1/ I feel compelled to say an unpopular opinion for all the ppl building knowledge mgmt tools out there based around connections between ideas
2/ This approach won’t work. It sounds cool in a math nerd kind of way, but these connections are either durable but obvious/boring, or they’re interesting/insightful but very fragile
3/ In other words, anything you can document is boring, anything that’s not boring you can’t document. Human brains excel at inventing these connections on the fly. Documenting them in a graph doesn’t approach 1% of this capability, and worse, doesn’t enable it
4/ Basically you’re automating creativity along the wrong dimension, frontal assault on the Crown Jewels of creativity. Instead, we need better logistical ops so the soldiers (neurons) have better tools for the job
5/ More ppl use Apple Notes or legal pads to manage knowledge than all specialized PIM tools ever created. What doesn’t that tell you? Conceptual simplicity & usability matter more than advanced features
6/ As soon as you put ideas into a structure, they start becoming brittle. The upfront work required to tag or interlink them is also a risky sunk cost that will start skewing all your decisions: to protect what you’ve created, instead of creating new things
7/ You see this just visiting the websites of PIM apps. They look like they were made in the 90s and never updated. Of course, that’s the era they’re optimizing for, at the expense of current one
8/ How COULD you create a successful knowledge mgmt tool? Biggest opportunity I see is the shift to truly fluid styluses, like iPad Pro + Apple Pencil. Will be as big as mouse and touchscreen I think
9/ Evernote UI is now two generations behind: desktop > touch > stylus. I love my Pencil but taking 4 taps to indent an outline is insane. Outlines are insane. A whole new UI metaphor and culture will need to be created around tablet-first notetaking
10/ It’s a big opportunity, and I don’t think any of the major players will succeed. If anything, it’s the drawing apps that will reverse vertically integrate into notes, finally joining text and sketches as they used to be
11/ Biggest challenge seems to be, how to monetize unstructured data? Evernote barely does it with 200M users. OneNote & Google Keep are little side projects because there’s not much they can do with it, relying instead on cash cows
12/ This isn’t a technical challenge, but a cultural one. Notes are inherently private, personal, & not closely tied to purchase decisions. Ads and data mining won’t work. But selling apps or subscriptions is also difficult to build a big business around
13/ I actually don’t see anyone building a big business in this space. It’s fragmented by nature. But content could work, like a GTD for notetaking. That’s what I’m trying to create with Bldg a Second Brain
