Keeping up with more people than you can remember

Think of someone you meant to get back to this month. Maybe a friend who told you her mother was sick. Maybe a former client who said to check in after the summer. You didn’t decide to let it go. You forgot, because a lot was going on and your head only holds so much.

That’s the problem we keep coming back to. Past a few dozen people, memory sets the limit on your relationships. You can care about two hundred people. You can’t hold two hundred people’s news and plans in your head at once. So the people you see every week stay close, and everyone else drifts by default.

If you could remember more, could you be deliberate about more people? We think so, and that’s why we’re building Groupthink. It’s a memory for the people in your life and work.

What you know about someone is scattered

Right now what you know about a person lives in a lot of places. Some of it is on your calendar, in a meeting from six months ago. Some is in a text thread. Some is in notes from a call. Plenty of it is only in your head.

The usual fix is a contacts app or a CRM. You make a record for each person and type things into it. Most people try this once and stop. You already had the conversation. Writing it up again afterward is a chore, and it never ends.

So the first rule we hold ourselves to is that the record should fill itself in from what you already do. Connect a calendar and Groupthink adds the people you meet with, and keeps track of when you last met and when you meet next. Add the notetaker to a Zoom, Meet or Teams call and what was said becomes part of the record for the people in it. On a Mac you can import the text conversations you pick, and new messages in them keep coming in. When you want to add something yourself, you type one line, like “coffee with Theo, he is moving to Lisbon,” and it’s added to your relationship with Theo.

It isn’t zero effort. You still decide who matters and how often you want to see them, and you still add the coffee nobody recorded. But most of what you learn about someone ends up in the record without you writing it down.

People are people, not records

Most contact tools make you put each person in one box. Work or personal. Client or friend. Life doesn’t sort that way. Your college roommate becomes your cofounder. A client becomes a friend, and years later a client again at a different company.

In Groupthink a role belongs to the relationship, and it has dates. Ines can be a client at Acme and a friend at the same time. When she leaves Acme, you end that role and the friendship stays. You can see who someone was to you and when, which is closer to how you remember people anyway.

That’s also why work and personal live in one place. The people who matter to you don’t stay on one side of that line, so the memory shouldn’t either.

Remembering is the first half

A good record is worth something by itself. Before lunch with Maya you open her page and see what you talked about last time. The bigger payoff is doing something with it.

You can set how often you want to be in touch with each person, from weekly to once a year. Then you can see who you’re falling behind with while there’s still time to fix it. When a plan with someone is half made in your texts, you can pick a time, put it on your calendar, and get a reply to send back. You choose which people get that attention. The record makes the choice easy to keep.

The line we won’t cross

Groupthink helps you show up for people. It doesn’t do the relating for you. When you draft a note to someone, it opens in your own email app and you send it. When you make a plan, you copy the reply and send it yourself. Groupthink can draft the words, but nothing goes to your friends unless you send it, and that’s a line we mean to keep.

It’s yours

A record like this gets more useful every year you keep it. That only helps if you get to keep it. Much of what you know about people now sits inside accounts you rent, like a work inbox or a meeting app’s archive. Change jobs and a lot of it is gone.

Your Groupthink record belongs to you. You can export all of it whenever you want, as files you can open in a spreadsheet or read in a text editor. You can also connect your own AI assistant, like Claude, so it can look people up in your record and save what’s new. The memory goes with you into whatever tools you use next.

Where this goes

Everything above works today, and there’s more to build. The direction stays the same: one memory for everyone in your life, filling itself in, that stays with you.

We think a lot of people could be deliberate about many more relationships if remembering weren’t the hard part. If that sounds like you, come try Groupthink. Remember what matters to make every moment count.