Building Second Brain

AI native products coming out this year are very cool. However, most of them are just cool demos and I have barely gone to the same product twice. There is too much friction to try new products in a sea of products releasing everyday.

One of the first ideas I had when OpenAI opened up its API access for GPT-3 in 2023, was building an amazing notes app – something that automatically organizes and allows for querying. I procrastinated and rubbed it off as something too simple. But in 2025, when I look back, I noticed that the product need is still not solved. Notion, Obsidian, etc are too complex and are not made for quick note taking. They are made for documenting structured thought over a computer, not quick capture on the go.

While there are products like Google Keep and Apple notes, these are just blank pages that accumulate over time. I noticed one very interesting user habit when people store something. They use a self-chat app. If you think about it, chat has become a great medium for us to interact with software, it is super intuitive. And hence, most people maintain a self group/ self chat with themselves on whatsapp/telegram/slack, etc.

And while this offers great convenience when storing information, it is a huge hassle when you want to search over it. A lot of times I know I have saved something, but I don't remember the key words. I always keep a copy of my PAN and Aadhaar (Indian IDs) on my whatsapp self group for when I will need it later. And the time when I actually need it, I forget the file names I saved them with and am scrolling my media gallery holding up the line at the airport. Now, of course, I, as a user, can organize my stuff better with memorable names, but after a point, it gets too onerous.

Hence, I built Second Brain. It is exactly what its name is. It is a perfect store of memory of you. It remembers everything that you want to remember but cannot. It leaves up space for you to do the cognitive thinking and tasks that only you can do. And Second Brain builds and maintains the memory of anything you throw at it.

It reads and connects the contents of links, pdfs, images etc. – making meaningful connections that make querying incredibly powerful.
It has a sense of who you are, it remembers what you like, what your preferences are and adapts according to you over time.
It has a sense of time and the world. When you send vague reminders, it knows what that means and actually reminds you at the said time.
It keeps a tally of your tasks, and to-dos. You can check them off, add new ones, and get notified about stale tasks getting piled up.
It is super non-intrusive, it does not interrupt you when you save things, it does not need to have the last word – just like you would interact with your self-chat.

You can ask it for any deep rooted information from your memory and it will pull up exactly what you are looking for.

You’re at the airport and can’t find your vaccination certificate? Ask Second Brain.
You’re filing tax returns, can’t remember that section under which you claimed a rebate last year? Ask Second Brain.
You aren’t able to manage daily to-dos? Second Brain will do it for you.
Have an article, a pitch deck and a voice note related to the same thing? Next time you ask Second Brain about it, it would make logical relations and connections between them and give you a nuanced answer – just like your first brain does.

Second Brain builds a powerful knowledge graph for each user and connects concepts just like we do.

There are a lot of small edge cases that the second brain handles incredibly well. It took a long while to iron out everything to create a nuanced product that gets you.

While it may seem like just a whatsapp bot, what it really is, is a reflection of your own memory system. The goal with this one is to build the most powerful personal knowledge management system.

Soon, Second Brain will come to Slack and MS teams for you to store work related information right where you run your comms.

Also, a very exciting integration coming soon is integrating Second Brain with your favourite AI chat platform (ChatGPT, Claude etc…). This ensures that you don’t have to repeat yourself every single time. You carry your context with you, wherever you go.

Do try at secondbrain.ink, and please give me any feedback at @ken1roy