Your ideas deserve to leave your head.
Ideabud is a voice-first buddy that holds your ideas, asks the questions that help you dig deep on them, and helps you share your honest self with the world — one at a time.
Join the waitlistBeing built now for iOS, Android and web.
Why this exists
Nobody taught us how to share ourselves.
Don't talk about what you're working on. Don't announce it until it's done. Keep your ideas to yourself, keep your beliefs quieter still, don't make it about you.
Most of us grew up on some version of that. And then the real world turns out to run on the exact opposite. Artists share. Builders share. The people whose work finds its way to you are, almost without exception, the ones who let you watch them figure it out.
Sharing your honest self is a muscle. Most of us were simply never given one.
And then there's the other problem, the boring one: turning a thought into something readable is genuine work. Most good ideas die there — not from cowardice, but from a blank page at 11pm after a long day.
So Ideabud does that part. You bring the thinking; it asks the questions and carries the draft. What's left for you is the only bit that was ever really yours — being honest, out loud, today.
How it works
Fifteen minutes, once a day — run the way a real ghostwriter would run it
Say it badly
Voice or text, whenever it lands — cooking, walking, right before sleep. One line is enough. It gets saved as a seed, and it will still be there in three weeks when you're ready for it.
It shows up already thinking
It doesn't open with a blank page or a menu. It arrives with a hunch — "you started something about taking a U-turn and never finished it. Want to?" The menu is only there for when you say no.
One question at a time
It goes for the moment, not the topic: when, where, who said what. It follows the part you're least comfortable with rather than the part you've rehearsed. And it asks what the thing actually cost you — the question nobody volunteers an answer to.
It reads it back, and you cut
"Here's what I heard. Did I get it right? What would you protect?" You'll delete a third of it and move the real point to the front. This is the moment the idea becomes yours again — and it's the step most writing tools skip entirely.
Then it writes — in your words
The draft gets built out of your transcript, not a summary of it. The phrases you said well survive word for word. It decides what the idea wants to be — a short post, an essay — instead of asking you to pick a format before you know how big the thought is.
It keeps score
It remembers that you circle the same question every few months, and which phrases are yours. Session twenty is better than session one, because by then it knows you.
Every idea stays, so this is also just where your ideas live. Scheduling and publishing are coming later.
Why it sounds like you
It writes in your words. Literally your words.
Most AI writing tools summarise what you said and then generate something fresh from the summary. That's the whole reason the output always reads like it's about you rather than by you.
Ideabud builds the draft out of the transcript itself. When you say a phrase well — and on a walk, talking, you usually do — that phrase survives into the draft word for word. Its job is selection, ordering, and the connective tissue between your good bits. Not authorship. That stays yours.
And the draft isn't really the product. The reading is.
What makes anyone open up is being seen accurately. So the turning point of every session is the moment it hands your own thinking back to you and says: here's what I heard, did I get it right, what would you protect? It will tell you when it thinks you've buried the better idea. A ghostwriter who only ever agrees with you is no use to anybody.
What it's not
This is not another place to perform.
- —Not a blank page waiting for you to be clever at it.
- —Not a dropdown asking whether this is a tweet or a blog before you've even worked out what it is.
- —Not a summariser that writes about you — the sentences come out of your own mouth.
- —Not a notes app where good thoughts go quietly to be forgotten.
- —Not a feed, not a follower count, not a place to perform.
It's one conversation, at the end of your day, with something that remembers who you are — and does the typing.
What Ideabud believes
The ideas this whole thing is built on
Show your work
Austin Kleon's idea, and the spine of this app. You don't have to be a genius, you have to be findable. Share the process, not just the finished thing.
Perfectionism is the enemy
Doing something regularly gets you far closer to the thing you're reaching for than waiting on the one perfect post. Derek Sivers built a life on shipping the unglamorous version.
One day as a unit
Not a five-year plan. One day. Something small, honest, out of you and into the world — and then tomorrow, again.
Get it out of you first
Morning pages, brain dumps, stream of consciousness. The thinking happens in the saying. You can't edit what was never let out.
Sharing is a muscle
Nobody was born with it and almost nobody was taught it. Like any muscle, it only grows one way: used, a little, most days.
Honest beats impressive
The half-formed, still-figuring-it-out version is the one that reaches people. Ideabud is built for that version, not the performance.
A letter from the maker
I'm building Ideabud because I needed it.
I have always had ideas. Things I noticed, things I believed, things I was in the middle of making. And for most of my life they stayed exactly where they started — in my head, in a notes app, in a voice memo I never listened back to.
It wasn't that I had nothing to say. It's that I'd never practised saying it. Where I come from, you don't talk about what you're working on until it works. You don't say what you believe if it might be wrong. So I'd wait for the idea to be finished and impressive, and it never was, and so nothing ever got shared.
What finally changed it for me was small and unglamorous: someone asking me a good question, and me answering out loud. That's it. The idea was always there — I just needed somebody to pull it out of me one layer at a time.
So that's what I'm making. A buddy that holds your ideas, remembers them, and asks you one question at a time until the thing you actually meant is sitting there in the open. And then — this is the part I kept needing — it writes the draft. Not from nothing. From what you just said, the way you said it.
I used to think handing the writing over was cheating. I don't any more. The courage was never in the typing. It was in saying the true thing out loud, and then not deleting it. Ideabud takes the labour and leaves you the honesty.
Do that most days and something shifts. Not because you got better at writing, but because you got used to being honest out loud. That muscle is the whole product.
Fifteen minutes a day is the whole ask. Not a posting schedule, not a content calendar. Fifteen minutes with yourself, out loud, the way you'd sit with a person whose job is to get the good thing out of you.
I'm building it from the Himalayas, alongside WhatsHappening. I think of them as two rooms. That one is the therapy room — where anything can come up and you go inward. This one is the studio: the room where the artist works, and where the work finally leaves the building.
Abhinav Rai
abhinavrai.com
Start before you're ready
Ideabud is being built now, for iOS, Android and web. Leave your email and I'll bring you in early — and tell me what you've been meaning to write.
Form not loading? Open it in a new tab.