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Building in Public: Help vote on my idea pivot

I like to challenge the status quo. So I said screw it to the conventional wisdom of LEAN startups and went 100% balls-in and built a fully functioning prototype of my app. Yep, before validating a market, before building any marketing or audience or figuring out if it was actually a problem.

I'm wild like that. I live dangerously. Malcolm Gladwell would be so proud of me being a true Outlier. A complete Original. Some may refer to me as noob but I say they're probably wrong.

But alas, conventional wisdom has a way of taunting you. And now here I sit at my keyboard, furiously typing away, trying to be creative and engaging enough for you, my fellow Indie Hacker, to be invested to help me succeed and achieve my goals of being free and excited by a product I created!

So here's the stinker. I built a product, only to find out that it's probably not quite positioned right. Yay!

It was dripreader.com if you want to have a look at the landing page (I am going to decommission the app now so no need to sign up) but at its core it's an app that allows you to write and record book notes that you've taken when you read a book, and queue them up into a spaced repetition system.

It's cute, at least I think so. But I have all of 1 user. Me.

I think in summary, it is going against the likes of note-taking apps like Obsidian, Notion, Keep and any physical pieces of paper that people like to write their book notes on. There's no way I could compete with those. The SRS system is nice to have but not compelling enough to drive behavioural shift.

So it didn't quite land.

But that's okay!

Now I have several ideas of how to pivot it, but as first round of validating the direction, I want to field some thoughts!

I've created a poll - I'd love it if you could let me know ideas of what you personally think could be valuable.

I was thinking that my Spaced Repetition algorithm is the unique selling point here. Book review apps are dime-a-dozen. And so are note-taking apps. But how can I incorporate it into a functional product I wonder?
A chrome extension perhaps? Something enriched by AI maybe?

Building in public, I hope you enjoy my journey!

on April 5, 2023