Right now it feels like a ton of the application is running client-side, so that when you have a lot of data and you search for a common keyword, it freezes your comp for a bit. Smart compromises on performance/scalability. ![]() So de-prioritizing UI design was a good call. The hypothesis they’re looking to prove is that data model is their key differentiator, not UI design. The product isn’t particularly pleasant-looking, but it’s very usable. The UI design they launched with does a good job of being simple. While they couldn’t resist including a graph visualizer, they resisted including any major features that would have slowed down their launch, such as realtime multi-user collaboration, because those features weren’t necessary for validating their data model hypothesis. They held back from building important, tempting, but non-critical features into MVP. If Joe switches to Roam, he feels like his tangential ideas spill more easily out of his head without being prematurely filtered, because he can set them aside as linked Pages. But Workflowy isn’t that great at managing lots of top-level bullets, so Joe only creates a top-level bullet when he thinks his related concept is a promising candidate for a blog post. To keep track of those, he creates top-level bullets for those other concepts. Joe drafts his blog posts in Workflowy and often gets ideas to write about related concepts. But can we get more specific about what use cases this could get market traction for? What’s a value prop story? Story #1 What’s the Value Prop Story?īeing made of a novel set of simple, powerful building blocks is a very good sign. I think it’s an incrementally better version of Workflowy’s bullets-only data model. I’m excited about that because I personally want to use that data model. I think Roam’s data model of pages/cards full of bullets is powerful, and has never been properly explored in another tool before. The overall effect is that Roam feels like dumping your brain into a “second brain”. Then you can go through all your pages and flesh them out with more bullet points, and those will inspire linking to new pages that you’ll want to flesh out afterward. ![]() If you’re writing bullets in Roam, and you just add a couple extra keystrokes once in a while, pretty soon you get a cool linked graph of pages. Even just putting a new word in ] automatically makes it a page, so you find yourself dumping every concept-node in your brain as a page.Ī graph visualization of linked pages in Roam While Workflowy encourages you to work within one top-level bullet at a time, Roam encourages you to split off lots of top-level “pages”. I can then go to my “SpongeBob” page and automatically see that “Marine Biology” references it, and maybe other pages reference it too. What if I didn’t have a SpongeBob page? I do now, automatically. ![]() What does Roam do that Workflowy can’t? Roam’s #1 differentiator is linking: You can easily link a bullet (and its page) to another page by putting the page’s name in a double square bracket or hashtag.įor example, if I’m editing a bullet on my “Marine Biology” page and I type ] or #SpongeBob, then I’ve linked that bullet to my “SpongeBob” page. ![]() (It’s not fully caught up yet on multi-user collaboration and scalability, but I’m sure it will be soon enough.) Roam’s MVP seems to already have feature parity with all of Workflowy, which is pretty impressive. The main question I had about Roam is how it’s incrementally better than Workflowy for my needs. I personally use Workflowy pretty often, so I get why a bullet-based tool is quick and easy for taking notes and drafting ideas. Then you can “zoom in” to that bullet point and it’s like you’re “on that page” seeing only its sub-bullets. If you want to make a new page, you just make a new top-level bullet instead. Your whole Workflowy account is like one big page of bullets. Unlike Roam, Workflowy doesn’t have a separate concept of a “page”.
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