Goodnight Journal Introduction: Building the best online journal community

Goodnight Journal was launched on Jan 1, 2013 and has been serving over 100,000 members in the world. It started as a side project and became a full time job when I decided to revamp the app and community completely.

I quit my job to build the brand new app that makes writing journals much easier with the intuitive simple user interface that also works faster than ever. I wrote a blog article about my journey to build the new Goodnight Journal if you want to read more about it.

Another main focus that I have is to build the high quality community where all journal writers can connect and interact with each other. After running Goodnight Journal for 7 years with no membership fee and any advertisements, I noticed that it's very hard to maintain the app with good quality content. Spams and unconsidered comments were made every day which also cost me more time and money to maintain the app. To solve the problem and being able to fund the project for me to pay full attention to the app, I decided to implement a freemium model to the new app.

However, that does not mean you have to pay to use Goodnight Journal. You can still write as many private journals as you want for free that does not require any of your personal information besides email address. Because the data shows that most people write their journals privately and I really want Goodnight Journal to be the place for everyone to come and write at any time they want and as many as they want. You can still become a paid member if you want to support the community but It's entirely up to you.

While you can still read and like public journals in the community, writing public journals and commenting on them became paid features. This reduces the number of users to participate in the community but also the number of spams and low quality content. I learned that it is very hard to manage and maintain the community in a good shape especially when it’s free and anyone can write things anonymously.

Although most of the people were nice and respectful to others, there were still some who spoiled the entire community. It was often filled up with non-respectful content along with a bunch of spams that I have to manually filter out. I really want this to be changed and build a community that feels like home where you can still express fully and make comforting and cheerful comments to others.

Where you can get healed and re-charged and be excited to come. This will also allow me to run this app smoothly and implement more features to make journaling more fun. I know this won’t happen overnight and I will never stop working on it to make it happen over time. Please reach out to me if you have any issue paying for the membership fee. I would love to help you out!

There are many journal and diary apps out there that you can use. However, there aren’t many journal apps that also offer a high quality community where you can be motivated, inspired, and get connected with more people like you. Goodnight Journal is building that community. Beyond simple journal writing, we are building the community where all writers get motivated, inspired, and get connected with other writers and hopefully that will make your life better.

We took a first step but still have a long way to go to build the community and in order for me to get there, I need your feedback. Please feel free to check out Goodnight Journal and give us feedback on the feedback page.