Software for stationery lovers
How software might learn from paper clips, & other thoughts 🐷📎
Merry Christmas, everyone!! 🎄
It’s December 26th, I’m at home and cozy, and over the last few days I’ve had a blast finishing up my 2024 journal and finalizing my Techo Kaigi for 2025. Those would have been perfect topics for this last newsletter of the year, BUT!!! I decided I had another story to tell!
If you follow Pouch Studio on Instagram, you might have seen that I launched a software tool a few weeks ago! It’s called Hobonichi Journal Helper, and it’s a free tool that I made that lets you preview, crop, and resize photos for your Hobonichi journal.
Check it out here:
✨ https://www.journalhelper.com/hobonichi ✨
It’s a very small tool, and intentionally so 🌱
Today I want to share with you what I think it means to build software for paper lovers, or more specifically — software for stationery lovers. It’s the thinking that led to the creation of this tool, and the inspiration fueling me as I build software in 2025.
I hope you enjoy! Have a wonderful rest of your holidays, and see you in January!! 🎊
♡ vrk
PS: If you’re sad I’m not talking about my 2024 journal + Techo Kaigi today, don’t worry!! I’ll be posting those updates on the Instagram, and this miiiiight even become the topic of January’s newsletter…. I don’t plan my newsletters that far in advance though 😆 We’ll see what January brings! ☃️
⚡️ Oddly specific software
It was Saturday, November 30th, I was riding the subway on the way to meet some friends for brunch, when suddenly — out of nowhere — I knew what I needed build! And more importantly, I knew why.
Hobonichi Journal Helper is not a new idea I’ve had, and it’s not even that ~interesting~ of an idea.
It’s a tool that helps you make, SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY, journal layouts that look like this:
I love journal layouts like this, and — prior to Hobonichi Journal Helper — there wasn’t a special tool to help you make layouts of this style. You’d have to find a way to resize and crop each photo you want to use, then print them out and hope for the best when you sat down to arrange the tiny photos in your journal.
What if there was a software tool that let you select photos you wanted to use, crop them to size, preview it in your Hobonichi, and print all when done? It would make this experience 100 times nicer!!
It’s an obvious idea, but I had been reluctant to build software for such a niche use case.
This problem was SO small, SO oddly specific. It’s not just limited to journals or even Hobonichi journals, but the monthly pages of Hobonichi journals. By design, its most passionate users would probably use it AT MOST, once a month.
Why would I bother to build software for this? Almost reflexively I would dismiss it: Yeah it’s too niche, I’ll come back to this later.
But in that fateful moment on the subway, I had sudden 3-way realization:
🚙 For stationery lovers, there’s no problem too small!
🐷 There’s life from 1000 paper clips
🎮 A good demo is a polished glimpse
… and from that moment, I knew how I wanted to build software for stationery lovers.
Allow me to elaborate!
🚙 No problem too small
Working in tech, I was taught to avoid working on problems that were too small. There are plenty of neat ideas, but at the end of the day, you gotta think about, “How many users will this affect?” If it’s not a big enough problem, there aren’t enough potential users, and if there aren’t a lot of potential users, then it’s not a problem worth solving.
Very logical, yes? So logical that it’s easy to be fooled into thinking this is the “correct” approach.
But then for some reason, sitting on the subway, it finally dawned on me:
“Too small of a problem”?? This concept does not exist in the land of stationery!!
To show you what I mean, here’s a roundup from JetPens on “oddly specific stationery:”
The first example is the Sakura Mixline Underline Highlighter, which lets you highlight and underline at the same time:
If you’re unfamiliar with products like this, you might think they’re silly novelties you buy for the idea rather than the function.
Like… do you really need to highlight and underline? Even if this was your preference, couldn’t you just buy a separate highlighter and a separate pen?! Is it that much effort to switch between pens? It’s so much more useful, more practical, more logical to have them separate. Right??
But I gotta say, as a stationery lover, my gut reaction to this pen is…. Cool!!! I never thought about underlining my highlights… should I try it?
And I find that interesting — this is a very opinionated tool, and an opinionated tool provides built-in inspiration for how to use it.
What are you gonna do with a pencil? I dunno.
What are you gonna do with a Mixline Underline Highlighter? Oh my mind is racing with ideas!! I could highlight some sentences, create headers, I could make cute forms with this…
There’s a second aspect to these ultra-specific tools, too.
Later in the video is a tool I do own, the Midori Eraser Dust Mini Cleaner II:
It’s a small plastic car that you can use to sweep up eraser dust or other small debris on your desk.
I can attest first hand: I use my Mini Cleaner regularly! I draw a lot, and erase a lot, and when I just swept up the eraser dust with my hands, pieces would fall to the floor, get smushed into my floor by the wheels of my desk chair, which was annoying to clean up… Therefore the Mini Cleaner, a device that helps me keep my floors cleaner by keeping my desk cleaner? Felt like a practical purchase to me!
I think it’s the allure of products like this — it’s not a gimmick; it’s a thoughtfully made tool for a particular person, a particular problem in mind.
Whether I’m its target customer or not, I can appreciate who it’s for and why it was made, even if it’s not for me. I’m probably not buying a Mixline highlighter, but I respect the product, and its mere existence has inspired me.
But when I AM the target customer — like in the case of the Mini Cleaner — it truly feels like a miracle! That someone saw my problem, and invented a way to solve it just so. I feel a small, invisible, but warm connection to both its creator and all its users. It’s a tool so specific that simply by using it, we’ve got something in common.
🐷📎 A stationery collection
The question was posed to me: Would a stationery lover buy one 3-color multi-pen, or 3 individual pens, one of each color?
And the answer, of course, is C) All of the above!! I’ll take the multi-pen and one of each color, please 😆
Which is to say, I think stationery is a “yes, and” culture — for better and worse!
Stationery lovers tend to curate a large collection of analog tools and stationery. Similarly, stationery brands tend to produce a large catalog of products, too.
The Midori Mini Cleaner is not Midori Japan’s only product — far from it! The brand has hundreds of products:
Software companies take the opposite approach. They often build one massive product, to the point that the product and company name is one and the same — for instance, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb. Even when if there is a suite of products, like from Microsoft or Google or Adobe, each product is still huge enough to be is own standalone business.
But why? It’s certainly one approach to building software, but it can’t be the only way.
What would it look like for a software company to instead to try a model like stationery? To produce potentially hundreds of tiny software apps, each carefully and thoughtfully made — as special-purpose and opinionated as, for instance, these paper clips by Midori:
There is a lot of aggression baked into tech culture, which especially comes to light when discussing products of the same category. In my career as a software engineer, I worked on both Google Chrome and Arc Browser. When I worked on Chrome in 2010, the question was, “Will Chrome be the IE-killer?” When I worked on Arc over ten years later, the question was still, “Will Arc be the Chrome-killer?” Even when we aren’t talking about software murdering each other, still the word — and goal — is “domination.” Who is the dominant browser? This competition for dominance is recapped on the Wikipedia page entitled, Browser wars.
In the stationery world, there’s a rich ecosystem of products — hundreds, maybe thousands of variations of something like a paper clip: a product with the same narrow focus, same goal, trying to solve the exact same problem — and yet these products seem to coexist peacefully.
Somehow I don’t think this pig is trying to declare war on the paper clip:
Is our little 🐷 even a “competitor” to the 📎? I’m not sure if I’d describe it that way! Competitor or not, I feel like they’d be friends, hanging out, appreciating each other’s unique qualities.
I’m interested in creating non-warring software, where variety is celebrated, and “a different approach to the same idea” is seen as a like-minded friend rather than an enemy to destroy. This goes hand in hand with a yes, and culture — when there’s room for you, there’s little need to fight for survival.
🎮 A polished glimpse
I love playing video games and I watch a lot of cozy gamers on YouTube. My favorite channel is @JoshsGamingGarden.
Josh plays lots of indie farming games, and he notes that many first-time game developers make this same mistake: They want this game to be their DREAM game, and so they try to include in it EVERYTHING they ever wanted. Then they release their game as a demo or in Early Access as a wide-but-shallow experience where most of the game is there, but it’s all like 25-50% complete.
Whenever this happens, Josh says, “I feel like a demo should be a very polished, but small portion of your game.” When you have a game that is incomplete in all areas, it’s not a good experience, and it’s hard to get a feel for what the full game is going to be like. In comparison, a narrow-but-deep sliver of a game is a much more compelling introduction!
A game that gets this right is Super Farming Boy. The demo is only a few hours long, but EVERYTHING presented — the the visuals, the dialogue, the gameplay — is highly polished, and you leave with a strong feel for what this game will grow up to be.
Truthfully, I empathize so much with those indie game developers. Hobonichi Journal Helper is not the complete version of the software I want to create, not at all!! Ughghgh I want to launch so much more than this! It’s frustrating to launch something that feels like 0.01% of what I set out to do.
But I agree with Josh! It’s worth limiting myself in scope, both to make its completion more feasible and to most effectively communicate the type of thing I’m trying to build.
🚃 Following my zoomies
So — back to November 30th, back to the subway!
I sat on the train and I had these 3 simultaneous thoughts. I realized that this simple unclever idea for a tool, i.e. Hobonichi Journal Helper, embodied the spirit of these 3 insights:
🚙 It’s a super specific tool designed to solve a super specific problem
🖋️ It’s a tool that’s intended to be one of many, rather than THE ONE tool that does everything
🎮 It’s a narrow and focused demo for what I am trying to do as a whole
It felt like a 4-D epiphany!! And consequently, I got this powerful urge to DROP EVERYTHING AND BUILD JOURNAL HELPER…
…WHICH GAVE ME A MINI CRISIS! Journal Helper was NOT my plan for December!! I was planning to focus on Pouch Issue 2 in December, and Pouch aside, I had been developing a totally different piece of software-for-journalers lolll, whose development I was going to pick back up in January.
Do I stick to my original plan, or do I follow this surge of inspiration?
At my past tech companies, I know exactly what I would have done: The original plan, of course!! This was a fun idea that should be backlogged. It’s not urgent enough to change my priorities. I should let the emotion pass and govern myself by logic.
But earlier in November, I had a memorable conversation with an artist friend I admire. In it, she mentioned how she gets the “productivity zoomies,” where she feels a burst of sudden inspiration, and that energy would propel her to be absurdly productive in a short period of time, like “designing an entire sticker line at 2am” sorta thing. It was a style that really worked for her. As she talked, it occurred to me how deeply I recognized the feeling she described, yet how rarely I let myself work off that feeling.
I decided: This time, I’m gonna follow my zoomies! I dropped everything, and I created Hobonichi Journal Helper in 10 days1, from the spark of the idea on November 30th to posting the Instagram announcement on December 10th. Only then did my soul find peace. Zooming was the right move!
I won’t always be building-by-zoomies — my artist friend doesn’t do that, either — but it’s something I want to incorporate more in my practice. Impulse shouldn’t always win, but neither should restraint.
📝 Software for paper lovers
As some of you know, I embarked on this sabbatical in July 2023, originally with the sole intention of building software for paper lovers. As most of you know, that’s not how I ended up spending my time! Instead, I’ve been leveling up my design skills, taking drawing classes, I started a zine store, and I launched my pride and joy, Pouch Magazine. None of this was planned! These projects emerged after having uninterrupted time to follow my passions 💖
But — y’know what’s weird, maybe? — I’ve never thought of this as not on the path to building software.
Back in August 2023, I mentioned needing to level up my non-software skills in order to level up my software-building skills. This was true, and I felt the difference as I built Hobonichi Journal Helper: I’m a lot faster and tbh a lot better at creating the tools I want to create!
But also: As a person who respects analog mediums equally to digital ones, why would I limit myself to creating software? Why not make some stickers? Why not draw a thing, if I want to? Why not make a magazine?
In the same way that I will reach for my Kokuyo Pasta Markers one day, and my Pentel MatteHop Pens another… I want to reach for “coding” as I would any other tool in my toolbox. As any other pen in my pouch!
With Pouch Studio, I hope to publish magazines *and* software. I’ve focused on Pouch magazine in 2024, but I’m excited to expand the software side in 2025 and beyond. I want to build independent, community-minded software that emerges from a reverence for pen and paper ❤️🔥 Software worthy of the stationery community that I love so dearly!
Thanks so much for reading today’s newsletter! And thank you to everyone who has supported me and Pouch Studio this year. I’m so moved and grateful to each and every one of you 🙏 Writing and creating for this wonderful community has been the greatest privilege of my career.
Rest well this holidays, and I’ll see you next year! 🎄☕️
In case unclear: I didn’t use AI tools for this. No Pouch Studio products have been nor will be created with AI, software or otherwise. There’s more to say on this, but it’s a big topic (and a rather draining one), so I’m containing this to a footnote today! Will write more on this in the future when I have the time and energy.
I admire your journey to build products for people intentionally and in opposition to the logical, but not necessarily correct approaches of Big (and not so big) Tech focusing on problems for the masses and dominating in their product spaces. I think solving problems for niche areas and markets can build really loyal customers who are loyal because they feel seen and heard.
I love your perspective :)
I've been building and re-building the same digital journalling application. In my latest version I added a button that just hides all the textboxes so you can use it as a reference for writing on paper instead of the app.
Computers are fun and helpful, but not everything needs to be computers.