About

Outlain Inc. is an independent software company, founded in 2025 and incorporated in California.

My name is Russell and I'm a lifelong learner and technologist. Outlain exists because I saw where the world was going and I couldn't imagine myself just being taken along for the ride during the most game-changing technological era in human history (AI). The only option I could see myself being happy with was immersing myself in the technology and building cool things that I wanted. Then sharing those things, which would inevitably find people who also want them.

From an optimist's perspective, one of the promises of AI is providing creative building capabilities to whole classes of people that didn't have it before, allowing society to see products that they never would have otherwise. That increases utility for everyone, and moves more control of "how we interact with technology" from the hands of a smaller homogenous class of people to a broader one. And that seems good to me.

My version of a note-taking and personal knowledge management system is something I have had in my head for almost 20 years. As a passionate learner, a PKM is one of the few apps that I would essentially never live without—I need a way to keep track of my understanding of the world. That said, I never thought I would ever even attempt building the thing in my head, not just because I wasn't an engineer, but because the things I wanted specifically weren't out-of-the-box with libraries, so I knew it would be a lot of custom code to begin with. Obviously agentic coding changed the game, allowing me to actually get this thing out of my head to reality in a ridiculous few months instead of years. I seriously never thought I would actually build this.

Independent and self-funded

It's literally just me building the pure vision of what I want in a product like this. As a lifelong learner, I consider this a project I will maintain from now until I can't, because I don't see myself ever not needing a way to manage what's in my head. There's a paid plan because I've been working on this for months without any income or outside funding, so the more subscribers, the more time I can spend on making it even better.

Contact

For product support, email support@outlain.com. For privacy requests, email privacy@outlain.com.