Compass is an AI note-taking app and journaling system built specifically for entrepreneurs, emphasizing "voice-first" and aimed at founders who take their thinking seriously. Its core idea is: Every Note Compounds, helping entrepreneurs connect their ideas, insights, and relationships so they can make clearer decisions every week.
[Purpose and Positioning] Compass is used to capture the scattered thoughts in an entrepreneur's daily life: product decisions, investor conversations, hiring plans, competitive developments, and more. Unlike general-purpose journaling apps, it does not just record; it automatically organizes notes, detects recurring patterns across weeks, surfaces insights you might otherwise miss, and turns private reflections into shareable build-in-public content without manual organization.
[Main Capabilities]
- Voice-first capture: open Compass, tap record, and dictate; you can pause freely and change your mind; you can also choose to type. The official website examples show that it can capture thoughts from different situations, such as meetings, fundraising calls, late-night thinking, Slack messages, and more.
- Instant organization: your words are organized into clean notes, tagged by topic, and easy to search.
- Insight surfacing: Compass reads through your notes and highlights recurring content, for example, the need to "consolidate" appearing in three of the last five notes.
- People memory: remembers the people you mention and the contexts in which they appear, for example recording contacts (such as a founder in logistics, or someone who offered Series A advice) and being able to suggest introductions to each other.
- Weekly review: every week Compass shows what you recorded and what it learned, for example the distribution of the number of entries within a week.
- One-tap content generation: any note can be turned into a draft post for X or LinkedIn with one tap, in your own voice.
- Privacy and export: notes use AES-256-GCM encryption and all content can be exported in Markdown format at any time.
[How to Use] The usage flow described on the official website is: open Compass, tap record, and dictate or type input -> the content is instantly organized into tagged notes -> insights emerge across notes -> turn notes into X or LinkedIn drafts. The official website also explains on the page the steps of recording, insights, people, weekly review, note-to-post, encrypted export, and so on (01 to 06).
[Use Cases] For entrepreneurs' daily capture of thoughts, including topics such as product, fundraising, hiring, and competition; for discovering the questions you repeatedly struggle withtopics (such as whether to pivot, or that the growth bottleneck is scope rather than headcount); to maintain relationship records; to turn private reflections into public sharing content. The official website says the founders in early access come from different backgrounds (the page lists example sources such as Notion, Linear, Slack, WhatsApp, Email).
[Platform and Availability] Compass is an iPhone app and requires iOS 17 or later; there is no Android, Mac, or web version. It is currently in early access and has not yet been listed on the App Store; after joining the early access list, Compass will notify you by email when it launches. The official website says founders will be personally reviewed and invited.
[Pricing] Compass has only one subscription, Compass Pro, which is started within the iPhone app and paid through the App Store. There is a 14-day free trial, after which it is $9.99/month or $99.99/year. Early access list users can maintain $9.99/month as long as they keep their subscription active; after the first 100 founding members, the price will increase to $19.99/month. Founding members get full access, all future updates, and a role in deciding the direction of subsequent development. Joining the early access list is free.
[Privacy Notes] The official website says every note is encrypted with AES-256-GCM and stored in the database as ciphertext; OAuth tokens for connected platforms are separately encrypted using HKDF-derived keys; all traffic uses TLS. To provide AI features, notes are decrypted in memory, and the text is sent to its AI service providers (Anthropic, Cloudflare, and AssemblyAI for longer recordings), and these providers are used only to return results. The official website says user data is never sold, and the privacy policy lists all providers. Notes are stored locally on the iPhone in SwiftData, protected by the iOS app sandbox and device-level encryption; when synced to the server, they are stored encrypted and decrypted in memory only when providing AI features. They can be exported at any time as plain Markdown, compatible with Obsidian, Bear, or any text editor.
[Difference from General-Purpose Tools] The official website compares Compass with Notion and Apple Notes: Notion requires you to design pages, databases, and AI autofill rules yourself; Apple Notes requires you to create folders and tags yourself. Compass, by contrast,requires you only to capture raw ideas, and AI handles the rest of the organization, cross-note pattern detection, remembering key people relationships, and generating content.
[Limitations] Currently iPhone only, requires iOS 17 or later, with no Android, Mac, or web version; it is in early access and has not yet been listed on the App Store; a 14-day free trial is provided, after which a subscription is required. Other features, effects, or pricing information not stated in the materials are not currently provided.