I didn’t set out to build software. I set out to remember more from class, and five years of trying every notes app on the market got me to a frustrating conclusion: the format was the bottleneck, not the apps. So I built something with a different shape. This post is the reasoning.
The five-year failure
The list of what I tried, and why each one fell over:
- Apple Notes — frictionless to capture, impossible to find anything in three months later.
- Evernote — the same problem at a larger scale.
- Notion — I spent more evenings tweaking the database schema than reviewing techniques. I’d built a system for note-taking instead of taking notes.
- BJJ Tracker — great for volume, wrong shape for thoughts.
- Submeta — an excellent instructional product, but the notes I took there lived inside their curriculum, not my game.
- A physical notebook — three weeks, then it lived in the gym bag.
(The longer teardown of each is its own post.) The pattern underneath: every tool was either flat, with no structure at all, or structured around someone else’s mental model. Nothing was structured around the way jiu-jitsu itself is organized.
What jiu-jitsu is actually organized like
It’s a decision graph. Position → opponent reaction → your response → new position, branching everywhere. Every technique has multiple follow-ups depending on what the opponent does, and every position has multiple entries and exits.
Write that graph as bullets and you lose the branches. Write it as a paragraph and you lose the positions. Build it as a Notion database and you spend your study time on the schema. Draw it as a flowchart, and for the first time the format matches the content.
Why nobody built it before
Two reasons, as far as I can tell.
First, drawing flowcharts by hand is tedious. Miro and Whimsical work, but the friction means you draw two charts and quit — the “flowchart after every class” habit dies on cost. Second, making the capture cheap requires software that understands enough jiu-jitsu to take a rambling voice memo and produce a sensible first draft. That capability genuinely didn’t exist five years ago. Now it does.
What Grapple Flows actually is
A flowchart editor with two BJJ-specific ideas built in:
- Voice-to-Flow. Talk into your phone for sixty seconds and get a draft flowchart of the position, the reactions, and the branches — so the expensive part becomes editing, not drawing.
- Branching that maps to grappling. Position nodes, reaction nodes, technique nodes, typed so the chart is still readable a month later instead of being a bag of boxes.
That’s the product. Not a curriculum, not a video library, not a coach — a tool for the gap between I learned something tonight and I can still use it next month.
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Try it free See what your last roll looks like as a flowchart. Create a free account →
The part where I’m honest about fit
I built this for myself first. Every feature exists because I wanted it on a Tuesday night after a hard class, and there’s no roadmap of features I don’t personally use. If you train the way I train — voice memo on the drive home, structured by bedtime, re-opened before the next class — the tool will probably fit your hand. If you don’t, one of the other tools I’ve reviewed on this blog may genuinely suit you better, and those comparisons say so where it’s true.
What I most want is for grapplers to review more. The tool is a means to that end. Whatever gets you to open the same page twice in one week is the right tool, and for me, that turned out to be a flowchart.
