Hunchly: A Year Later, and so Much Better
Revisiting an old investigative friend, this time as an outsider.
Hunchly was a happy accident that occurred solely because I suck at my job.
That’s the real story—not some fancy VC-backed pitch to a chrome-domed troll on Dragon’s Den. Not some incubator. Not because I am some visionary or really even know what the fuck I’m doing half the time.
Nopers.
I fucked up, and it was painful for me. I wanted to not feel that pain again.
In the middle of 2014, and heading into 2015, the war in Syria, Iraq and other hotspots had seen a stream of foreign fighters from Canada, the United States and other countries catching flights to Turkey to take up arms for various sides of the conflict.
I had taken a keen interest in how my fellow Canadians were particularly self-radicalizing. Keep in mind, we’re still 5-6 years before COVID and the immense self-isolation that happened because of it. I often wonder if the two timelines had collided whether any of it would have been different.
Due to the explosion of high-gloss propaganda (some of it made by Canadian hands), I had piles of examples to review.
Remember, “Flames of War”?
Well, I would find references to it, and that would lead me to the folks who liked, commented on, or recommended it.
Not all of the consumers of extremist media and messaging had the seal of Muhammad, nor the Shahada, splayed across their Facebook.
No black flag. No lion roaring. No gun extended to the sky.
Looks can be deceiving, of course, and I’m often ashamed at my own ignorance, ten years ago, when I did some of this work1.
I found it curious and troubling. I took courses from much smarter people than myself to better understand it. Annoyingly, my own self-declared and non-expert opinion was that it was our old friends, systemic poverty and institutional racism, that were creating much of the “extremism” problem.
In the midst of all of this, a province over from my own, I had been watching a small group of dudes that started out liking stuff, then reposting, then adopting the symbols. It seemed like this radicalization escalator and I were peering through the window at the terrorism mall.
One night, when I crawled into bed and looked at the news on my phone, I saw their faces were on it.
“Oh shit!” I leaped out of bed, nose to my phone, stubbing my toes along the way, “I know those guys!”
Flipping my laptop open, I headed to their Facebook accounts.
They were gone. Deleted.
Frantically, I started going back through my notes.
There were none.
Screenshots?
Zero.
Archives?
Zilch.
Ah yes, the sudden and emergent bile that heads up your gut as you realize: I thought I was good at this? Am I not?
This was a stream of the most basic fuckups I have ever professionally engaged in.
I went to bed, berated myself, and told myself I would never let this happen again because I clearly couldn’t trust myself.
The next day, I started coding Hunchly—something to automatically capture what I was doing.
The fuckup protector.
That’s where my influence largely stopped, as Phil, Divya, Clare, Maksim, and others took charge of making an actual product.
I looked at the stats and see over 10,000 users and over 70 countries. I remember many of the earliest by name. Many customers became friends, and some became professional colleagues.
It helps me to remember we don’t suck; it’s just a common problem—a very human shortcoming.
We don’t need AI in investigations. We just need a note-taking companion.
Over a year ago, my journey with Team Hunchly changed, but it did not end. I shot off into the world of money laundering, criminal justice, and wrongful convictions.
In the midst of it, I stopped using Hunchly. Maybe it was my feelers. Maybe it was just that my new role requires reading thousands of pages of court transcription and very little external research.
But a few weeks ago? Clare sent me a license2, and I fired it up, taking a big breath as I did. What would I find?
And that little blue sumbitch, moustache and all, looked at me and said, “Really? What, your note taking got that much better in the last year?”
And I smiled.
Because I knew ole Bluey was bolting right back into my day-to-day kit like it was always meant to. And it had nothing to do with code, but let’s talk about the code a bit anyway.
The Sexy Bits
It’s fucking fast. Really fast. I use an Apple Macbook Pro M2, with the Apple Silicon version of Hunchly and it just smokes along like a beast.
It’s stable. I am a voracious researcher and a demanding mistress. It has mowed through everything I’ve tossed at it. Happily.
The note-taking and new annotation tools are an absolute godsend and make report authoring a breeze, no longer requiring a full screenshot.
Hunchly is a lawyer or paralegal’s3 dream, just like we always theorized. Being able to pop names, case citations and other items into the Selectors and have it track them is SO useful.
The lover of all things tagging, spray paint or otherwise, continues with Tags working just the way you want. I often use the manual capture mode with Hunchly during case and academic research, and simply use tags as my method of capture, filing things away to export later.
There are a number of other things that I love (hey Phil, how’s that to-do list? Sexy, right?), but I ain’t here to sell you anything.
Just telling a story.
In conclusion, the little blue-detective-that-could remains 5/5 stars for my investigations, my evidence preservation, and for producing court-ready materials.
My favourite part?
I put it down for a year, and in 5 minutes, it was part of my everyday kit again.
*snaps fingers*
Just like that.
Everything that was in Hunchly before, that was critical to me as a user, remained. It all just got so much better!
And that’s the funny thing. That’s not code, eh?
Not at all.
That’s culture.
It’s the people.
That team has always made Hunchly for the right reasons. They put meaning into their work on days where meaning is incredibly hard to find—if not completely obfuscated.
It has nothing to do with code, and you can feel it when you use the product today.
It’s the people that made Hunchly for people—and it’s so comforting to see that heart still beating today.
Much love to my old team, wherever they may be, and all the best in 2025.
Don’t change a thing.
Signed,
A Very Happy Hunchly User
p.s. Syria, we always saw you!
To my credit? I did tell anyone who would listen that we need to worry more about the psychopathic white guys in pickup trucks heading to church every Sunday. They didn’t listen. And I’m rarely right, so we’ll call it fair.
Listen, I did say I would pay for it. Ask her!
Currently training to be one of these and boy do they focus on good notes, solid research skills and organization!