It started with a throwaway line in a book.
I was reading How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes, one of those self-improvement books you pick up half-sceptically and end up underlining half of. One of its 92 tips was something along the lines of: jot down small things about people. What they like. What they mentioned last time. That person likes whiskey. That one just got a dog. Small details that let you walk into the next conversation already knowing something real about them.
It stuck with me more than the rest of the book. Not as a social hack, but as a genuine act of care. Remembering things about people is how you show them they matter.
When school ends, the scaffolding disappears
The tip resonated most because of the timing. I'd just finished school, and the thing I hadn't anticipated about adult life was how much of my social life had been maintained by structure I didn't build. When you're in school, proximity does the work for you. You see the same people every day. Friendships stay warm almost by accident.
Then it ends, and suddenly you realise you have no idea how to actually maintain a friendship from scratch. You have to choose to reach out. You have to remember who you haven't seen in too long. You have to know what's going on in someone's life without being in the same building as them.
And at the same time, real life starts. A job with actual deadlines and a commute and a manager. Rent to figure out. Groceries. The small logistics of keeping yourself functional. It doesn't feel like a lot individually, but together it fills every gap that used to be available for the spontaneous catch-up, the unplanned evening, the kind of hangout that didn't need to be scheduled three weeks in advance.
You lose track of when you last saw someone. You forget what they were going through. You show up to a catch-up and spend the first twenty minutes on a recap that feels like a status update rather than a conversation.
Moving abroad made it urgent
A few years ago I moved to London to work at Amazon, on the Prime Video team. It was a great experience, professionally and personally. But it added a whole new layer to the problem of staying connected.
My closest people were back in Croatia. My family, my oldest friends, the relationships I'd built over years, all of them now required active effort and a timezone difference. It's one thing to let a friendship drift when you're in the same city and could theoretically just fix it by getting coffee. It's another when you're in a different country and every "we should catch up" requires actual planning.
I started to feel like I was losing the thread. Not in a dramatic way, just slowly, in the way that happens when life keeps moving and you don't have a system.
The workarounds that didn't work
I tried a few things. The first was my calendar app. I started adding notes to past events: who I'd seen, what we'd talked about. It sort of worked, but it was messy. The data was scattered across dozens of individual events. There was no way to look at a person and see everything in one place. Finding a specific note meant scrolling through weeks of calendar history hoping you'd remember when the conversation happened.
Then I tried the contacts app. I started adding notes directly to people's contact cards. This was better for lookup, at least everything about one person was in one place. But the contacts app isn't built for this. The notes field is a plain text box with no structure, no timestamps, no way to organise anything. And it had a problem that frustrated me constantly: if a note involved more than one person, you had to write it twice.
Say a couple you know is going on a trip to Japan. You want to remember to ask how it went when you next see them. You'd have to copy the same note into both of their contact cards. Then if you updated it, you'd have to update it in two places. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't, when you're doing it repeatedly across dozens of people.
So I looked for apps. I tried a lot of them, every personal CRM and rolodex app I could find. Most of them were fine, technically. But they all had one of two problems.
The first was focus. Almost all of them were built for networking, not relationships. They were optimised for business contacts, for tracking leads, for professional follow-ups. The whole mental model was transactional. There was nowhere to log that you had a long lunch and talked about nothing important, which is the kind of thing that actually defines a friendship.
The second was pricing. Nearly all of them put meaningful features behind expensive subscription walls, very quickly. Apps that asked for €10–15 a month for what amounted to a fancy address book. It felt out of proportion to what the tools were actually offering.
So I built it myself
I'm an iOS developer. I've been building apps for a while. And at some point I got tired of looking for the right tool and decided to just build it.
I knew what I wanted: something that felt human, not professional. That was built around friendships and family, not business contacts. That let you log events and notes, attach those notes to multiple people at once, remember first encounters, set reminders to check in. That gave you a real picture of your social life, not a pipeline.
And something that was genuinely free to start, without immediately asking you for a subscription to do the basics.
That's BuddyLog. It's the app I couldn't find, so I made it. It started as a personal tool, something I built for myself, to solve a problem I had. It became something I thought other people might find useful too.
If you've ever felt like you're losing the thread with people you care about, like life keeps moving and the relationships that matter are slowly getting harder to maintain, BuddyLog was built for exactly that.
It won't make relationships effortless. Nothing does. But it gives you the memory and the nudges to show up for people more intentionally. Which, in the end, is what that line from the book was really about.
That person got a dog. Remember that. Ask about it next time. It's a small thing. It's not a small thing at all.
