Lalaland Journal | Our Story

What is Lalaland's
origin story?

It started off with a bad year
for Jeanette...

How Lalaland Started...

As usual, it started off with a bad year, specifically between 2022-2023, where I was hit by a truck of strange emotions and thoughts. Amidst the lows, I felt lost and unimportant, even after spending enjoyable moments with friends & family.

Questioning my place and worth became a nightly ritual, and my brain would pick at the little things that happened throughout the day to find evidence that I was unwanted and unnecessary.

"Questioning my place and worth became a nightly ritual"

To combat this, I began journaling to capture both the highs and lows. I also practiced writing short descriptions about the person I aspired to become.

Reflecting on past entries, I discovered how my self-perception could be way off at times, and to a rather large extent, I'd already achieved many of the milestones that I yearned to reach, but I just couldn't see it.

"I discovered how my self-perception could be way off at times"

I am privileged to have a close friend I could discuss these issues with and we talked about how if only we could have a clear memory of what happened without the sad filter on it, so we could escape the warped reality we lived in during the bad days. And if only we could also see what people close to us felt about our shared experiences so we wouldn’t get trapped in our own perceptions.

"if only we could have a clear memory... without the sad filter on it... so we could escape the warped reality we lived in during the bad days"

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This led me to the idea of a simple and collaborative journaling tool that we could use (and would keep using) to recall special events and use for introspection.

The means to the solution came to me easily: AI remembers things far more accurately and recalls them faster than us humans. It can also access and analyze an unfathomable number of separate events to draw out insights or simply summarise them easily for us to review.

The only thing left was then to make journaling fun and easy, for both personal and collaborative use with close friends (because a long diary entry every day is just too much for us). After some brainstorming, I decided that I liked the idea of being able to add chunks of disorganized information as and when, punctuated by images or videos, simply because that’s how it really is and journaling shouldn’t be curated.

I got to Figma and with my trusty dev pals, we built Lalaland which I am so excited to share with everyone. I truly believe we created a product that would help many people (me, included!) become more self-aware of our journey, strengths and weaknesses, and the richness of relationships in our lives.