01 · The break
The moment it broke
I was reading a book on my laptop. A good one — the kind where the world goes quiet and it's just you and the words.
Then I hit a word I didn't know.
Select. Copy. New tab. Paste. Translate. Tab back. Find my place. Read one more sentence.
Fifteen seconds. That's all it took to shatter the spell. I wasn't reading anymore — I was managing a workflow.
02 · The friction
Death by a thousand tabs
It happened again two paragraphs later. And again. I started a vocab list in Notes — another app to manage, another thing to forget.
One evening I realized I'd been on the same page for twenty minutes. Not because it was hard. Because the tools kept pulling me out.
I started avoiding books in other languages. The thing meant to grow my vocabulary had become the reason I stopped reading.
03 · The idea
What if capture took zero effort?
What if you never left the page? One keystroke. The word gets looked up and saved locally — while you keep reading.
No tabs. No copy-paste. No "where was I?"
And the words you capture? They live in your library on your Mac — searchable, exportable, sortable into folders whenever you want.
04 · The metaphor
Why leaves. Why a tree.
Every word is a leaf
Small, fresh, picked up from a sentence or headline. Your library fills up — one leaf at a time, one book at a time.
A tree grows in rings
You don't jump from beginner to fluent. You grow one ring at a time — one word, one page, one chapter. Leafy keeps every capture so that growth stays visible.
A tree doesn't grow by rushing.
It grows by not stopping.
05 · Today
Still a seedling
Leafy wasn't born in a product meeting. It was born from a frustrated evening with a book I couldn't finish.
It's early — a beta, a seedling. But the idea is simple: reading should grow you, not slow you down. If that sounds like you, come along.