Monolog: Intelligent Journaling with AI
A sophisticated, AI-powered companion that turns personal reflection into an interactive and insightful experience.
Client
Noli AI
Deliverables
Mobile app development
UX/UI design
Distribution consulting
A monologue, turned into a dialogue
Write freely, and the app reads back what you wrote: mood, recurring themes, and the threads worth picking up tomorrow.
01 About the project
Let it go, write it down.
Monolog is a journaling app for meaningful self-expression rather than note-taking: a safe, non-judgemental place to put thoughts, feelings and goals.
The challenge was to go past a blank page with a save button and build an actual partner for reflection: something that understands context, notices patterns, and gives back an insight rather than a word count.
Industry
Mental wellness
Personal development, in a category where trust matters more than features.
Scope
Product to store
Full-stack mobile development, AI integration, UI/UX and the database architecture.
Platform
iOS and Android
One cross-platform React Native codebase.
Core tech
GPT-4 and Supabase
OpenAI GPT-4, Supabase, TypeScript and Expo Router.
Write, then read yourself back
The entry screen, the takeaways and analysis drawn from it, and Noli, the companion that holds the context between sessions.
02 Noli
A companion that remembers what you already said.
Noli learns from a person’s own patterns rather than a generic prompt library. It detects mood and theme in real time, holds the context of earlier entries, and writes summaries that connect one week to the next.
The point is not that it replies. It is that the reply refers to something you actually wrote.
03 Four ways in
Different reasons to open the app deserve different doors.
Morning planning sets intentions, evening reflection reviews the day, brain dumps take unstructured thought as it arrives, and voice recording transcribes when typing is not possible.
Each mode is shaped for its purpose, so the app never asks someone in a hurry to face the same empty page as someone settling in for half an hour.
Suggestions, companion, weekly view
Prompts when the page is blank, Noli when there is something to discuss, and the weekly tab where patterns become visible.
04 Designed for serenity
A calm surface, because the content rarely is.
A minimal, distraction-free writing environment on a sage-green palette, with Romana for display and Akkurat for body, chosen for readability at length rather than for personality.
Light and dark themes both meet WCAG contrast, and motion and haptics stay subtle: acknowledgement, never celebration.
05 The stack
Serverless, so the product could stay small.
React Native with Expo Router, React Native Paper and Reanimated for motion, and the Context API for state.
Supabase provides Postgres, auth, realtime, edge functions and storage. OpenAI GPT-4 sits behind a dynamic prompt system, with PostHog for analytics, RevenueCat for payments and EAS for builds.
Shipped, not a concept
The live App Store listing. Everything above is running in a product people pay for.
06 Results
A first year, honestly reported.
Monolog shipped to the App Store and Google Play in 2025. The figures below cover its first year, taken from the app’s own RevenueCat and PostHog reporting.
4,900
Installs across iOS and Android
64%
Wrote a first entry in the opening session
420
Trial starts in the first year
29%
Trial to paid, giving 122 subscribers
$3.0K
Gross subscription revenue, first year
$24.80
Blended revenue per paying user
38%
Day-7 retention
19%
Day-30 retention, with 27% holding a weekly streak
Noli was doing its best work on entries people had already written, rather than getting them to write in the first place.
07 What I would change
The companion arrived after the effort.
Retention was the honest weak point. Day-7 at 38% is reasonable for journaling, but the fall to 19% by day 30 said something specific: the insight came as a summary, when the hard moment is the blank screen.
The next build moves the intervention earlier: a single contextual prompt on open, drawn from the last entry’s open threads, instead of a weekly digest. The streak mechanic also needed notifications to mean anything, and we shipped it without them, which is why 27% is a ceiling rather than a result.
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