A TALK BY MIKE LITMAN

Why I Built My Own
Save Button

A Chrome extension, an iPhone bookmarklet,
and the case for owning your own workflow.

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THE PROBLEM

Saved links go to die.

Every read-it-later app made the same promise: save now, read later. Pocket. Instapaper. Now Matter and My Mind. But "later" never comes. The link sits in a list. You forget why you saved it. Buried treasure that stays buried.

POCKET (RIP) INSTAPAPER (RIP) MATTER MY MIND SAME PROBLEM

THE MOMENT

I saved an article about how Nike designs for culture.

Three weeks later, a brief landed that was exactly about this. I knew I'd saved something relevant. I could feel it. But I couldn't find it. Not in Pocket (back when it existed). Not in my bookmarks. Not in the 47 open tabs I'd closed since then.

That was the moment I decided to build something that would remember for me.

3

THREE FRICTION POINTS

Why existing tools fail

Too much friction. Open app, paste URL, pick folder, add tags. By the time you're done, you've lost the thought.

Zero intelligence. They store your link. That's it. No analysis, no themes, no connections between the things you save.

No mobile story. Half of what you discover happens on your phone. If saving means switching apps, it won't happen.

1

click to save.

That was the brief I gave myself.

CONTEXT

Trove is a personal knowledge library I built from scratch.

The name means "a treasure hoard." That's the idea. Save a link. AI extracts the content, analyses themes, maps entities, classifies tone, and generates an embedding for semantic search. Your library becomes a treasure chest that organises itself.

STACKNext.js 15 + Supabase + pgvector + OpenAI

AISummary, themes, entities, tone, highlights per save

SEARCHFull-text + semantic vector search

INTELLIGENCETaste profile, connections, briefings, rediscovery

THE DEEPER IDEA

Your saves leave a Patina.

Every link you save is a gold coin dropped into the chest. Over time, those coins compound into a pattern. Trove calls this your Patina: the residue of your intellectual curiosity, made visible.

It tracks your top themes, the domains you keep returning to, the entities that keep appearing, the tone of writing you're drawn to. Not as data points, but as a portrait. Matter and My Mind tell you what you saved. Trove tells you who you are based on what you save.

TASTE PROFILE THEME MAPPING WEEKLY DRIFT REPORT REDISCOVERY ENGINE

TOOL 01

One letter. One click.

There's a T in my browser toolbar. I click it. That's the entire workflow.

The page URL is already there. I pick an intent, hit save, and the AI pipeline starts before I've switched back to the tab. Recent saves show at the bottom so I can see what I've been collecting.

WHAT THE T GIVES YOU

Click T or hit Cmd+Shift+S
URL pre-filled, intent picker ready
Tags, notes if you want them
Save fires the full AI pipeline
Summary appears in the popup while you wait

TOOL 02

The iPhone Share Bookmarklet

Half of what I discover happens on my phone. In bed. On the train. Walking. If saving requires opening a separate app, it won't happen.

Share

Tap Share in Safari, select the Trove shortcut from the share sheet

Save

Opens quick-save page with URL pre-filled, auto-saves immediately

Done

Confirmation in under 2 seconds. Back to reading. AI runs in background.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU CLICK

The save is just the start.

01ExtractFull article content pulled from the URL

02AnalyseAI reads it and tags the summary, themes, and tone

03EmbedThe meaning is mapped so similar ideas find each other

04IndexEvery word becomes searchable, ranked by relevance

05ConnectSemantic links to everything you've saved before

IN PRACTICE

One save, five connections.

I saved a piece about how Hermès uses scarcity as a brand strategy. Within seconds, Trove had tagged it with luxury positioning, artificial constraint, and cultural signalling.

Then it connected it to four other saves I'd forgotten about: a piece on Supreme's drop model, an essay on why Noma closed at its peak, a Nike article about limiting colourway runs, and a thread about how Spotify deliberately throttles Wrapped access.

I didn't search for those connections. They emerged. That's the difference between burying treasure and drawing a treasure map.

THE ARGUMENT

Why build when you could just use Matter?

OFF-THE-SHELF

Stores the URL. That's it.
Tags are manual, rigid, forgotten
Search is keyword-only
No connections between saves
Your data in someone else's database
Mobile save requires their app installed

TROVE

AI extracts, summarises, and analyses
Themes and topics generated automatically
Search by keyword or by meaning
Every save linked to every other save
Your data, your database, full ownership
One-click save from any device

48

THE BUILD

48 hours. One person. Custom tools that beat billion-dollar products.

The Chrome extension took an evening. The bookmarklet took an hour. The AI pipeline took a weekend. None of it required a team, a sprint, or a standup.

This is what building looks like now. You don't need permission. You don't need a budget. You need a problem that bothers you enough to solve it, and a weekend where you'd rather hunt for treasure than scroll.

MANIFEST V3 SUPABASE RLS PGVECTOR OPENAI API iOS SHORTCUTS

WHAT'S NEXT

The save button was just the key to the vault.

COLLECTIONSCurate public playlists of saves. Share what you're reading.

RSS FEEDSSubscribe to sources. New articles auto-save and analyse overnight.

SLACK SAVEDrop a link in a channel. Trove picks it up via cron.

NEWSLETTERSTurn any selection of saves into a formatted newsletter in one click.

REDISCOVERYOld saves resurfaced when they become relevant to what you're saving now.

Every feature starts the same way: what would I build if no one else was going to build it for me?

The best tools are the ones you build for yourself.

When you own the save action, you control the entire pipeline from intent to intelligence. No vendor lock-in. No feature requests. No waiting. Just the exact workflow you need, built in a weekend.

Thank you.

mikelitman.me · hello@mikelitman.me

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Why I Built My OwnSave Button