Personal Relationship Manager & Diary
I haven’t actively worked on Votre itself since 2017. I have rebraned it to Formable and am still working on that.
I also wrote an article explaining my journey from Votre to Formable.
Votre is still very close to my heart. It’s a personal relationship manager, or personal CRM, which allows you to organize information about the people in your life.
We all forget things about other people. We can’t even remember the names of all the people we meet. Not only remembering names, but also little details about others can make you a better friend. Remembering previous conversations is important for having better ones.
When I set out to design Votre (which was many months before I started coding), I asked myself how I would want to handle such a task. The system should make it easy to enter and read all the information I want to remember about people. I initially thought of an extended contact app, somewhat similar to Monica, which launched a year later.
But my gut feeling told me that entering data about people into a system similar to a spreadsheet wouldn’t be fun and either lack in depth of features or have millions of possible fields. I knew I had to make it customizable in some way.
I think that the easiest way to input information about people is by writing about your day, by journaling. Thus Votre came to be a diary application, where you can tag people and later retrieve where you mentioned them.
You can @-mention people, so that you can later view everything that you wrote about one person.
It’s best to build a good habit and write every day.
Joseph hosted a great party yesterday. His new girlfriend is Marie. I found out that Joseph is allergic to Onions.
Joseph is an old friend of mine. We met in Kindergarten and are still friends today. He loves coffee.
As far as I know, the term personal CRM wasn’t coined when I started Votre, but nowadays there are dozens of solutions to that problem.
Bidirectional linking—like it’s possbile in Votre—has also found its way into many more products, like Roam:
