32 // Second Brains vs AI Assistance
What I’ve been working on
I built some content pages for Formable this week. Not done yet. I’ll let you have a look when they are.
I also wrote about “Second Brains vs AI Assistance”. It’s still somewhat of a draft, but if it sounds intriguing to you, please have a look, I’d love to hear your thoughts on my points or just general feedback:
What I’ve been thinking about
1.5 weeks ago or so a “new” competitor launched. Some subscribers have of course already heard of them: Tana. Product wise they are close enough to Formable and I’d say successful enough for me to think about Formable’s position relative to them.
Some parallels, taken from the home pages and comparing features:
The Everything OS. ←→ All the tools you need, in one space
Build anything. ←→ just add the tools you need and customize them as you grow, with no codeso you can leave files and folders behind ←→ It’s time to ditch the limitations of the file cabinet.
(not that others hadn’t said that before)Supertags: Even just normal tags in Formable can be used to tag something as e.g. Task and filter for it.
What I’ve planned for schemas / types in Formable makes the two come together even closer.Live queries ←→ Filters
In both products they are first class citizens.Itemised OS / Everything is an item. Even menu items and user settings are just normal nodes in both products.
Alexander Obenauer quote / testimonial on the homepage. If you read this; we have to talk when Formable launches 😜
So yes, Tana is decent competition. Their product is much richer, further developed, and more polished.
And from what my Twitter timeline is trying to tell me they are very successful thus far.
At least towards people who know Tana, I might want to revise my marketing a bit.
It’s cool to see a similar product have such great success, but there’s also a bunch of anxiety. Just like with Roam in 2020 I have mixed emotions. Other products in between didn’t make such leaps approximating Formable.
I can’t ignore Tana and am watching excitedly.
Read Second Brains vs AI Assistance next?
(Both this newsletter and that site don’t include images. Sorry, cba to even write a prompt for AI image generation today)
Enjoy your Sunday!
–Emil