Show IH: Supernotes is a collaborative note-taking tool for collecting your thoughts
Hi Indie Hackers,
My co-founder and I have been working on Supernotes for a few years now and wanted to show it to IH!
Supernotes, at its most simple, is a note-taking app. It's a place to take the things in your head and dump 'em for storage (and then sharing, if you like). But the approach we've taken to note-taking is slightly different than what you'll see with other solutions. Instead of opting for a long-form document format (and folders to put them in), we decided to go with a card format. So like documents, but shorter. We also decided to make the cards themselves nestable, rather than having a folder system. This means that as you flesh out ideas, you can just add "child" cards to a "parent" card to keep yourself organized (plus cards can have multiple parents!). Each and every card can be edited, commented on, colored, titled, icon'd, linked to, and shared.
We did it this way because we think its a better fit for how our brains actually work. Humans don't think in terms of essays – we think in terms of a large number of interconnected thoughts. When it comes time to share your cards, all you need to do is send a 4-word share code to your friends/family/pet and they can see that card right away.
So to summarize, on Supernotes you can:
- easily make notecards which have their own tags, comments, colors, icons, etc.
- cards can have parents/children, and unlike most other platforms, a child can have multiple parents (yay graphs!)
- cards can hyperlink to other cards directly in their bodies (otherwise known as wiki-style, Zettelkasten, or the internet)
- cards can be instantly shared via 4-word "share codes"
- cards can be "published" inside other cards (i.e. published children) so that anyone who has access to the parent can see the published child
- once shared, cards have fully-featured permission-system so you can decide exactly how you want to collaborate with whom
- use dark mode because who doesn't love dark mode
Anyway, I'd love for you to try it out and let us know what you think! Always open to suggestions.
p.s. Due to the current global pandemic / work from home situation going on, we've also decided to make Supernotes completely free until July, so even more reason to try it out.
p.p.s We've also just launched on ProductHunt, so check us out there too!
Oh, that looks really nice.
Thanks Rosie, we've spent a lot of time (probably too much haha) trying to make everything as slick as possible!
Very interesting.
Good interesting or bad interesting? 😂
Good interesting. A lot of notes tend to be snippets and also tent to be interconnected information. It will be more interesting as a native app as this is something you would want to pull up often.
Glad to hear it! Yep, native apps are definitely something we want to get out ASAP.
Looks sweet! Can’t wait to try it out!
Thanks, hope you like it!
Looks neat. What would be the difference compared to http://notion.so/ ?
Notion is a great product, big fan myself.
There are a couple main differences, but I think the biggest one is the way things are shared and from there the kind of workflows we are trying to accommodate with Supernotes.
Everyone has a different way they like to organize their notes. Sometimes, this can make it hard for people to collaborate because they all want the final product (a collection of notes) to suit their own workflow. Notion has done a great job of building a great UX for collaborative working, but when you collaborate with someone on Notion, you still need to agree to a structure because everyone is working on the same document. In other words, you cannot collaborate while simultaneously maintaining your own structure/workflow in a seamless way.
In contrast, we have built Supernotes around "cards" (rather than documents), so you can always just share a single card, which is approximately one "idea". From there, we have integrated many different ways for these cards to be organized. Importantly, the way we have designed it means that different people can organize the same cards in different ways:
And of course you can mix-and-match these options as much as you want / need to. This makes it easier for people (especially people that aren't on a "team" – think freelancers, students, friends, family, etc) to collaborate in their own way, because while one collaborator is organizing things with hyperlinks, another collaborator could be using tags to organize those same cards, but in an entirely different way.
tl;dr – what products like Notion are striving for is "all together sharing". What we're aiming for with Supernotes is more granulated, personalized sharing.
Saw this earlier on PH and signed up - looks great.
I really like the visuals. The landing page tells the story pretty well too, I feel. Does it convert well or do you not have enough data yet?
Thank you! We actually just did an overhaul of the landing page (our previous version was a bit more student-centric).
So jury is still out on how well this new version converts, but we're hopeful and so far it seems to be doing better than the last one.
Will definitely update on here when I have more data.