App inspires letter-writing for better connections

OF THE hundreds of text messages you send and get every month, how many feel special enough to keep?

Concerned that “people today aren’t expressing themselves as well as they did before,” Joelson Fabian came up with a way to send one-of-a-kind messages, without having to endure the long wait that snail mail usually entails.

Fabian, 25, and the design and development studio Symph have built OnlyNote, an app that lets you write and send letters on a mobile phone or tablet.

“We wanted to build something that offers the best of both worlds—a fast, simple and modern product dedicated to special messages that convey the same sentimental value of a real letter,” Fabian said. A few years ago, he mailed a postcard to a friend in Japan but realized that getting the right stationery, finding a post office close by, and finally getting the card delivered was “much more difficult” than he’d expected. He wanted a solution that would be as special as a letter—more moving than chat, email or e-cards—but also more convenient than snail mail.

At the recent Cebu Lit Fest, while surrounded by makers of postcards and graphic novels, he patiently explained how OnlyNote works: how each sender can write notes, attach a photo as a kind of stamp, and send each note on its way. No copy remains with the sender. Each participant gets five pages to start with, but every time someone clicks on an icon to thank him or her for a letter, the sender gets a fresh page.

“I think written communication, especially through letters, is very important because people today aren’t expressing themselves as well as they did before,” Fabian said.

“We are more connected now than ever, but recent studies have shown that people feel lonelier and more socially isolated than ever before…Letter-writing lets us focus on exactly what we want to say without the other person in the room (we are distanced from the recipient’s reaction), so it offers us the best outlet to send our complete and honest thoughts to someone else.”

Fabian has conceptualized other tech projects before. In college, he and some friends won an IdeaSpace hackathon with a social fitness app that allowed its users to run at the same time with other users from elsewhere, “like Temple Run or Waze with friends.”

A management engineering graduate from Ateneo de Manila University, Fabian said it took a team of three (a project manager, a developer, and a user interface designer) about four months to build OnlyNote. They received “amazing support” from Symph’s user experience specialist and web designers. Since its launch in December, OnlyNote’s iOS version (available on http://www.onlynote.io/) has reached nearly 500 users from at least 25 countries. It has also connected Fabian to new friends from Belgium, Indonesia, and the Czech Republic. Work on an Android version of the app is underway.

Fabian’s experience highlights how important a role collaboration plays in building new products or services to meet people’s enduring needs, like the need to communicate and connect. Reconnecting with a friend from high school, Symph co-founder and chief tech officer Albert Padin, helped him move OnlyNote from concept to execution.

“The greatest challenge in the beginning was finding good people to work with. More than just competency, you need to find people who you genuinely get along with, share the same values with, and believe in your idea,” Fabian said. (IDA)

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