sharing with beanies

I’d like to introduce you to the wonderful world of sharing.

Now, I’m not talking about the type of sharing my parents begged me to do when I was a kid (and as a parent now, let me tell you, I finally understand the struggle). Back to the topic though, did you know there’s a type of sharing that can actually help get your family life ultra-organized, and you can still keep all of your M&Ms for yourself?

The other day was one of those rare Fridays that I was out of work early enough to pick up my son from his after school daycare. As I was heading up the elevator, I noticed a flyer next to the buttons that filled me with an unbridled joy and excitement that only parents would understand.

any parent here will know the feeling you get when you see something like this

An entire half day of kids’ entertainment - planned, choreographed, and arranged. And to top it all off, a parent’s most favorite word in the whole entire world: free (or, well, close enough).

My hands fumbled clumsily into my pocket to pull out my phone, extending it through the closing doors and almost dropping it down the elevator shaft. I hastily snapped a pic, my mind immediately freeing itself of one more half day of family planning, organization, and entertainment.

What now, though?

Heading down the hall to locate my son’s classroom, I could feel my crooked flyer photo already sinking into the infinite depths of my camera roll, buried in a never-ending gallery of family photos and blurry reminders, destined to be forgotten in the heap of baby pictures, horribly unflattering selfies, and pseudo-artistic out-of-focus nightscape photos we (and our kids, when they swipe our phones) now take in this modern age of ubiquitous phone-camera-ism.

So what did I do instead, that took me exactly 5 seconds more? I shared that snap to my beanies app. You see where this is going, right?

literally took me 5 seconds. well, with the extra time spent marveling at my newfound efficiency, maybe 10. what a beautiful thing.

Done and dusted. Not only is the photo itself now saved together with the activity in my family calendar, but we also have the date, time, category, location and lots more. And what else? Every last significant item from the invite has been summarized to bullet points and saved in the notes section, so you don’t have to sweat the details. And given it’s a celebration, a helpful hint will appear in my to-do list and daily briefing as a reminder when the time comes.

I know: You’re welcome. Again.

By the way, in case you were curious - yes, it works with travel plans, too:

don’t complain to me the next time you forgot to purchase a child’s meal for your kid. beanies tried to tell you.

Share an image, a screenshot of your itinerary, a PDF document, or just copy and share an email or WhatsApp message, and boom! You have yourself a fully formed travel plan, every detail summarized and populated, down to your meal orders and how many pounds of luggage you can carry on the flight (as long as that info was buried somewhere in that forwarded document which - admit it - you didn’t even bother to read).

It even works for recipes:

well, i know what i’ll be having for dinner tonight

Magic beans scan everything you send, down to the last detail of the terms and conditions, extracts everything that might be important or useful to you, and loads it straight into your calendar, travel plan, or cookbook as a beautiful recipe, itemized travel plan, or activity with a bulleted summary. And as per the legally documented and agreed terms of our private and secure AI provider, it proceeds to immediately forget everything you just sent as soon as it’s done.

If those aren’t some helpful beans, I don’t know what are. Well, except these:

seriously though, can somebody please get me a captain beanie plushie?

Ok, so aside from an imaginary magical superhero that rescues little beanies from fires (that may be my next Netflix pitch idea), these are the most helpful beans I can think of. For now, anyway.

I hope you find this feature useful, because it took claude-bot and me long enough to get it right. It’s already saved me multiple times over though, so that time spent untangling those weird platform-specific sharing bugs was worth every second, at least to me. If you like it or think I should change anything, let me know on discord!

So take your family’s private and secure beanpod on beanies.family to the next level with magic beans, and share (or don’t share) anything you’d like with the app. You don’t even have to tell us what it is - we’ll figure that out for you.

And by the way, more amazing magic beans features are on the way - I just started working on sorting out bank transactions with AI, to help those of you who live in the finances section!

Enjoy those magic beans, my friends. And never stop sharing (the good kind, and the beanie kind).

greg