Journaling through the trip: 5 Questions for ALTERD app founder Sam Suchin
Suchin discusses the making of his altered-states journaling app and how users are employing it.
A week into his freshman year at Harvard, Sam Suchin got bad news: his father, a brilliant doctor, had been diagnosed with dementia. Suchin tried to push down his feelings about it, concentrating on school, but he always felt a heaviness from the knowledge that his dad’s days were limited, and that he was far away. It wasn’t until his junior year that a friend suggested he try psychedelic-assisted therapy to work through his grief over his dad. During a guided session, Suchin felt a comfort he hadn’t found elsewhere, and the ability to confront some of his feelings head-on. Beyond that, he saw the substances as a tool to help him connect with others.
Suchin had always been a tinkerer. At 15, he designed and 3D printed maps for people who were visually impaired. He went on to design a 400-part artificial coral reef project, and during his senior year, he built gaming apps with Rus Yusupov, co-founders of HQ Trivia and Vine, and Daniel Greenberg, founder of the art collective MSCHF. A month before Suchin graduated, his dad passed away, and Suchin found himself wondering what he wanted to do next.
His first thought was using the skills he’d gained from his year of app-building to create an app for himself. Every time Suchin experienced an altered state, whether from psychedelics or cannabis, he took copious notes about his thoughts and feelings, which he found helpful when trying to make sense of things later on. So, a couple months after graduating, Suchin, now 23, built ALTERD, a journaling app for altered states. He launched it on Reddit. The Microdose spoke with him about the making of the app and how users are employing it.
How does ALTERD work?
I describe it as a journaling app for altered states. You can choose your state of mind — for instance, baseline sobriety, meditation, or exercise — and you can record details about your session, like how long you meditated, who you’re with, or if you took a substance, which one and what dosage. Then, you can just write your thoughts, whether that’s one liners, big ideas, brainstorms, or poetry. It’s all rooted in the ideas of intentional use and harm reduction.
Then, once these thoughts are in the app, it uses integrated AI tools to analyze them. Hours after your session, it’ll send you a summary, even recommending music and movies to check out based on your thoughts — it’s kind of like Spotify wrapped.
There’s also the community aspect of the app. You can keep your posts private by default but you can also choose to post them to the wider community. So far I’m discovering it’s an incredible, supportive community where people are talking about philosophy, spirituality, consciousness, and life. People seem to really like that there are no “likes” on the app; there’s no clout-chasing.
What do you know about your users?
In 6 months there are now tens of thousands of users who have signed up. I’ve made friends with some of them just from DMing; at this point I’ve spoken with hundreds of people on the app, which makes sense from a product development standpoint but I’m also just enjoying learning about people and hearing about their perspectives. There are people who are primarily interested in the science aspect, while others are more interested in exploring psychedelics from a spiritual lens. And then there are even people who have never even touched a psychedelic, but they are using it as a dream journal, or people who aren’t using it as a journal at all, but enjoy the social aspect of the app, like scrolling through other people’s posts.
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The app has a distinctive design — what were your influences in creating it?
There are so many different ways to make an app. You can do market research and target a specific avatar of user. Or you could build something for yourself, the way musicians make music they like — and that’s really what I did. The basis of it was just me writing in my phone’s Notes app, and I would always do it in dark mode because when you’re in an altered state, whether that’s cannabis or psychedelics, a white screen can be kind of jarring. So the background of the app is black, and I use colors to represent a different state of consciousness.
I studied computer science in school but I love design and art, and almost wish I’d studied that instead. I think a lot about Virgil Abloh who was a huge streetwear designer; he merged art and fashion in a way that made it accessible to the mainstream.
Can you say more about how the app uses AI? Given all the talk right now about how AI apps can lead people into harm, what safeguards do you all have in place to ensure your users in vulnerable states stay safe?
AI can be misused just as psychedelics can be taken in the wrong context, and I take that really seriously. The way I think about it is that AI, like psychedelics, is a tool: if you use it the right way, it can help people make new connections between their unstructured thoughts. The way AI is used on ALTERD is not like a tripsitter or chatbot; you don’t talk to it while you’re in an altered state. You don’t need to be taken out of that moment. The AI comes in post-session, roughly eight hours later, to send you insights. But if, while you’re using the app, we detect suicidal thoughts, there’s a pop up with info about a suicide hotline as well as a link to The Fireside Project. [Reporter’s note: Fireside Project offers a psychedelic peer support hotline; for more, read our interview with co-founder Hanifa Nayo Washington.] So far, we’ve been lucky to have no issues, though some people have complained that there are too many safeguards.
This app is fairly new, and you’ve just graduated from undergrad. What plans do you have in the future for the app, and for your own interests in the psychedelic space?
In the short term, I want to concentrate on making the product as good as it can be and making sure it’s safe, private, and secure. I just love building things, and I never wanted to raise venture capital funding and go down that path, and having to do things with investor profits in mind.
In the longer term, I think about my dad a lot. A week or two after he died I ended up learning about the potential applications of psychedelics for neurodegenerative diseases, like the one he died of.I think it’d be great to be able to get involved with that kind of research — maybe even using the app for that in some way. Around sixty percent of our users have opted into allowing their deidentified data to be used in research so far, so I think it’d be great to partner with researchers. It also would be really fun to lean into the people aspect of the app; as it grows, I would love to do events, whether that’s a conference or even an ALTERD concert. But so far this doesn’t feel like a business, but art, and being able to talk to people and hear that the app has helped them has been incredible.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
