Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The moment when you decide to no longer do your own support. Naively, you think, oh, that’s taking so much time. Primary reason to make that decision is to spend more time on the product as a developer, perhaps. But the side effects is that you lose all these direct touch points with your users to the filtering of features of what’s really important.

00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins and I’m joined today by Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam and Alex Greekspoor from Agenda. Hello. And Alex, I understand in addition to being a company founder and a product developer, you’re also a musician.

00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s a big one. It’s a hobby. Anybody who has run agenda, you know, knows my music if you want to see it later.

00:01:01 - Speaker 2: So yeah, there’s a little video on the home page there, and if you hit play, you get some music in the background, and I think you were telling me that folks ask you, oh, where did you get that music from? And the answer is, you made it yourself, right?

00:01:13 - Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah. I had 2 or 3 requests where I could find it on iTunes, and my wife is always saying that you should put it there. But not, you know, those are the Easter eggs.

00:01:24 - Speaker 2: Well, this is part of the fun of being an indie developer, a small team, as you get to wear a lot of hats or do a lot of making of different kinds.

00:01:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and spend a lot of time on things that the boss wouldn’t have found justifiable, I think, precisely so.

00:01:38 - Speaker 3: It’s funny, I’ve had the opposite experience. We have some piano music on the video on our homepage, and people ask me if they know I play the piano. Mark, is that you playing the piano? No, I regret to inform you I don’t play that well.

00:01:51 - Speaker 1: Well, you know, it’s time to replace it.

00:01:54 - Speaker 2: But notably, yeah, the music in the muse trailer there, launch trailer is one of your favorite pieces. It’s one you’ve played, that’s why we chose it. It’s just performed by, let’s say, a professional, yeah, exactly, yeah. Well, Alex, I was really interested to talk to you because you work on this great app called Agenda, which you describe as date focused note taking, and some of the philosophies behind that I think are quite interesting, as well as being a beautifully designed app and has won Apple Design Awards and all that sort of thing. But maybe we could start with your background and especially I’m interested in your work on papers and how that kind of led you to agenda.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Sure, sure, yeah. I guess like I’m not a professional musician, I’m also not a professional app developer. I’m actually a biologist of training.

And that as a hobby, I started programming and that basically got out of hand and fast forward 10 years and this is what I do now.

But yeah, I started developing apps to help me in the lab. We were in a biology wet lab environment, and I always had an interest in working with apps like Photoshop, but never had gotten myself to programming.

And then basically, in the early 2000s when Mac OS 10 came out, That’s when actually I started tinkering with the then new Coco stuff and everything around programming that was newly introduced alongside Mac OS 10, and that basically then grew, started making apps for in the lab, sharing those, all free, they were all free. And we shared them on our website and that’s basically how it all got started.

And as I progressed, basically, the apps became more complex and You know, the next one and the next one and then ultimately, I wrote an app called Papers, which was kind of an iTunes for scientific research articles, PDFs, and that really kind of took off and allowed me to go full time in the developer basically.

00:03:50 - Speaker 2: Nice, and Mark and I have worked a bit with scientific computing tools and kind of creating tools for scientists who are working in the lab. And one thing that struck me there, particularly in the maybe in this modern era of, I don’t know what you call it, data science or whatever, but yeah, for biologists specifically, but I think the sciences in general, having some programming skills seems to be a superpower like whether it’s R or Jupiter notebooks or some of these more consumer-ish tools that are still programmingAT lab data, that kind of thing. You started there with kind of automation type things because app development or Mac program development. I feel like that’s a level up from what I think was the usual, a scientist that wants to crunch a few numbers, they’ve outgrown a spreadsheet a little bit, seems like you jump straight to the hard stuff.

00:04:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, but it’s interesting because actually, for me, the hard stuff was exactly a lot of the things you mentioned.

And I think the interesting bit is that actually, I was not going from this area of I need the program for my science. For my biology, I didn’t really need any, I was not a data scientist. I was really a cell biologist doing microscopy work. And I wasn’t using any of the programming, little scripting.

I had done a little bit of scripting. I had made some web pages more as a hobby or as a, to earn some money as a kid, but nothing really special.

I actually, in the, in the contrary, right? I wasn’t able to do any programming of any form.

But it was always something that intrigued me. And I came always in from the more visual parts.

So I’ve taught myself a lot of Photoshop skills, or video editing skills, that kind of stuff.

And I would love to make apps, but at the time it was like C++ and Gold Warrior and all kinds of very difficult stuff. And I was like, no way is this gonna work.

But then when Apple released Mac OS 10, they kind of presented that new stuff, the new programming stuff that came from Next at the time as a way that it would make it easy. So I was like, oh, maybe somebody like me can now actually make an app.

And I started looking at it. I actually bought the book at the time there was just one book about it. That they then advocated as that’s how you’re learning. And I was like, Oh, cool. Now I can finally make these apps. And I started reading it within 3 pages, I realized, no, this is just still serious programming, you know.

But I was motivated enough by then to kind of really buy a book on C and kind of dig into it and put my teeth in it and really go through the hard part till the point where I could go back to that original book that I bought and actually got enough to get going.

So I never used any scripts or I never felt like I could use it in my science actually. And that’s the interesting bit because I made apps that I consider not scientific apps in a way because you could better describe them as consumer apps for scientists, right? So you have kind of two types of apps or two types of programming, but uh, you know, you have kind of Two types of programming. One is for your scientific work and usually there it’s just a matter of getting the shortest route to your results. You’re not making something for general purpose. You just want to get to a result.

00:07:02 - Speaker 2: It’s just for you and the code itself is throw away because what you really want is the results.

00:07:07 - Speaker 1: And this is the opposite. This is kind of a consumer product. It’s a product you’re working towards a rounded off thing that others can use. It’s a completely different type of programming.

00:07:18 - Speaker 2: And papers, of course I’ll link the homepage in the show notes there, but you’ve got, for example, PDF reading and annotation on the iPad with the Apple pencil, other features that certainly sound familiar to Muse users. Do you have any big takeaways from building a product, sort of a serious productivity tool with heavy document capabilities that ran on the iPad, among other places? What were your big takeaways from working on a product like that for however many years you did?

00:07:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, to go back to how it started and how I kind of also think, I guess. I always think, what is the problem that I like to solve, right? And I almost always, well, always basically a problem that I have. And so I always make the app for myself as the first customer or the first user. And in the case of this PDF reader, we were in the middle of the transition to PDF, right? Before that, you would go to the library. Of your research institute and you would literally photocopy articles from paper versions and you know, when I joined that institute, there was just this transition going on.

00:08:25 - Speaker 2: What year was the transition from paper to digital?

00:08:33 - Speaker 2: Around 2000, 9, between 1995, 2000, certainly a while ago in internet time, but really not so long ago when you think of it.

00:08:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the interesting thing was that We went through this same exactly this parallel with MP3s, you know, when Napster came out and these apps, you would have all these files on your desktop and you would have an app that basically would play those files, but you were still actively busy with an app in combination with files, loose files, and iTunes kind of solved that by creating a shoebox app that took away all the kind of concept of a file. And just basically bring the real concepts there, which is album, artist, song, right? And so I was thinking that we need that in science, basically an app that basically lets us search for author, for journal, and basically all these concepts instead of having these PDF files everywhere. And so I was at Apple conference in 2004, probably. And Apple introduced a technology for a database. They introduced a technology for a PDF reader and Spotlight, which was to be able to index PDFs.

And I was like sitting in the audience like, well, those are the three components that we need to create a shoebox app for creating that Napster for research or that iTunes for research, I have to say. And so that’s how the idea came about, basically. So it’s about thinking about the solution or the problem that you have and then I’m able to see these components and then be able to kind of assemble the puzzle, basically.

00:10:05 - Speaker 2: And I think that is the genesis of a lot of great technology products is a new. Come along, then someone who’s familiar with the domain sees how that or in combination with other technologies can be put together to do something new that you couldn’t do before.

00:10:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s it. It’s not necessarily new because iTunes did this for music. So it’s not that I invented the idea of a shoebox app, but I could see that that’s what we need, but translated to this domain, right? And that’s I think there’s still a lot can happen in the innovation.

00:10:36 - Speaker 2: So it seems like that one was pretty successful. I’d love to hear about the journey that took you from there to your current work on agenda.

00:10:44 - Speaker 1: Well, in a nutshell, it’s the same kind of process because what happened was that fortunately papers became very successful. It allowed me to at some point decide, well, this is what I’d like to do the whole day. I was doing up to that point, everything in the evening hours, but I looked at some point, like, we got so much feedback, it was so motivating. I got so much drive to continue working on it. And in the meantime, I had started making money with it, and it was surpassing my postdoc salary. So you’re like, well, I can do this the entire day and live from it, you know, that’s a very easy decision to make. So then it continued to grow.

I worked alone at it first and a friend of mine joined me and it kind of organically grew to about 6 people. At which point, And that was in 2012, 1 of the bigger scientific publishers approached me and said they wanted to acquire papers. And so they bought it and I joined the company and we continued growing the team.

And at that point, my role became more and more manager than so much being an indie developer, certainly not indie anymore, but you know, also not any development at some point anymore. And yeah, I, I just realized I’d much rather go back to that original phase. So I decided to end that journey also because I had left the lab and scientific area for by then about a year or 10. So I wanted to focus again on something that really was a solution for a problem that I had, right? So, kind of back to that original setup. But interestingly, when I was at that bigger company, I had started hitting other problems. Also, that came back, basically. I was kind of transplanted back in these early days of a new career and you start hitting new problems for which you’re gonna think of new solutions. And that’s basically where agenda came out of.

00:12:47 - Speaker 1: Right, you basically traded your job as a lab scientist for a job as a manager of a small team and company, yeah, exactly, yeah, and then you hit very totally different problems and different issues and you start thinking, OK, what is the solution for this problem, and I kind of naturally start to think about it.

It’s interesting because I never thought about it really, but for instance in the case of the PDFs. I started organizing those PDFs. I started manually renaming them, manually putting them in folders, and I in this kind of stuff, so that you start searching already in a very kind of primitive way for small solutions.

And in a very similar way, when I, uh, when I was becoming a manager, I started in a very primitive way, starting to develop methods of keeping track of what was going on, keeping track of who I should talk to and what I had talked about with people, what the agenda for the next meeting should be that I had with my team every week, etc. And in the way of note taking. And that methodology has started to evolve to the point where I was like, well, that methodology works really well, and I can see other people in my team not doing that kind of stuff so well. So they could definitely benefit from this solution that I have kind of invented as a big word, but developed, basically. And then That’s where I thought like when I leave this place, I’m gonna, you know, take that kind of approach and just put it in the form of an app that then becomes much more accessible to anybody, really.

00:14:08 - Speaker 2: Well, and that’s precisely what caught my attention about agenda and brings us to our topic today, which maybe I’ll call time-based notes or you talk about date focused note taking, and I guess the meta element there, since we’re philosophical on this podcast, is that I feel that there’s this, I don’t know, type of product, it’s not even a category, but an approach which is taking a philosophy or a way of working and then baking that into a piece of software.

00:14:37 - Speaker 1: So basically, it started by just a simple realization that I should just always have a place to take my notes and seeing that not even that is what a lot of people do.

So it started by, I started just using text edit and I always had already when I was programming, always had these kind of 4 or 5 text edit documents open, one for each of the apps I was making, for instance. Where I would get an idea and then just put it in, but also put stuff there when I found a certain bug or something that I should really add.

It was kind of a living document that kind of organically shaped what I was gonna work on. And more also as a way to calm the mind, you know, knowing that you have preserved some ideas or some order and where you can find what you need to go back to, etc.

00:15:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the mind calming thing is a big part of the getting things done methodology. I always love the term open loop. It’s the concept of if you feel like there’s something you have to keep in your mind that you’re keeping that alive, it’s consuming mental bandwidth. If you have a place to put it, but importantly, it has to be a place. To put it that you trust, it will be resurfaced at the time you need it, however you define that. So yeah, big fan.

00:15:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and I think it’s one of the most important parts of note taking.

And then that kind of was a natural thing to do for me.

So when I moved into this kind of managing role. I just created instead of one for weeks, one for papers, one for enzymax, I just created these kind of similar documents, but now for our weekly team meeting or for the marketing thing or for talking with my boss and etc. And from there, it evolved into a way where I kind of naturally say, OK, I need to separate the previous meeting from this one. So I would just, at the top, I would create a basically just with a few equal signs, like, OK, that was kind of the last one. And on the top, I started adding. Some empty new lines where I could basically, OK, that’s where I would naturally keep the notes for the next meeting. And then I started realizing, oh, that actually works well, because now I can go back in time as well, because automatically, as every time I add new stuff at the top, stuff that kind of is from the previous meeting sinks to the bottom, but it kind of, therefore becomes kind of a paper trail of what you discussed in the last meeting and the one before and one before. And that just started to evolve in a little bit more formal way where I would just have kind of like a domain language, right? Where you would just say, OK, I always start with a plus sign and the title or the date of the meeting. And then I have some topics that I discussed, etc. So you became almost like a quite nicely formatted document, basically, with exactly an entire history of all the team meetings that we had. Which I realized very valuable because at some point, even people from my own team would come and say, OK, yeah, well, last time we agreed this and this and this, and I would say, no, look, I can even go back. Last time we discussed this and before that we did this, etc. And of course, I was working remotely and then it naturally kind of fits that because you will have a Skype call or Zoom meeting and you always have that text document next to it. And so you would be very good at note taking, more better in a way than. Doing it in present, right, because then you don’t want to sit behind a laptop or anything.

00:17:49 - Speaker 2: My managerial life, I had a similar technique, not nearly as structured and elegant as what you’re describing, but it was really based on the the person, and this was often connected to one on ones, or yeah, if there’s a particular team planning meeting, then I have a text file that’s named after that team. running log where the newest stuff is at the top. But yeah, the idea is as a manager, you’re context shifting constantly, and if you’ve got 30 meetings throughout the week, including one on ones and whatever, and then yeah, you don’t want to spend the first, I don’t know, 15 minutes trying to re-ramp up on the context. Yeah.

00:18:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and Adam, you mentioned this idea of, I think called open loops where You want things to be written down so you have space in your head, and I always find that so important because it’s so deceptive when you don’t write something down, your head is full and you’re saying, oh look, my head, in fact, can contain all the things that I want to be thinking about.

It’s just perfectly full, it happens to be. But in fact, when you go to write something down, you create space and other things enter your mind, which you didn’t even realize you needed to be thinking about, and you couldn’t have unless you had ejected some of the other stuff by writing it down or some other means.

00:18:52 - Speaker 2: Um, it’s almost like a Parkinson’s law kind of thing.

00:18:54 - Speaker 3: What’s that?

00:18:56 - Speaker 2: Parkinson’s law is I usually think of it as referring to hard drives, but it can also refer to closets, I think as well, which is if you have a storage space, you will somehow magically acquire the number of things necessary to fill that space. So if your hard drive is a certain size, you will somehow always fill that. If your closet is a certain size will somehow, and how is it just so that I have exactly the number of clothes or whatever that this closet, and of course actually the causality flows the other way.

00:19:22 - Speaker 1: And I think another interesting aspect of this is when you think about writing versus thinking. Writing, certainly handwriting is a slow process, right? So, compared to how fast we can think. So I think it even helps when it comes to writing down your thoughts and typing them, there’s a number of processing steps to really, OK, how am I gonna write it down because it’s always, it needs to kind of be more neat. You have to form proper sentences. Instead of just some terms that go through your mind. So you need to think how am I gonna write it down, and you need to actually write it down. And in that process, your brain is just faster, thinking about all kinds of things that come in. And so I think it helps really in the creative process. And like you say, Mark, that it brings up other thoughts that you hadn’t thought about. You get new ideas as you write down a sentence. It can really generate this idea of, you feel like an idea generation machine because while you’re typing, you’re always like, I need to type faster just to think all these other things that now come up. That’s also great. I have that very often, actually. And this whole process helps in that, putting it down. Paper. That’s one of these things.

But what I found interesting is that you mentioned, I also have this kind of process. It looks a bit, I wasn’t so organized as you.

And you also mentioned earlier, you know, how did you kind of form it into a general thing.

It’s a very interesting process what happened with Agenda, because when I left this company, I was like, OK, I’m gonna put this workflow exactly like that in the form of an app. So I pitched it to a really good friend of mine, another fellow in Dev, Drew McCormack, who I always would meet up a few times a year. And he had once said, if you leave this bigger company, maybe we can do something together. And I had this, OK, is this a great idea for an app and I feel that I needed it. But I felt like when I met him, I’ll just pitch the idea to him. And he said, Yeah, I think it makes sense, despite the fact that there are bazillion other note taking apps already out there. And I said, why don’t we do it together? So we started working on it and we made the app exactly kind of follow this workflow that if you would say, OK, this meeting is done, it would automatically create a new note for that meeting at the top, which would be called next, which was just places where you could put things out. So effectively, really, literally the way I worked. And what we saw there is then when we worked after 1.5 years, we basically brought it into the first alpha of beta that we would send out to friends and there were like a handful. And, you know, nobody got it. And they were like, what’s this? You know, because it was this, OK, but why is this note appearing at the top? And It was just too much my way of doing it. Then you go into the whole topic of how generic should it be versus how much should it be steering towards a certain workflow or a certain way of doing things. And it was definitely something from day one that we experienced this struggle, basically, to do it in a very opinionated way or very generic way.

00:22:23 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges with software that tries to bake in process. You can certainly have either for a personal piece of software, what we usually call situated software, or you’re building.

I used to do consulting for basically ERP consulting for enterprise customers, and we would just come in, they would tell us the process we would write software that exactly encoded that, but it was never intended to be used by anyone else.

And so then if you go and try to bring that something and make it more general purpose, it may not fit with what everyone else needs or wants, and I feel like this is especially so in project management software.

I’ve written some of that over the years, and I’ve also seen plenty of others, and there’s this very natural tendency to your company or your team or you as a person have a way to manage projects.

It’s worked really well for you and you think great, I want software that exactly encodes that go to make that, and then it’s not really usable by others and what you probably want is something that has more some building blocks that can be combined in different ways, but I agree it’s a very tricky. In some cases just trade off where you just have to make a choice between opinionated versus open-ended, but maybe there’s other places where you can have clever moves where there’s building blocks that can be combined together in a way that reflect a worldview or a philosophy or a way of working, but also give you some flexibility, freedom, mix and match, customize your environment.

00:23:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s exactly how we basically then went, right? We need to make one step back and make this something more generic.

But that still would allow somebody like me to build that workflow using the building blocks that agenda provides, but others might not even want to use any dates, so you can use agenda just as a replacement of the notes app, for instance, without ever bothering about dates.

And you can build all kinds of workflows, and that’s great. And then I think that’s what a lot of people like and actually it’s funny because earlier today. That was exactly the comment that somebody made a user made. Like, it’s so flexible. I love the flexibility of agenda, but you need to limit the number of building you purposely limited the building blocks to make them kind of general purpose.

So you get basically a Lego for your note taking workflow, basically, you know, so you can build your own way. But that leaves you with the problem that now, how do you get back to those people that don’t have those workflows developed.

That maybe are not aware that they need to do it and just maybe are not that kind of reflective on how to build such a workflow. So that’s where we are pretty much now, right? that you start thinking again, OK, back to that person that wasn’t taking notes or that wasn’t really able to kind of structure his thoughts for a meeting.

How can you help them without enforcing, basically by setting them up in agenda in a way that really works well for them? And how do you let them discover this way that works really well for them.

So. I think that’s where a lot of my thoughts go right now, as the basic building blocks for agenda are pretty much in place. And you start getting at the point where it’s more important again to start thinking about how do you teach people to find a great way to really feel like, oh man, this app is that, I can’t live without this app because it’s my go to for all my ideas. It’s how I structure my thinking. It’s where I find everything I’ve done in the past, etc. right?

00:25:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a problem that Adam and I have grappled with before, the way of working or getting it problem. You have a product, but you need to approach it in a certain way for it to be fully useful. So I’m curious what exactly are the techniques that you’re using to communicate these ideas to your customers or potential customers.

00:26:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the first thing we do is when you start the app, I thought it was really important that we show what is this app going to do and why is it different from the other note taking apps. So it kind of set the general stage.

What is it, what is it not? And so we have a little animation that just kind of tells you, OK, it’s a note taking app and there’s these different aspects to it, and it also shows kind of the weaknesses of other types of apps. And then you have a kind of general onboarding sequence of a few slides that just show you, OK, this is where you find this and that.

But one of the, I think most important things is that we also ship some example documents, which are, again, I think one of these areas that comes close to the music stuff where you maybe spend a lot of time or fun on, but they actually are very useful. And they show you kind of a few models of working. So they can be inspiring.

And then the last, that’s kind of where we leave you in the app.

I very consciously brought back from the early papers days, which we over time lost, but I figured that was actually a really big loss, is that we embedded a community forum inside of Agenda. You can access it through, if you go to, uh, agenda.community, but it’s built in the app, so you can access it from there. And That creates a group of users that also talk on purposely, I added a section called Talk where I invite people to discuss their workflow. So, of course, it has a how-to section, which is kind of a manual, a living manual. It has a feedback section and a support, but it has also this talk section where we basically say, just let us know how you use agenda and describe your workflows. And it’s been a fantastic resource of all kinds of people describing. How they work, which techniques they use, from GTD to settle custom to all kinds of things and all kinds of topics, but also like I’m a teacher, I use agenda like that, and that’s been a great resource, I think, and we send a lot of people to that. It tells a lot how you do it.

00:28:09 - Speaker 3: That’s super interesting because we’ve long.

Suspected slash slash argued that people mostly learn tools socially, as much as we invest in manuals and onboarding and stuff, mostly people learn from other people.

And for more enterprise oriented tools like Notion or Atlassian, there’s a natural contagion vector which. you’re at the same company, you’re working on the same project together, you’re in the same meeting.

And for very widely used individual focused tools, you can also get that because you have a sort of critical mass where there’s enough people to spread the ideas around.

But for these more indie independent, individual user focused tools, it could be hard to get that social contagion going.

But you have sort of a neat mechanism here with the built-in community into the app to help encourage that.

It’s very cool.

00:28:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and there’s one aspect that also keeps me busy a lot, which is that it’s very common actually, that people that love agenda right in support or on the forums, that it’s basically the second time they try agenda before they really like it.

So I get a lot of feedback that is like, you know, a year ago I tried the agenda, I didn’t get it or, you know, it didn’t work for me. Now I got back to it and I absolutely love it.

And so you start thinking, OK, what is it that the second time around they got? Is it because they saw I need somebody else working with it? Is it because they come to the app and a lot of kind of wrong assumptions have been cleared by that first try? And is it because of the community? It’s probably a whole mix of things, but I think part of that is what you described there, yeah.

00:29:42 - Speaker 2: I’m just flipping through your community forum bit here and I notice it’s sort of a mix. There’s both topics initiated by community members like you mentioned, people talking about telecasting or other kind of note taking methodologies, but I see you also post product updates there or something happens like there’s some external and external review or something like that. That’s sort of all ends up there and even it seems like maybe use this as essentially instead of having a company blog or writing kind of standalone web articles, they basically just go in this forum and they’re part of the conversation.

00:30:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we don’t have a company blog. This is our blog. I have a bunch of tutorials there. This whole, for instance, if you search it for Nextbox, you basically get this entire story about with images and stuff of how this whole thing started, even including some screenshots from the.

First beta that was kind of so badly received, etc. So, yeah, and even as well yesterday, somebody wrote in, I was really surprised as some person wrote an entire article, huge article about the whole topic of back linking and different types of approaches, you know, as a graph, kind of representation of your notes, and there’s a group of people that just love writing up these things.

There are great kernels of discussions and They teach you how they see it, and they teach others how they can use it, and they help others discovering these workflows of how to organize their thought. And that same article that I just mentioned of this person use writing this huge kind of overview of all the tools that are there, including a lot of our competitors, but I don’t mind because he did write a really great summary because he was mentioning. This aspect of that is note taking is not so much about writing, but it’s more about the structuring of the thinking process, basically, note taking is about the thinking process of where you place things, how you organize things and. It’s also I think still goes one step further because you see all these discussions about, oh, this app does it like that, and in this app I can, I have a core port, and in this app I can link and no and this app can do that, and this app can’t, and I think a lot of these discussions tend to go about what app A can do and, you know, program B can do and what others can’t, and it kind of feature tick boxes and stuff. Well, I think it focuses way too much on what exactly an app can do and how it works. It’s much more about how do we get people to find a way to structure your thoughts, to find this way where you feel that you have everything in your brain organized. And you can find back things and you can be really creative because you, you have this capacity for it and a place to put things and everything. So it’s, yeah, definitely more about the process. And I’d like to focus in a way more and more on that. And the community is a way to stimulate that, to be a lot of that thinking process happens there and it’s nice that you create not just the app, but also the community around it. It helps people to discover new ways of better ways of organizing themselves and take better notes, for instance and etc. So, yeah, it’s a really important part of the app actually.

00:32:56 - Speaker 2: I also find it really interesting that it’s both on the web, which of course something Like a forum really should be, but you also have it in the app. So that dual access means it’s right there at hand, but it’s also searchable, so I assume there’s some element of people finding these interesting articles through the web, like they would a company blog, but now they see the whole community discussion, and they can follow that and see how rich the community is. But then if it’s right there in the app, you probably are more likely to get people using it than if it was standalone web forum.

00:33:29 - Speaker 1: You know, I guess maybe you were hiding that term, but for sure the term SEO went through your head. And yeah, fair enough. You know, the marketeer things like like that. Oh, that’s great content because it’s Google index it and if they search for this, they will find the agenda, of course.

But for me, those are the kind of byproducts because what I see more is that people come to the community and because it’s so actively embedded and referred to in the app, and then when somebody contacts us and support, we point to it and etc. so we always kind of inward point to that community.

But it gives there’s also this great impression about, oh, this is a nice place to be, right? As a user, and it gives some kind of feel of, if I use this app, I’m part of a group that can help me or if I have a problem with the app, or if I can discover new things, so that’s valuable for me. And we see that back in the review comments because we live there too. I mean, I’m there and Drew, we are there all the time. We answer everything. We take part in those discussions. Which means that you get in your reviews on iTunes, you get back, you know, these developers listen, these developers are there, they’re transparent about what’s coming up. We know what’s gonna happen. They feel empathy for being small developers, so they understand when you have to say no to a lot of things, etc.

So it’s a way to really be there as well. So it has many aspects beyond being just a community forum in a way, or a discussion board or something.

And actually, I mentioned this article. Maybe you can point to that video that I put to this article that is describing the whole next box idea, because I did an iOS talk where I actually talked about that and about what I call kind of side effects. So, for instance, we had a forum in early papers one. And it was a great place. That’s why I knew it worked. But we got riddled with spam and with some nasty people. And so what happens is that if you don’t have the tools to manage that, in the beginning, you have to say, 1000 users, and as one guy is nasty, OK, you can handle that one guy. But if you now grow 10 times, now you have 10 nasty guys, right? At some point, it becomes hard to handle if your forum doesn’t really support you in that. And so it started to become a bit of a nasty atmosphere in some cases.

And the spam, and so at some point you said, ah, it takes so much time, let’s just put it out. But you don’t only lose the forum where people could support, but as a side effect, you know, the SEO part is one side effect. The fact that that’s where we meet enthusiastic users that help us translate the app in 10 languages, which is all voluntary work done through people that felt that they were part of the community. And when we said, hey, we’re going to translate the app, who wants to contribute? And I’ve got some people there. Well, they’re amazing. It’s super high quality. If we have an update, they translate everything within no time. All gained through that. Those are all side effects.

You can think so many ways. Your new features that you discovered there, your ideas, your sample documents, your anything. There’s so much stuff coming out of that. That’s amazing. And we tend to think of like, OK, what’s the primary reason? Oh, it’s a manual and some kind of support help. If you make the decision to kill such a community, for instance. Based on those two things, then you forget that there is this long tail that probably is worth equally or more even than all these main primary reasons, and that you base the decision to say in that case in papers, we stop the community. And I see that pattern everywhere that you can kind of focus on the 23 things that you think are the most important in a decision, and there are so many side effects that you throw away or that you affect by that decision. They are easily to underestimate effectively.

00:37:26 - Speaker 2: The side effect element of, you have this thriving community that you really participate actively in and you do a lot of work to make that a welcoming place, but also a place you post updates about the product and your own usage and your journey and so forth.

That reminds me of we had Lisa Cole. On the podcast some time back under this topic of authentic marketing and I guess the idea there was that there is this crass way to think about marketing I think like SEO that you mentioned earlier that search engine optimization, which is this very kind of reductive. OK, if I make content in the very generic sense, that people will Google something and they might find my website and then that might lead them to trying my product and purchasing it. And that’s all true, but that, like you said, you’re focusing on the side effects there, really.

I think the primary effect is make a great community, be your authentic self, engage with your users, talk about why you’re passionate about this. Talk about what’s coming for the product, and I think that’s also something indie developers have that you don’t get with bigger companies. You, the individual, and your colleagues can be there directly interacting with the users as opposed to a larger product where you have millions of users and the company has hundreds of employees, you just can’t have that, and that’s something an indie developer can do that’s quite unique.

00:38:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think, for instance, another good example is the moment when you decide to no longer do your own support. Naively, you think, oh, that’s taking so much time.

Primary reason to make that decision is to spend more time on the product as a developer, perhaps. But the side effects is that you lose all these direct touch points with your users to the filtering of features of what’s really important. You get ideas from there. You miss opportunities that come up are being mentioned reviews or collaborations and stuff.

So you all throw it away with it. And those are all the side effects of doing your own support and answering these people yourself. I mean, if there’s one big example, that’s what happened at the launch, right? So we have this kind of big odd slash uh unique. Business model with agenda. And when we launched agenda, that business model had almost gave us equal amounts of attention as to the fact that we had the new product itself, right? So I think half of the news outlets that kind of talked about agenda when we launched were probably wouldn’t even have mentioned us or very little if it was just not a note taking app because, you know, maybe they were just thinking it’s nothing really special or anything. But because we had that, plus a completely kind of new business model or at least something that people hadn’t done before. They were like, oh, we need to talk about this, etc. etc. We, of course, we never went there to think, oh, let’s do a new business model because that will give us so much attention.

00:40:20 - Speaker 2: Let’s get pressed by having a weird business model. That’s probably not what you’re thinking.

00:40:24 - Speaker 1: Exactly. No, that’s not exactly. The way I at least I think, but it’s a perfect example of how these side effects can be used, right? I mean, uh, it reminds me always of medication, right? And it’s really those kind of side effects. The side effects can be huge, you know, more important than the actual medication.

00:40:42 - Speaker 3: This is an example of something we talked about on the previous podcast on small giants where just by virtue of being a little bit different, you unlock a lot of potential energy. Yeah, but I think that’s fair or not, it is what it is.

00:40:55 - Speaker 2: Definitely, yeah, and that also comes to where, yeah, being kind of indie, however you want to define that opens up just the ability to do weird stuff, to be off the beaten path, to to take your own.

It’s no longer designing for the mass market or designed by committee or whatever else, but you can do whatever weird thing you have to express in your soul, and, you know, that may or may not actually work in terms of a business, maybe it doesn’t resonate with other people, but at least for me, I get a lot of. when I see an indie piece of software that’s just doing something weird, different, expressing something, whether or not it speaks to me, just the fact that they are doing something unique and different, and I think that the world is big enough now. Certainly the world of software is big enough now that we can have a million tiny niches and a million interesting little pieces of software that are going to resonate with some relatively small portion of the population, but that’s enough to sustain the team.

00:41:51 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah, exactly.

00:41:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, being able to do weird things makes me think of a little story you told me earlier, Alex, about the agenda homepage, which I love this little animation, kind of a CSS JavaScript animation thing that has a rising and setting sun and moon going over kind of what looks like a little mountainous island. I would love to hear that story for our listeners.

00:42:15 - Speaker 1: Pencil Islands that in a way, it’s just another example of what we all just discussed.

And there’s also this process of how thoughts grow as you work on them, right? So if you leave these thoughts in your brains, you kind of think they’re done or they don’t evolve so much.

But if you start writing it out, or in this case, create actual, you know, in this case, images or things that you can see and share with others, it starts to flow.

So what happened? In this particular case, when we were busy with the app, you always have this kind of empty shoebox problem, which is that if you start an app and you say, even I don’t want those sample documents, the app is empty.

00:42:59 - Speaker 2: So you’re looking at a completely empty screen, the blank page problem, I think that’s usually called.

00:43:02 - Speaker 1: Well, in this case, it’s just aesthetically it looks horrible, you know, it’s like, why have I got this big wide. because of the app, it’s natural, we already designed it extremely kind of clean, empty, right? Without any chrome from the brows, you know.

Anyway, so I asked the designer that we always work with also a good friend of ours, Marcello. I asked, he, Marcello, can you make us some kind of placeholder image that will show when the app is empty or when you don’t have a selection? And I said, Sure. And the natural place to start was to start with the icon, and we had kind of settled down on. The icon being a pencil tip. So the idea is the app is called Agenda. So it’s an A, and the A kind of nicely can be transformed into also being doubling as a pencil tip. So that’s the icon of the app.

So he put big icon, past the big pencil as the placeholder images, and it wasn’t working very well. And then the next day he came, I, I was playing a little bit, I guess he just had a few layers on or something. And he discovered that if you put a few of those pencil tips in different sizes next to each other, you basically got kind of what’s this an island.

And the other element that we have in the app is when you put something on the agenda, which is kind of the equivalent of flagging a note as being important. We use a simply orange dots as the kind of way to signal that. And so he started realizing that that could double as a sun above that island. And this was how this kind of little scene was born. So that was kind of a nice funny placeholder. And yeah, we liked it. So he kind of proposed that you could even have like a moon for a kind of a night scene. I don’t know how he got there, but basically I started thinking, actually you can really make this scene kind of dynamic in the as the day progresses. You can actually put the sun in a certain different location, and then at night, it becomes night time and it became kind of a dynamic scene. And it was just, again, one of these things where you spend too much time on. I actually, there is literally a piece of code in the app that I found somewhere that kind of calculates where the sun should be more or less, at which time of the day.

00:45:09 - Speaker 2: So if you search in agenda right now, so does this mean if I load up agenda here in Germany in the winter time, the sun will actually only be up for a smaller portion of the day and in the summertime, the sun, the sort of the app will show sun version for much longer.

00:45:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s quite accurately knows what time the sun sets. So if you search for something you can’t find it, at least you get the island scene.

If you do that in the morning, you see sunrise, if you do it in the afternoon, you see.

Sun peaking and in the night you get stars and even the, the final Easter egg is that even the moon phase is kind of accurate, whether it’s full moon or not.

Anyway, that was kind of the fun there.

And then one of the things that I kind of saw was it’s kind of a little bit of a yin yang thing, right? The sun always kind of goes on and you have kind of a night half and a day half. And at the same time I was working on this intro movie, and I was thinking we want to kind of say.

There’s some apps that know everything about the future, right? So it’s like your task managers and everything.

But then when you actually check off these items, they kind of disappear into nowhere. And there’s other apps that kind of know everything about your past, which is journal apps. Journaling apps is where you keep track of everything I did today. But they have very little concept of future.

So you get this kind of yin yang kind of two sides of the story.

And I figured that that works really nice with this little island scene, because then you can say one app does this, and in the meantime, the sun goes up and down, and then at the other apps, it’s kind of the dark side. You have the light and the dark side in a way. So it felt this kind of, it would make great for that animation. And so that’s what you see on the homepage right now, and it all came out of that.

Then it starts to grow, because then you’re like, OK, we need to have some sample documents. One of the sample documents is about somebody who visits the pencils Islands, and the Pencil Islands feature everywhere. If you go on our community and our sample documents, even our latest release where we added tables.

You know, the image I made basically contains a table with a list of hotels, which are basically the Pencil Island Hotels, one of 5 stars and a beach cabin for 3 stars, so it kind of provides this kind of coherent thing or or kind of creative kernel where you hang up a lot of things too and.

Now, when you buy the app, you get fireworks launched from the island. We recently introduced referrals, and that’s more that if I say, hey, Adam, you should try out the gender, you get a bunch of tickets to the island. And if you kind of register the referral, basically a boat arrives at the island. It’s like, it creates its entire character. All started out with just asking for a placeholder.

00:47:49 - Speaker 2: What a lovely story. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or via email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Alex, I hope I’ll see you on Pencil Island.

00:48:08 - Speaker 1: Sure, I hope you guys are there as well.

00:48:10 - Speaker 2: All right, thanks so much for coming on the show.

00:48:12 - Speaker 1: Cheers.