Assistant 2.0: Features Are Overrated
Features are overrated. Paper notebooks. Thousands of notes. Speed. Focus.
With tools for thought, I spent years wandering from one use case to another, from one feature to another.
Wandering between three kinda-the-same-but-not-quite similar projects.
Then I realized that apart from Roam and Airtable, I actually do use a single feature of my own writing (yes, I do have working prototypes but too shy to show them just yet, sorry ;))
Speed
And that feature is the speed—the freedom to take quick, small notes anytime, anywhere.
Because it’s super convenient, super-fast, and does not get in the way.
The pitch
So, the pitch! Swift Organizer. For your every idea, article, or book you read.
Why?
If you have hundreds of notes, go with the paper, indeed.
Compounding results from your second brain start with thousands. Behind every serious publication, there’s a mountain of drafts.
Every tool starts lagging with thousands of notes. Evernote, Roam, Notion, you name it. Isn’t it insane for a productivity tool to make you wait? The only reason people tolerate it is because there’s no alternative.
Speed gives us an excellent development priority, clear from the “feature creep” swamp.
When you write, procrastination disappears when it’s so easy to jot something without blinking an eye. And to get back to that years-old idea in under a second.
UI and features can be copied, but “properties” (fast, reliable, on-premise, offline, secure) both show the app’s value, and much harder for the competitors to achieve; the larger the competitor, the better.
And to cover tons of niche use cases, we can hire more people and build an add-on store, like Airtable does right now.
(Technical note: I decided to join this newsletter with my standalone blog, but haven’t decided the details yet—e.g. it does not have a mailing list. For now, I’ll just copy the posts manually. Here’s the permalink for this one: https://oleksandr.works/2021/03/16/assistant-2-0-features-are-overrated/ )