FAQs from friends and strangers

Who do you think is the closest to thinkdeli in terms of competition? Is it notion, notes, or medium?

Who is your target audience? Who are you building this for?

Why are you building thinkdeli? What do you aim to get out of it?

To be honest, I hadn’t really thought of all these questions when I started working on thinkdeli. I started working on thinkdeli before it was thinkdeli. 

I remember feeling annoyed with notion and google drive. They made me think before I could start writing. I had to make a bunch of decisions and process a bunch of UI before I could start writing a single word. Find the new document. Decide the template of the document. Decide where that new document will exist. Wait till the new document is created. Good luck if you are on a slow network. No luck if you are not connected to the internet. This was a slow and painful dance. It killed my desire to write. 

I remember discussing with a friend the need for a fast editor. Such an editor would let you start writing in less than one second. Irrespective of the speed or the availability of your internet connection. It is not for the first time in the history of human kind that this idea came to someone. Such editors already exist. There are writing apps that let you work offline, create bi-directional links, and even automate publishing to a blog.

There is a notes app on your favorite platform - Google Keep, Apple Notes.

There are knowledge management apps like Obsidian, and Roam Research. 

There are beautiful writing apps like Bear for Apple.

So is this a solved problem? I would say, it is not a very well defined problem.

There are several reasons why people write. You may write to remember things. You may write to think clearly. You may write to publish to an audience. Or you may write to communicate. 

Publishing something needs research. Research needs you to document things so that you can remember, connect the dots, think, and synthesize ideas of your own. You could a blog, a book, or a paper.

One writing app can’t cater to all the use cases. So there is no competition. A writing app is a tool. If a tool works well for you, you use it. You don’t care which company manufactured it or if your friend uses the same tool. It is personal.

The kind of tool I want to make is the one that you forget about while you use it. It disappears as you make progress towards the task at hand. When the job is done, you don’t talk about the tool. You talk about the finished product. The product is your writing - an essay, a blog, a paper, a humble note, or your journal.

For a writing app to become such a tool, the baseline is - it needs to be fast, always available, and present on all your devices. It is a great bonus if it is as beautiful as it is functional.

thinkdeli has achieved this baseline. It is fast. It is available even offline. And it runs in a browser or as a PWA. So it is available on all your devices. And every user of thinkdeli will tell you, how neat it looks.

Everything else goes on top of this baseline.

Publishing - thinkdeli lets you publish your notes in one click. It is super simple. Just write and hit the publish button. 

Bidirectional links - thinkdeli implements a version of the bidirectional links where you can create n-n connections between notes.

Writing streak tracker - thinkdeli helps you build a writing habit. The writing streak widget shows you the number of words you wrote every day. 

Knowledge Management - this is the next big thing for thinkdeli. Use the advanced AI and ML tools that are finally available in the browser to help users search and organize notes and to discover connections between notes.