Knowledge gardening

Reading Garden

A quiet, typographic reading app that turns the articles, books, and PDFs you save into a living garden of highlights, backlinks, and weekly reflections.

Full planning bundle — BRAND, MRD, BRD, PRD, DESIGN
Branded styleguide — typography, color, components
5 previewable mockups

Cloning copies the full plan into a new project you own — edit it freely.

Inside the bundle

Styleguide and mockups

A look at the brand palette and screen-level mockups that ship with this plan. Cloning copies all of them into your project.

Mockups

Style guide

Styleguide

What this blueprint gives you

Reading Garden is a subscription consumer app for the curious reader — the lifelong learner who saves more than they finish and wants the reading they actually did to compound into something they can return to. It bundles a save-anywhere inbox, a magazine-grade reader, a highlight workspace, and a markmap-style knowledge garden into one calm, serif-forward product. The blueprint ships as a turnkey B2C SaaS: Stripe-billed subscription, browser + mobile clients, the worker pipeline that turns highlights into a graph, and the editorial design system that makes the app feel like a private library rather than another productivity tool.

What’s inside

Five planning documents at senior-team depth (BRAND, MRD, BRD, PRD, DESIGN), a styleguide that codifies the editorial type ramp and the botanical accent palette, and five hand-built mockups covering the core surfaces: Inbox, Reader, Highlight detail, Garden graph, and Daily review. Each mockup is a working <body>-fragment with realistic content drawn from the books and essays the target reader actually keeps on their nightstand — Christopher Alexander, Cal Newport, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, Patrick Collison, Maggie Nelson.

Who it’s for

Lifelong learners and curious knowledge workers — product managers, founders, designers, writers, lawyers, academics — who already have a reading habit but lack a place for it to accumulate. The blueprint assumes the user has read at least one book on attention or learning in the last twelve months and has tried (and partly abandoned) Readwise, Pocket, Matter, or Reader by Readwise. They are not looking for another inbox; they are looking for a quiet shelf.

Why the design matters

Most reading apps are productivity-bro stacks: dense, blue, busy, AI-summarizer-first. Reading Garden is the opposite — typographic, serif-forward, slow on purpose. The reader screen has the measure of a hardcover book; the inbox feels like a library card catalogue; the graph renders as a markmap rather than a force-directed network. AI appears as a quiet marginalia voice, not a “summarize this!” button. The whole product is built around the soul-line on the brand sheet: the reading is the product; the system disappears.

How it pays the bills

A single $8/month or $72/year subscription, with a 14-day trial on the unlimited tier and a free tier capped at three active books and fifty highlights so the surface stays warm. Stripe Billing handles the subscription; Stripe Tax handles VAT. The blueprint includes the full plan structure, the gift subscription flow, the team plan for reading clubs, and the lifetime referral credit that quietly powers word-of-mouth among the target audience.

Why this blueprint, not the off-the-shelf one

Off-the-shelf reading apps optimize for power-user features (RSS triage, search operators, API access). Reading Garden optimizes for the return — the daily five-minute review, the weekly map of what you’ve been thinking about, the surprise of a highlight from three years ago appearing next to one from yesterday. The blueprint is a complete take on that thesis: brand, market, business model, product, and design spec, ready to clone and ship to the first hundred customers within a sprint.

Group

Productivity

Preview the plan

Each blueprint includes the senior-level planning files. These cards show the opening text before you clone the full bundle.

Brand Guidelines Document

BRAND.md

Preview

BRAND — Reading Garden One line A quiet place for the reading you actually did — so the thinking can grow. The product, in a sentence Save articles, books, and PDFs. Highlight as you read. Reading Garden stitches the highlights into a living garden of backlinks, marginalia, and a daily five minute review you'll actually open. Who it speaks to The curious knowledge worker — a thirty two year old product manager, lawyer, designer, founder, postdoc, or staff writer who has a real reading habit and

Design Specification Document

DESIGN.md

Preview

DESIGN — Reading Garden Information architecture Five surfaces. Inbox, Reader, Highlight detail, Garden graph, Daily review. There is no sixth top level surface in v1. Settings, billing, and account live behind a single quiet avatar menu in the top right. Navigation. A left column on desktop (Inbox · Reader · Garden · Daily · Library · Clubs) collapsed to a hamburger on tablet and to a bottom bar on phones. The avatar menu is top right on every surface. There are no tabs inside a surface; deeper

Market Requirements Document

MRD.md

Preview

MRD — Reading Garden Market summary The "read later + highlight + recall" category is a real category, not a niche. Roughly forty million English speaking adults pay for at least one productivity, reading, or knowledge product per year. Inside that set, a clearly defined subsegment — call them the committed readers — pay for a reading specific subscription. The category has consolidated around four products: Readwise (the incumbent, $10/mo, focused on review and Kindle import), Reader by Readwis

Business Requirements Document

BRD.md

Preview

BRD — Reading Garden Business model A single product, single tier consumer subscription with a real free tier and a small set of orthogonal upsells (gift, club, lifetime). Stripe Billing is the source of truth; Stripe Tax handles VAT and US sales tax. The model is deliberately uncomplicated so the brand promise holds — readers do not want to be sold to inside their reading app. 1. Subscription. $8 monthly or $72 annual ( 25% discount). One paid tier. No "Pro", no "Power User," no "AI add on." Ev

Product Requirements Document

PRD.md

Preview

PRD — Reading Garden Product summary A consumer subscription app that turns a reader's articles, books, and PDFs into a quiet, living library. The reader saves anything from anywhere, reads it inside a magazine grade reader, highlights as they go, and the system stitches the highlights into a markmap style garden with backlinks, AI marginalia, and a five minute daily review. The product is one job, one library, one ritual. Personas Maya, product manager at a Series B SaaS company. 31. Reads 22 b