You’ve got to try harder on community, marketing etc. if you’re behind. While Roam was getting free publicity and good will Obsidian had to figure out ways to generate more of it
Conversation
Aside from being a great tool, I think a significant part of Roam’s early success was because it took effort to learn how to use it. People invested a lot of time and energy into it which made them have stronger feelings about it (see Ikea effect)
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But these strong feelings of excitement and love can turn into frustration and anger if people feel like they’re being unfairly treated or not listened too.
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Communication style and personality also attracted people to Roam. But this can be flipped around too over time.
Visionary, quirky, fun, obsessive, geeky, rebellious… can be seen as flippant, arrogant, disorganised etc.
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But communication style and personality hasn’t changed - that’s actually the problem.
It’s still quirky and nerdy and exciting. But people’s perception of this communication style has changed. Or they grew more and more dislike for it over time (you can’t please everyone)
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This was called out by months ago. I immediately thought of this tweet when I read Curzi’s post.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @Conaw @gerad_t0d and 3 others
I'm suggesting you take a hard look at the consequences of the apparently cosmetic choice to use such language and mental models. Who does it attract? Who does it turn off. What doors open? What doors close?
In case it's not clear, it personally turns me off quite strongly.
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Building a business and product is the art of juggling priorities & resources. Hard stuff.
It seems an over reaction to for people to say things like “the fall of Roam” when, in fact, this is the type of learning experience that will make a company stronger long-term
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Good stuff for and gang to reflect on. I’ve not really laid attention to all this, but still been using as before. My key product concerns (loading time, permissions, API, link preview) are unchanged from a year ago. That’s basically all I care about.
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I’m not in it for community or messianic world-changing, and I think people who are actually interested in the core technology basically are disjoint from those for whom it’s a missionary vehicle. The company has to basically figure out which group to serve or lose both.
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lesswrong.com/posts/Js34Ez9n
What matters:
A) Building a great team and a culture of learning and truth seeking
B) Ship great product that solves problems users care about
Plenty mistakes this year, fortunately we’ve built a great tool, healthy business, most users don’t care how
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“What matters”… to whom? Not sure what that’s a response to.
Like I said 2 tweets up, my product expectations are pretty narrow and concrete. The tool is still solving some of my problems as it did ~Dec 2019, still failing to solve others.


