Why I Built Mnemo
This whole thing started when I got really into the Red Rising series earlier this semester. I buried myself in my room and spent hours a day just getting sucked into the series. I loved it so much that I finished the first trilogy in just 3 weeks. In an effort to find books similar to the series I recently fell in love with, I discovered The Count of Monte Cristo. This book was significantly harder for me to read as I hadn't really been a regular reader of classic literature. While I had heard amazing things about the book online, I struggled to reflect and take away the same lessons others discovered in their reading.
In looking up ways to get better at this and pre-existing tools, I found nothing. I thought this was an area that others struggled in too and took it upon myself to see what I could build as a solution.
The problem I kept running into
I had plenty of thoughts about the material that I was reading. Every time, I would finish a chapter and have an instant reaction to something. What most people usually do (myself included) is either nothing (and let the thoughts die away) or open Notion, stare at a blank page not knowing where to start, and close it (also letting the thought die away).
For me, this was way too open-ended to actually start. There was nothing to guide me or push back against that led me to new insights on some of the best works in human history.
What made this worse for me is that I'd see people on X or Reddit discussing these books, and they'd have real opinions and arguments. I hadn't even considered any of these takes, nor had they even remotely occurred to me while reading.
Why nothing existing worked
I tried a few things. Kindle highlights are a graveyard — I don't think I ever once revisited any of mine. Readwise is good at making sure you remember quotes, but that's not really what I needed.
AI reading tools felt closer but went in the wrong direction. They'd summarize. They'd answer questions. They'd do the thinking for you, which I felt stripped the entire purpose of reading in the first place.
I was looking for the following things:
- A framework for reflection giving me many different types and methods to engage with and reflect on what I had just read.
- Specific Socratic questions relating to the material I just read to connect it to my own life, other reading sessions, and prompt me to think deeper.
- (Ideally) an insanely cool mind map connecting my different reading sessions together to build ideas over many sessions and make it easy to look back at previous ones.
To my knowledge there is nothing that comes close to this... for now.
Where my background came in
I spend a lot of time thinking about knowledge management. I'm a Notion power user and have been using Obsidian as a second brain for a while now, recently adding Claude Code into the mix. The graph view in Obsidian looks very impressive (and was a huge inspiration for this app) but most people's graphs are a mess of unconnected nodes because linking notes is work you have to do manually and it's easy to just... not.
I also work with AI every day, and the Socratic method kept coming back to me as the right mental model. The reason a good question works better than a blank page is that it gives you something to react to and an easy place to start from. A tricky part of this, however, is avoiding basic and vague questions. I wanted to avoid low-quality questions like "what themes did you notice?" or "how did this chapter make you feel?" that don't really unlock anything. I wanted something that actually challenged my read of the character or uncovered why I tended to sympathize with them. Something that pointed at a contradiction I might have glossed over. The kind of question a well-read friend would ask you at dinner.
That's what Mnemo generates: specific, slightly provocative questions drawn from what you actually wrote about your session, plus everything you've written before.
The map piece
The other half of the app is a thought map. Every question you answer becomes a node, and over time the app finds connections between your thoughts in the background. This means that the longer you use it, the more it starts to look like your actual mind: how you think, what you keep coming back to, where your opinions have shifted.
As mentioned eariler, the Obsidian graph was the obvious visual inspiration here. People already understand what that kind of map means and why it's useful (in addition to Obsidian being all the rave on GitHub agent memory repos). The clear problem with manual graphs is that it only gets good if you're disciplined about manually linking notes, and most people (myself included) aren't. Therefore, Mnemo builds the connections for you. It's also just genuinely cool to look at. Watching a new edge appear after a session, connecting something you wrote about Dantès to something you wrote about Raskolnikov two months ago — that's the kind of thing that makes the habit feel worth keeping.
Why I'm building this now
I'm 19, studying CS at UBC, and I've been working in AI for the last year. I have the problem. I have the background to solve it. And I just wanted the tool to exist.
There's a real moment right now where good LLMs, the Obsidian/PKM cultural wave, and a general frustration with shallow reading habits are all overlapping. That combination makes something like this both possible to build cheaply and useful to a real audience. I don't think that window was open two years ago.
Mnemo is in active development. If you read seriously and have hit the same wall sign up for the waitlist at trymnemo.net. If you want to talk about the product, books, or anything else, you can find me on LinkedIn.
The most underrated part of reading a great book is forming an opinion you'd actually defend. That's what I'm building toward.