Latest / Solopreneur Sessions with Fexingo: One-Person Businesses, Freelancing, and Independent Work / How a Solopreneur Used a Tool Called Mem to Replace Her Second Brain
Transcript
- Lucas: There is a type of productivity advice I have become allergic to. It is the kind that starts with 'you just need a better system' and then describes a seven-step ritual involving colour-coded folders, a daily review, and a separate app for every life domain. Luna: Right. The implication is always that the problem is you — you lack discipline, you are not organised enough. Lucas: Exactly. But a solopreneur I came across recently — her name is Maya, she is a freelance UX researcher based in Portland — she took the opposite approach. She did not build a better system. She replaced her system with a tool that did the organising for her. Luna: Okay, I am intrigued. What was the tool? Lucas: It is called Mem. It is an ai native note-taking app — think of it as a second brain that actually remembers stuff so you do not have to. Maya had been using a combination of Apple Notes, a few Google Docs, and a physical notebook. She was constantly losing client interview notes, spending ten to fifteen minutes per hour just searching for the right document. Luna: I have been there. That feeling of 'I know I wrote that down somewhere' is surprisingly expensive. Lucas: It really is. So when Maya switched to Mem, she did not migrate everything at once. She started with just one client project. She dumped all her interview transcripts, meeting notes, and research findings into Mem. The tool automatically links related notes, surfaces past insights when she starts a new entry, and has a search function that actually works — you can type a fuzzy query like 'the thing about onboarding friction' and it will pull up the exact note. Luna: And the time savings? She tracked them? Lucas: She did. Before Mem, she tracked about five hours a week just on finding and organising information. After — and this was within two weeks of adopting the tool — that dropped to about one hour. That is four hours a week reclaimed. She also cut the time she spent writing project briefs by roughly two-thirds, because Mem can auto-generate a draft based on all the linked notes you have tagged for that client. Luna: So six hours a week total? That is significant for a solopreneur. Lucas: And it goes further. She also started using Mem's recurring note feature — she set up a template for client status updates that auto-populates with recent notes. That saved her another two hours a week. And she eliminated the mental overhead of 'where did I put that?' — which is harder to quantify, but she said it freed up cognitive energy she did not even realise she was spending. Luna: So total, around eight to ten hours a week. That is essentially an extra workday. Lucas: Twelve hours, by her own count. She was working about forty-five hours a week before, with twenty-five of those billable. After, she got to thirty-five billable hours while working around forty total. That is a forty percent increase in billable capacity without hiring anyone. Luna: And the cost of Mem? It is not free, right? Lucas: It is twenty dollars a month for the pro plan she uses. So roughly two hundred and forty dollars a year. She said that the additional ten billable hours per week, at her rate of one hundred and fifty dollars per hour, translated to about three thousand five hundred dollars in extra monthly revenue. That is a return on investment that would make any venture capitalist jealous. Luna: I want to be careful here. This is not a story about a magic app that solves everything. Maya still had to do the work of getting her notes into Mem and setting up the templates. That took a few hours upfront. Lucas: Absolutely. She spent a weekend — maybe six hours — doing the initial setup. But that is a one-time cost. And she did it incrementally, starting with one client. The key insight, I think, is that she did not try to change her behaviour. She changed her environment. Mem adapted to her, not the other way around. Luna: That is a very different philosophy from the 'atomic habits' style advice where you are supposed to design your own system brick by brick. This is more like 'outsource the remembering to software'. Lucas: Exactly. And I think for a lot of solopreneurs, the second brain idea is appealing but the implementation is daunting. You have to decide on a taxonomy, a folder structure, a tagging system. Maya's approach was: let the AI handle the structure. She just writes naturally, and Mem surfaces connections later. Luna: But there is a trust issue. You have to trust that the tool will pull up the right note when you need it. If it fails once, you might revert to your old ways. Lucas: Maya admitted that happened. In the first week, she double-checked everything manually. But after a few successful searches — finding a specific client quote from three months ago in seconds — she started to trust it. She said the turning point was when Mem surfaced a note she had completely forgotten about, a competitor analysis she had done for a different client that contained a framework she could reuse. That sold her. Luna: That is the real value — serendipitous rediscovery. You cannot plan for that with a manual system, at least not at scale. Lucas: Right. And Mem also has a feature called 'collections' which are like smart folders that auto-update based on criteria. Maya set up a collection for each client, and every note she tags with that client's name automatically appears there. No manual filing. That alone probably saved her an hour a week. Luna: I can see this being especially valuable for service-based solopreneurs — consultants, coaches, designers — anyone who juggles multiple clients with overlapping knowledge domains. Lucas: Exactly. Maya's business is research, so her raw material is qualitative data. But a writer could use it to track interview notes and research. A coach could use it to remember client history. A designer could store feedback and inspiration. The pattern is the same: capture information in one place, let the AI connect the dots, spend fewer cycles on retrieval. Luna: One thing that stood out to me is the psychological benefit. She said she used to have this low-grade anxiety about forgetting something important. That went away. Lucas: That is a real cost. The cognitive load of maintaining a mental inventory of 'where everything is' is draining. It is the kind of thing you only notice once it is gone. Maya described it as 'the hum of the refrigerator' — always there, barely audible, but once it stops, you realise how much noise it was making. Luna: That is a great analogy. So for a solopreneur listening, the takeaway is not 'go buy Mem'. It is: look for the one bottleneck in your workflow that a tool could eliminate, start small, and measure the time saved. Lucas: Perfectly put. Maya's bottleneck was information retrieval. She found a tool that removed that friction. And the result was not just more billable hours — it was a calmer, more focused workday. That is worth something too. Luna: If today's episode gave you a useful lens on your own workflow, or if you have been thinking about making a change like Maya did, here is a small way to keep these conversations going. This show is 100 percent listener-supported, no ads. If it has moved your work forward in any way, you can buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That link is always there, no pressure. Lucas: And we really mean that. The fact that people find value in these episodes and choose to support them is what keeps us going. So thank you. Luna: Alright. Back to Maya's story. One more thing she did that I found clever: she used Mem to create a 'personal knowledge base' for herself — a repository of frameworks, templates, and lessons from past projects. Now when she starts a new engagement, she searches that base first. She said it has cut her ramp-up time by about thirty percent. Lucas: That is an excellent point. Because the tool is not just for client work — it becomes a cumulative asset. Every project makes her smarter on the next one. Over a year, that compounds significantly. Luna: And that is the real competitive advantage for a solopreneur: speed and depth that come from not having to relearn things you already figured out. Lucas: Exactly. So if you take one thing from today, maybe it is this: your next productivity breakthrough may not come from trying harder. It might come from finding a tool that makes one specific kind of friction disappear. Maya found hers in Mem. Your version might look different. But the principle is the same. Luna: And that is where we will leave it. Thanks for listening.