A phone app for catching ideas · Private beta on iPhone

The best idea you had this week arrived while you were doing something else.

Driving, mid-take, hands full. Sing it, say it, or snap it in about four seconds — no title, no folder, nothing to decide. Seeds keeps it somewhere you'll actually find it again, tells you what it connects to, and gives you a place to work on it until it's real.

Ask for an invite Private beta on iPhone

01Catch itTalk, type, or snap a photo. Four seconds.

02Find it laterTranscribed and searchable from the moment it lands.

03See the connectionIt tells you what an old idea has to do with this one.

04Work it outTalk it through and keep what mattered.

Why it exists

Ideas keep bad hours

Driving

On a job site

Out walking

Half asleep

Over coffee

Mid-conversation

They show up on the highway. Halfway up a ladder. At eleven at night with the lights already off. Never at a desk, never when you're ready, never when both hands are free.

So you sing it twice to lock it in, and you tell yourself you'll write it down at the next light. Then the phone rings in the driveway, and by Thursday it's gone.

Or it isn't gone exactly. It's in your notes app, four hundred fragments deep, under a title you typed with one thumb at a stoplight. The notes app is where ideas go to be quiet. You'd have to remember it existed to go looking for it.

And catching it was only ever the first part. The one from March needed to still be findable in August. It needed to meet the two other things you thought about the same problem. And it needed somewhere to be worked on: a place to try a version, find out it was wrong, and try again without losing the trail back to why.

You never lost the idea. You lost the way back to it.

How it works

An idea keeps going after you catch it

Catch it

Hold the phone up and talk. Sing the line, play the riff, type a word, take a photo, share something in from another app. Nothing to name, nothing to file, nothing to tag. Four seconds and it's yours.

It saves the second you tap, with or without signal — basements, practice rooms, the far end of a job site. Nothing waits on a connection.

It stays findable

Every recording is transcribed and every photo described the moment it lands, so months later you can search for how you'd describe it rather than what you called it. Meanwhile it waits in the Pouch. Nothing turns red, nothing counts up, and every few days Seeds mentions quietly that a few are waiting.

A hummed melody is treated as its own kind of thing, not as speech. Seeds doesn't run a words-transcriber over your guitar and hand you nonsense — a riff stays a riff, findable by what it was, instead of becoming the fortieth file called New Recording 37.

It finds its relatives

Plant it in a garden and it sits with the rest of that thinking — Music, the book, things to build in the garage. The Cultivator goes further and tells you when a new idea belongs with an old one you'd forgotten. Gardens can be shared, so a band or a couple grows one together.

You work it out

Talk it through out loud on the drive home and keep the part that mattered. Record the take that finally works. Write down the one that didn't, so you don't spend November trying it again. Everything an idea collects stays with it in the order it happened, so when you come back the thinking is still there and you start from where you left off instead of from the beginning.

One idea, start to finish

Caught in a truck, finished in a song

Tuesday, 6:40pm

You caught it

Halfway home, the chorus finally lands. You hold the phone up and sing it. No folder, no title, no decision — the recording is kept before you've pulled into the driveway.

The Gather screen, part way through a voice recording.

The next three weeks

It stayed findable

It sat in the Pouch, transcribed and searchable, while you got on with things. Every few days Seeds mentioned quietly that a few seeds were waiting. Never how many, never twice in a row, and never in a way that made the pile feel like a debt.

The Pouch, holding several seeds that haven't been sorted yet.

A Sunday afternoon

It found its people

One tap put it in the Music garden, next to the other half-songs. Your bandmate is in that garden too, so it showed up on their phone without you sending anything.

A shared garden with two people in it, holding several seeds.

Over the next month

You worked on it

A second take with the bridge finally sorted. A photo of the lyrics off the back of an envelope. A note about why the first arrangement was wrong, so you didn't circle back to it in November. All of it attached to the same idea, in the order it happened.

One seed with several things added to it over time, each showing who added it and when.

Whenever you're ready

It found something older

You opened it to think it through, and the Cultivator pointed at a lyric you wrote in March and had completely forgotten. You wouldn't have searched for it. You didn't know it was there.

The Cultivator

The part that knows what else you've thought of

Seeds has an AI in it, and it has read everything you've kept. That's the part that matters.

So when you open an old idea and start talking it through, it can tell you that what you're describing is the same problem you wrote down in March, and show you which one it means.

A search box can't do that, because you have to already know what you're looking for. A general AI assistant can't do it either, because it has never seen the other four hundred things you thought of.

It asks questions, points out connections, and leaves the deciding to you. When the conversation turns up something worth keeping, one tap saves that part to the idea and throws the rest away.

Five minutes of talking something through is usually what moves it from a fragment you like to a thing you could actually start on Saturday. That conversation is the part most ideas never get, and it's the part that decides whether anything happens.

You can talk to it out loud, which matters when your hands are covered in something.

Ask for an invite Private beta on iPhone

The Cultivator naming a connection between two seeds and asking a question about it. — Tap to read it

Questions

The ones people actually ask

How finished is it?

Everything on this page is real and working, and we use it every day. It's on iPhone through TestFlight, which is Apple's way of handing out an app before it's in the App Store. Installing takes about two minutes. You'll still hit rough edges, and when you tell us about one there's a decent chance it's fixed that week.

What does it cost?

Nothing during the beta. We haven't settled on pricing after that, and we'd rather work it out with people using the app than guess at it now. Anyone in the beta hears well before anything changes.

Is there an Android version?

Not yet. The app is built with a framework that can produce one, so it isn't a rewrite, but it isn't a weekend either. Ask for an invite anyway and you'll hear when it exists.

Can I use it on a computer?

Soon. A browser version is being built right now for the sitting-down work: sorting a week of captures, and having the longer kind of conversation with the Cultivator where you'd rather type.

Will it nag me?

Once every few days at most, and only if something has been sitting a while. It never tells you how many are waiting, because a number turns a pouch of ideas into a backlog. If you ignore it entirely, nothing escalates.

What happens to what I put in it?

Your seeds are private. Someone else can only see one if it's in a garden you invited them to, and that's enforced by the database rather than by the app remembering to be careful. Recordings, photos, and documents get sent to OpenAI to be transcribed or described, and nothing is sold to anyone. The privacy page spells all of it out.

Can I get my recordings back out?

They're your recordings and they always will be. Right now you can play and share them one at a time, and a proper export — a whole garden's audio, in a form you can drop into a DAW — is the next thing being built for the browser version. We'd rather say that plainly than pretend it's already here. Nothing you put in gets held hostage to keep you using this.

How is this different from my notes app?

A notes app is good at holding things and bad at giving them back. Seeds is built around the second half: everything an idea collects stays attached to it, and the Cultivator has read all of it, so an old thought can find you instead of you having to remember it exists.

Does it help me actually finish anything?

That part is still you. What Seeds does is remove the reasons ideas stall: you can't find it, you forgot what you were going for, you don't remember which version you already tried. Talk a seed through with the Cultivator and you usually end up with a next step small enough to do, which is most of what finishing turns out to be.

Do I have to organize it?

No. Gathering is the only step that matters. Seeds that never get planted sit in the Pouch and stay searchable forever. If you sort nothing for a month, nothing bad happens.