I have a confession to make: for years, I abused Telegram.
I didn't use it just for chatting with friends or coordinating with colleagues. I used it as my primary note-taking app.
If you looked at my "Saved Messages" chat, it was a chaotic graveyard of half-baked ideas, grocery lists, links to articles I promised myself I'd read, and sudden bursts of inspiration.
I am a Notion user, and I love the power it gives me to organize my life and projects. But Notion demands an internet connection, and more importantly, it demands organizational overhead. When a thought strikes you while you're walking down the street, or camping, or cycling, you don't want to navigate through nested folders, create a new page, give it a title, and format it. You just want to get the thought out of your head before it evaporates.
I tried other tools. Google Keep looked simple, but it still asked me to organize things into digital sticky notes.
I loved Logseq's journal-like approach, which allows for quick entries without much overhead, but I am not a fan of its mobile app as it's quite slow to open. It's also fundamentally an outliner, which, if not careful, can lead to decision fatigue since I often feel the urge to structure my thoughts properly. Furthermore, individual items in Logseq don't have timestamps, which is important context for me when quickly capturing ideas throughout the day.
I have tried some others, which names I can't even remember because they were not scratching my itch, and provided nothing fundamentally new compared to other note-taking tools.
So, I always came back to Telegram. It was fast, it had a basic search function, and it synced across all my devices instantly.
It's Not Just Me
When I started talking to other people about this, I realized I wasn't alone. It turns out, abusing messaging apps for note-taking is a widespread phenomenon.
Look around productivity forums, and you'll find thousands of people doing the exact same thing. Some use Telegram's "Saved Messages." Others use WhatsApp's "Message Yourself" feature. Many developers set up private, single-user Discord servers or Slack workspaces just to dump their thoughts into different channels.
Why do we do this? Because messaging apps have perfected the art of zero-friction capture.
They are designed for System 1 thinking—fast, intuitive, and reactive. You open the app, you type, and you hit send. There are no titles to fill out, no folders to select, and no formatting menus to navigate. The interface gets completely out of your way.
But there is a massive downside to this hack. Telegram is, at its core, a messaging app. When you use it for notes, your private, brilliant ideas end up sandwiched between group chats, memes from friends, and work notifications. Your thoughts become cluttered, and finding that one important idea from three weeks ago becomes a frustrating archaeological dig.
More importantly, there is a concern about privacy. When you dump your rawest, most unfiltered thoughts into a cloud-based messaging app, you are handing over your intellectual property to a third-party server. Yes, the data is encrypted in transit and at rest, but you are still trusting a company with your most personal thoughts. For a true "junk drawer of the mind," that lack of sovereignty is quite concerning.
Building What We Actually Wanted
I realized I didn't need a better version of Notion. I needed a dedicated note-taking app that felt exactly like sending a message in Telegram, but without the noise of a social network and with the privacy of a physical notebook.
I wanted an app that:
- Worked offline so I could capture thoughts anywhere.
- Had zero friction, allowing for quick entries just like sending a text.
- Was local-first and private, ensuring my raw thoughts never left my device unless I explicitly chose to sync them.
- Offered basic organization or topic-anchoring that felt natural and unobtrusive.
- Acted as a bridge, allowing me to easily forward those raw notes to Notion or other apps for further processing.
That realization was the seed for Spillbox.app.
We built Spillbox.app to give you the speed and chronological flow of a chat app, but in a private, sovereign space designed exclusively for your mind. It’s a place where you can dump your unadulterated thoughts as fast as you can type them, knowing they are safe, searchable, and ready to feed your main workspace whenever you are.
If you've ever sent a text message to yourself just to remember something, Spillbox.app was built for you.