarks, then return to them easily.
People showed interest in these apps. That gave us the confidence, and the experience, to try something bigger.
We kept listening.
We spent hours in Reddit threads and Twitter conversations, reading what frustrated people about existing tools and what they wished worked better. We stayed active there while building Clipmate.
At a time when AI mostly meant ChatGPT to people, we wanted to use it to help with something we struggled with ourselves: finding the things we’d saved.
// THE CORE DESIGN DECISION
Don’t make people save everything twice.
Our main design rule was simple: keep people’s existing habits. If they’d bookmarked a post, they shouldn’t need to open Clipmate and save it again. We used platform APIs to bring supported bookmarks from connected accounts into Clipmate automatically. People came back when they needed something, rather than to keep their library up to date.
BUILDING THE PRODUCT
Built for the places people already worked.
We shipped an iOS app, web app, Chrome extension, and Raycast extension, making Clipmate easy to reach from a phone, browser, or desktop.
Features
What we built.
The features brought saving, finding, reading, and organising into one place.
Automatic sync
Bring supported bookmarks from connected accounts into Clipmate. Keep saving where you already do.
Reader mode and highlights
Read without distractions, highlight passages, and add notes or comments.
Chat with your saves
Ask questions and get answers grounded in the items you’ve saved.
Search in your own words
Describe what you remember, even if it’s only a vague idea.
Self-organising folders
Sort incoming items into collections automatically.
Paste to save
Add links straight from your clipboard with ⌘+V.
Text to speech
Listen to saved articles.
FROM IDEA TO REAL USERS
Then we reached around ~5,000 active users.
We didn’t expect that response so early. Something we’d been figuring out together was now being used by thousands of people.
For me, this was a chance to take responsibility beyond the design files: help decide what to build, build it with the team, and see people use it.
THE HARD DECISION
Why we sunset Clipmate.
As usage grew, so did the cost of running Clipmate. We tried to raise funding from multiple sources, but couldn’t find a sustainable way to keep it going. Eventually, we decided as a team to sunset it.
That was hard. We were proud of what we’d made. It also taught us how much work comes after shipping, and why the costs need as much thought as the product.
// THE STORY IS STILL OPEN