Redefining notetaking is hard. But I won't give up

Experience burnout to reborn. Fall to get up and continue.

Hello! Today I would like to be open with you and have a very important and honest talk.

Apart from vision and obsession to make a change in the world, I came up with the idea of Locus because I was too uncomfortable with all the notetaking apps out there. Notion is too clunky and you can’t just see needed information, it is locked in the structure that you need to tweak all the time and jump from page to page. Obsidian and Logseq are free as Notion, but they are built by the whole world, so they are like pilot cabins and hard to maintain, with tons of functions. Other apps,… Kinda the same. I tried them all.

I am a pro user and would easily handle managing my information and notes in any app. But it was not a pleasure for me. I felt too focused on the tweaks.

Knowledge work should be not a challenge. It should be your advantage. I know that I am building Locus for extraordinary people. If you need a system to manage your knowledge it means that you are not the same as others out here who just unconsciously consume media content or need just to-dos and Apple Notes. You want the information around you to work for you. To make you better. To help you grow.

And this makes you special.

And again, this Substack and your subscription are not just a waitlist or a base of emails. It is a direct conversation between me and you. No matter where are you reading this text - in the Substack Reader or an email letter, I care about you and I am grateful that you joined me on this journey.

For half a year I’m struggling with the cold start problem. Many different people, many different apps, many different opinions. I am tired of asking Redditors about notetakers and seeing that people prefer things that are completely free and this is their only choice factor. I am tired of people being cold and not ready to talk or to go on a short interview.

I studied every app myself. I researched the market and my potential competitors.

But the market is not about apps, it’s about people. I sometimes wonder why so many startups become dead although their products are intuitive and exciting. The reason for that is obvious - no people’s need. Or these people just don’t understand that they have a problem the app tries to solve. They don’t see any reasons to switch to this high-quality app that is built to give real pleasure of interaction and use.

I don’t want to build my app for businesses and fully go B2B because I don’t want to build things that just save you money.

“- You pay $500 to us and we will solve this problem. Currently, you spend $1000 on it.

- Okay, I care about my company’s expenditures and revenue. Take my money.”

This is the easiest path (the easiest among the hardest ones, entrepreneurship is always hard). You look for a weak point in a business and create a solution. You make an impact.

But isn’t the journey the most valuable thing? Not a big, extraordinary and fast success, but two years spent building and talking to people? Making hundreds and thousands of mistakes and failures?

Well, of course, I want my app to be sustainable and worth some price for the real benefit it gives. This is the rule of the game and I can’t change it. If no one pays and supports the business, it dies.

But what matters more - I am in the pursuit of real problems in knowledge management. I am trying to build my own iPhone and Superhuman, but in notetaking. To make this hard process of learning a pleasure. I believe that being an explorer of this world can be real fun.

I want to spread this message to people and make their lives happier.

I am too confident to stay on my own and make concepts from my own viewpoint. To prototype in isolation and hope that someday you will install my app, open it and exclaim: “These dudes built such a masterpiece! They cared about everything. They are here, they are not hiding under abstract brands and “companies”! Oh my god!”

But it shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t fall into an inventor’s pit and do everything in stealth mode. I want to understand people because I build Locus for them.

So, we finally came to the main message of this post.

I am just a student who is crazy enough to go worldwide and build a global startup from a room in the dormitory. But I have almost everything I need to achieve success - my hands, skills and my vision.

And now I have the most important component - you, the subscribers of this blog. I reload my email every day to check for every new subscription and really get happy. But you are more than a subscriber or a reader. You are a person who I would really want to know better and to talk to in any way that is suitable for you. No matter the distance. And I want to help.

So, let’s start small. Please, fill out this one-question poll. I think it would be a nice start of our interaction.

P.S.: if you just want to follow project updates, it’s okay. But it would be better if we reached each other out directly.