Deciphering the Sound of Crickets - My First Fleeting Notes Launch Experience

TLDR;

Sometimes life throws you curveballs, and sometimes those curveballs are your own projects. The trick is to keep swinging until you hit a home run. This is my tale of launching Fleeting Notes, an app aimed at revolutionizing the way we take and manage notes. My golden rule? Stick to one value proposition and do it well; don't get sidetracked by the bells and whistles.

Finding My True North 🧭

Many of you know about my previous endeavor, SynchroCise. Though it was a fantastic learning experience, it made me realize something crucial: I had to work on something I was deeply passionate about. The way to discover that? I turned the microscope on myself, peering into my daily struggles and inconveniences.

What I uncovered was a mess of thoughts, ideas, and observations I wanted to document but never could in a meaningful way. My notes would pile up, turning into a digital landfill that was too chaotic to sift through later.

The ADHD Dilemma 🌀

As someone who self-diagnoses with ADHD, my thoughts are like fireflies; they flicker and vanish before you can catch them. I dreamt of a world where jotting down an idea didn't mean burying it in a graveyard of forgotten thoughts.

The Zettelkasten Inspiration 📚

During this soul-searching period, I was engrossed in reading about Zettelkasten, a note-taking methodology that seemed to resonate with my chaos. What struck me was the concept of "Fleeting Notes"—brief notes that capture these quick, ephemeral thoughts.

A lightbulb went off: if I could improve how these Zettelkasten users capture their Fleeting Notes, I could change the game for them and, by extension, for myself.

Crafting The "Perfect" App 🛠

So I went into hermit mode, coding day and night. My goal was to create an app that effortlessly integrates Fleeting Notes into Obsidian. I threw in everything but the kitchen sink—linking and backlinking, full-text search, source-capturing, and a supposedly "innovative" UI for good measure.

Armed with what I considered a game-changing MVP, I stormed the Zettelkasten subreddit. I launched several threads, and each was met with... a lukewarm response. The upvotes were sparse; the comments, disheartening. Here's a particularly crushing one:

If I'm attending a lecture or reading an article, I don't want to take the time to make a bunch of properly linked individual notes. I prefer to have a single note for the lecture and write things down quickly. Then later I can extract the key points into individual notes, and link them to other notes as needed.

Was I devastated? Absolutely. Was I ready to give up? Almost. But did I? No. And that's the crux.

Stick to The Vision 👁‍🗨

While the initial launch was a reality check, it didn't make my vision any less valid. I was still committed to solving a problem; I just had to find the right audience for it. Rejection isn't the end; it's just a pit stop in the grand journey.

I'm still tweaking, refining, and most importantly, launching. Stay tuned for my next blog post where I share how I realigned my vision and finally got my first customer!