8 // Short Accountability Update

Ciao,

Some of the things I did and thoughts I had this week:

• Product improvements around

  • mentioning

  • querying

• Thinking about

  • marketing messaging

  • feature specifications—to avoid some technical debt in the things I build now

The query / filter component

By the way, I’m not sure yet whether I want to name it filter or query.
It’s the very foundation of Formable’s UI. Other tools for thought follow principles like pages, daily notes / pages, or root nodes / folders as their main way to organize information. Formable doesn’t do that.
The only way get blocks of information is by querying for them.

I also tweeted about this:

So, what do you say? Would you rather call it filtering for nodes, or querying for nodes?

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Remember this sketch from letter 3? I started implementing something like it this week. It quickly became obvious that it’s a stupid design. There’s a text input inside a select menu. Managing the focus state there was just terrible.

So I’m redoing this filter component a bit. Yep, I’m not very far yet. But I’m excited for when it’s done. It’s the last part of the app that’s currently still pretty much impossible for anyone but myself to use.

Marketing messaging

I’m a bit behind on marketing anyway, writing a bit of content that could go on the landing page is long overdue. As many of you know, the current formable.tools page doesn’t do a good job at explaining the app.

So now the question is which target audience I want to target there. I have multiple ideas for how to go about it, but I want to make sure that the messaging and language is uniform.
I remember Fibery having an “explain differently” button on their homepage. I guess they also couldn’t decide on a version. I do kind of like that idea of having multiple pages explaining the tool though. I generally like Fibery’s words.

“The only collaborative tool you need. Claims to be all-in-one, is mediocre at everything.”

I’d be more than happy to get to mediocre with Formable.

I want to share one approach I got the think about thanks to a message one of you sent me :)
Specifically only targeting the enthusiasts.
I always thought that I should make Formable as easy to understand as possible, but maybe I’d be targeting the wrong people with that. Formable won’t be that super simple tool, so why sell it as one? Go for the hardcore early adopters first.

Not easy, but powerful.

This thinking is also somewhat relaxing. I might not have to stress myself too badly with making this super easy to understand to everyone. I still have to explain how it works, which should nonetheless be done well.

Happy Easter!
–Emil