Funny to hear Notion described as an incumbent! Having used both though, Roam did much more to fundamentally change how I took notes and use them to form new insights and ideas.
No other note-taking service has been able to get me to stop using paper notebooks the way Roam has. I think it's because the default view is a daily diary and it's low-friction to use it. The linking is simple enough that I actually do it (versus having to remember to do it consistently). I'm undecided if it's software that I'd pay a lot for every month, but it is nicer than Notion for my use case.
All that being said... wow, that's a crazy valuation!
In 2011 I downloaded Evernote for Android and promptly took an important note down while in a meeting. I got an email during the meeting (tablet notification), and I opened it. Upon returning to Evernote (using the Android app switcher), my note was gone. "Ever"note must have deleted my note in onPause or onResume. Ugh. I've been calling it Nevernote ever since. The #1 thing Evernote had to do was not delete my notes but that's all it did for me.
A simple email draft would have been millions of times better. I don't take many chances on new notes apps now. I'm "sure" Roam won't delete my notes...until it does.
Gmail drafts as notes for life. Offline, syncing, multi-platform, extremely unlikely to shut down. Easy social integration (fill in to: field and tap Send). Got everything I personally want.
I'm also coding my own take on a new notes app......so we'll see.
No offense, but using Gmail Drafts of all things as a response to what sounds like a pretty rare bug (I’ve been a paying Evernote user for 10+ years and have never lost a note) does not make any sense. What happens when something glitches out with your drafts?
I can understand the desire to use caution , but “I don’t take many chances on new note apps now” as a result of that rare bug from ONE vendor seems extreme and unnecessary.
suggests that notes apps unexpectedly deleting notes is a major concern for users on both platforms (iOS and Android).
Perhaps my reaction is extreme, but I haven't lost a note since or worried anxiously about that issue with a new app. I get that gmail drafts isn't for everyone, but this type of destructive bug isn't rare at all. It seems to be very common.
And the platform I trust to not cause that bug is gmail drafts. Maybe one day I'll be in for a rude surprise but so far I have been very happy.
> What happens when something glitches out with your drafts?
Not the original commenter, but I have never had Google lose any of my data ever.
In Gmail, my drafts are saved locally and also synced. It's never failed, I've never lost even a single character of something I was typing.
And I too am in the boat of "bitten once, never again" when it comes to sync and data loss. If it happens once with something insignificant, it could happen to my thesis or book or whatever. My tolerance for data loss is like 0.000001%. Nothing is perfect. But if I ever experience it personally myself, something that ought to be less likely than being hit by lightning... then statistically, it's much more likely that the service is extremely risky to use, than that I got unlucky.
+1 for Obsidian. Lots of refinement in such a young product. It has been my main driver recently. I picked it up primarily to keep things local rather than rely on an internet connection. Even so, took only a few minutes to add encrypted backups to S3 debounced on file change.
I don't entirely get it either, but I get the motivation for a startup to try it even if it doesn't necessarily add value.
For one, people download and use note apps, so I think there's an inherent curiosity about whatever the next one is. And if anyone can get a critical mass to the point that it's a de facto note-taking app for 'most people', people might become accustomed to the idiosyncrasies and add-on features that the 'winner' note app provides.
There's no good reason for there to be a 'winner' note taking app, but I also don't think there's any good reason for there to be a winner video conferencing tool, or a winner office suite, but we have those.
Videoconferencing is inherently a group activity - it has a pretty clear network effect. Office suites less so, but MS did a good job of using the file format as their moat for quite some time - https://hackernoon.com/complexity-and-strategy-325cd7f59a92
Great UX makes a world of difference. UX is about more than just features or appearance: it's about everything coheres together as an experience for users.
UX should be relatively easy to copy, but it seems (at least to me) that many people have a hard time copying UX. Many people will copy features or appearance, but their execution usually lacks something. This is not a dig: most people don't get it.
There are a few people who do, and when they create something new, only afterward does it seem so obvious.
Just looked at the pricing page- wow.
Roam is pretty expensive.
I totally am open to paying for software but I’m not sure that by charging the amount they do, they can beat lower priced competitors, or stickies .
Maybe you do like it and think it’s worth the cost but I don’t think it’s my cuppa tea.
I’m not sure how others feel about this, but for me a tool that supports me in my work is fine to pay for, and I honestly don’t really care between $5 or $15. I like that there is some kind of value exchange, and these prices all remain more than reasonable. I pay for quite a few things like this on a monthly basis.
I do wonder about the valuation though, and that actually makes me more worried about the future of Roam.
I am an Evernote junkie but Roam is really intriguing. Linking thing together on Evernote is very clunky. Not sure if I will switch to Roam but if Evernote adapts some of their ideas I will be very happy.
Tried it out, the UI is slow and janky, and there's no element of "riffing" to the tool. In notion I can riff easily and polish the notes later then share. Everything is a `/` away. This tool feels tailormade for those neurotic types that use seven different colored highlighters and plan out their month down to 10 minute blocks. "Productivity junkies".
There's a guy that has a blog/course/whatever centered around Roam. I wanted to try it out but the pricing is honestly just insane.
There are so many options for note-taking apps with all sorts of features I don't think Roam brings enough to the table to justify it. Learn vim/emacs and just use a single text file instead or whatever.
Alas, since this article is hard-paywalled it's off topic by HN's rules. For a while The Information was unlocking their articles for HN readers when we asked, but they haven't for a while now. I'll try again.
All this really says is they've done a lot more work before the typical seed. Theres a product, a hashtag, a following, a user base, a expensive video training class and more. All bootstrapped by an individual. Super impressive!
Roam will probably do very well! But 'seed' means very little here as it's, relative to most seeds, very mature.
It shows a handful of UI examples but I still have no idea what is special about Roam except that it apparently has hyperlinks, hashtags and versioning?
There is no link in any main part of the page to get a list of features? Or how it works? I have to find some links in the footer... which take forever to load and give you a scary "No changes to the help database will be saved." message... and one is a "complete course" (way too long), another is a long "white paper" (way too detailed).
And I can't even try it out without giving them my credit card?
Maybe this is a great, revolutionary app. But they're sure making it as difficult as possible for me to figure out why that might be.
A $200M valuation and they can't even hire a marketer or even a PM to put together a homepage that gives me good reasons why I should use it?
For anyone looking to understand Roam, I would suggest searching "roam cult" or "#roamcult" on Twitter.
I'm not one of them — but there is a hardcode, devoted fan base that are convinced it's the best thing since sliced bread. Whenever that occurs, it's worth trying to understand why.
I think the bad homepage is (somewhat) intentional: they only want people who are willing to look past the home screen and actually give it a try... and (I believe) they want to avoid the audience who is trying it just because of a flashy landing page.
But it's funny, what you see as positives I see as negatives. When something has a devoted fan base but nobody else uses it, it tells me it's something incredibly niche for a reason, and therefore probably not applicable to me.
And a bad homepage would be a horrible intention. Why would any product ever avoid an audience? Why would you only want people willing to look past a bad homepage? That sounds like it's screening for people who have a lot of time to waste. I'm not sure why that would be your target audience.
I agree about the terrible homepage. I had looked previously (when they weren't accepting new sign-ups) and assumed it was Mac-only based on the screenshots.
I created an account today (realizing it was actually web-based, no client at all) to try it out and like you, couldn't believe that there was no way to do so without giving credit card info.
However, the "thanks for registering" email does include a link to a playground/test site.
Basically with Roam you think of your notes as a graph - when you link to another page, that becomes a relationship in the graph. Technically this is possible with any note-taking app that allows links between pages, but one of the nice things allowed by Roam due to modeling this way is you can see automatically all the pages that link to the current page, as well as instances of the page title that are still unlinked.
This also applies on the block level (you can reference any piece of text anywhere else without copy/paste), though blocks & block references are not currently shown in the default graph view.
I don’t get it... I use paper or a running text file for notes. Never have I ever had a desire to make it more complex than that.
On a deeper level, I think people who are obsessed with note taking are doing it wrong. I only do it to jot down things to follow up on from a meeting or a conversation. Anything more than that disrupts active listening and keeps you from actually participating in the discussion.
In an academic setting, I would focus on listening and understanding the lecture and referred to the text when it came time to study. I’d maybe take notes for the occasional class where lectures didn’t follow the text, but usually would just get them from classmates who were more dedicated transcribers.
The other thing is that notes tend to be ephemeral in my use case. Things to research or follow-ups from a meetings are basically a task list with a limited shelf life. I do jot down creative ideas in a few notebooks that I’ve kept over the years but that starts to approach journaling, which is a different beast. I guess software could make sense for that but writing by hand would have to become the rate limiting factor for me to cross the threshold.
I'm sorry, but I don't see any value in note-taking apps. It's likely these investors are just turning away from other products that have likely been hurt by covid.
(We work more remote now, we need to take notes, let's do it online, investor frenzy).
It’s puzzling that given the massive hype about roam on Twitter, nobody of their hardcore fans made it here.
So I’ll try to add my perspective after having used and paid for it since they started charging - even though I’m for sure not a hardcore user (yet).
The first problem is calling it a note taking app in the first place. What fits much better IMHO is the term knowledge graph.
The best analog I read is that it’s an extension to your brain. Because your brain works associative, Roam makes it incredibly easy to create bi-directional links between notes.
Wrapping any term in a note in [[]] creates a bi-directional link. I.e. it creates a separate page for the highlighted term automatically which you can then fill with content. On that new page you will also see all the places in other notes that mention the term.
This way you create a Wikipedia-style collection of notes very quickly.
This is the most basic way to explain it I can think of.
The thing is, it’s not really that easy to grasp it and it has quite a learning curve.
But once you start getting it, it is super, super powerful.
I don’t like the whole cult thing around it but the bad website, ugly UI, high price is simply because “they can” and to keep growth under control I think.
A few weeks after they started charging their founder mentioned somewhere that they already crossed 1MM ARR.
The app still has a long way to go to be ready for mass adoption (a mobile app for example would help) but I’m sure that they can somehow figure out UX with that funding.
That being said, I’m not sure they have a lot of technical leverage that would stop others from adapting their ideas and concepts.
38 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 98.9 ms ] threadI’m interested to see how incumbents like Notion try to compete.
All that being said... wow, that's a crazy valuation!
A simple email draft would have been millions of times better. I don't take many chances on new notes apps now. I'm "sure" Roam won't delete my notes...until it does.
Gmail drafts as notes for life. Offline, syncing, multi-platform, extremely unlikely to shut down. Easy social integration (fill in to: field and tap Send). Got everything I personally want.
I'm also coding my own take on a new notes app......so we'll see.
I can understand the desire to use caution , but “I don’t take many chances on new note apps now” as a result of that rare bug from ONE vendor seems extreme and unnecessary.
suggests that notes apps unexpectedly deleting notes is a major concern for users on both platforms (iOS and Android).
Perhaps my reaction is extreme, but I haven't lost a note since or worried anxiously about that issue with a new app. I get that gmail drafts isn't for everyone, but this type of destructive bug isn't rare at all. It seems to be very common.
And the platform I trust to not cause that bug is gmail drafts. Maybe one day I'll be in for a rude surprise but so far I have been very happy.
Not the original commenter, but I have never had Google lose any of my data ever.
In Gmail, my drafts are saved locally and also synced. It's never failed, I've never lost even a single character of something I was typing.
And I too am in the boat of "bitten once, never again" when it comes to sync and data loss. If it happens once with something insignificant, it could happen to my thesis or book or whatever. My tolerance for data loss is like 0.000001%. Nothing is perfect. But if I ever experience it personally myself, something that ought to be less likely than being hit by lightning... then statistically, it's much more likely that the service is extremely risky to use, than that I got unlucky.
I struggle to believe there can be any 'tech' that can't be rapidly copied in a note taking app (correct me if I'm wrong)
And it's not _that_ well known either so it's not like they're buying into a massive mainstream thing.
I don't get it.
For one, people download and use note apps, so I think there's an inherent curiosity about whatever the next one is. And if anyone can get a critical mass to the point that it's a de facto note-taking app for 'most people', people might become accustomed to the idiosyncrasies and add-on features that the 'winner' note app provides.
There's no good reason for there to be a 'winner' note taking app, but I also don't think there's any good reason for there to be a winner video conferencing tool, or a winner office suite, but we have those.
UX should be relatively easy to copy, but it seems (at least to me) that many people have a hard time copying UX. Many people will copy features or appearance, but their execution usually lacks something. This is not a dig: most people don't get it.
There are a few people who do, and when they create something new, only afterward does it seem so obvious.
This is just my take.
Maybe you do like it and think it’s worth the cost but I don’t think it’s my cuppa tea.
I do wonder about the valuation though, and that actually makes me more worried about the future of Roam.
I thought the whole point is it allows you to create relationships between ideas, which would be huge if done well.
There are so many options for note-taking apps with all sorts of features I don't think Roam brings enough to the table to justify it. Learn vim/emacs and just use a single text file instead or whatever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
Roam will probably do very well! But 'seed' means very little here as it's, relative to most seeds, very mature.
It shows a handful of UI examples but I still have no idea what is special about Roam except that it apparently has hyperlinks, hashtags and versioning?
There is no link in any main part of the page to get a list of features? Or how it works? I have to find some links in the footer... which take forever to load and give you a scary "No changes to the help database will be saved." message... and one is a "complete course" (way too long), another is a long "white paper" (way too detailed).
And I can't even try it out without giving them my credit card?
Maybe this is a great, revolutionary app. But they're sure making it as difficult as possible for me to figure out why that might be.
A $200M valuation and they can't even hire a marketer or even a PM to put together a homepage that gives me good reasons why I should use it?
I'm not one of them — but there is a hardcode, devoted fan base that are convinced it's the best thing since sliced bread. Whenever that occurs, it's worth trying to understand why.
I think the bad homepage is (somewhat) intentional: they only want people who are willing to look past the home screen and actually give it a try... and (I believe) they want to avoid the audience who is trying it just because of a flashy landing page.
But it's funny, what you see as positives I see as negatives. When something has a devoted fan base but nobody else uses it, it tells me it's something incredibly niche for a reason, and therefore probably not applicable to me.
And a bad homepage would be a horrible intention. Why would any product ever avoid an audience? Why would you only want people willing to look past a bad homepage? That sounds like it's screening for people who have a lot of time to waste. I'm not sure why that would be your target audience.
I created an account today (realizing it was actually web-based, no client at all) to try it out and like you, couldn't believe that there was no way to do so without giving credit card info.
However, the "thanks for registering" email does include a link to a playground/test site.
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help
Can someone who has used Roam explain what this means?
This also applies on the block level (you can reference any piece of text anywhere else without copy/paste), though blocks & block references are not currently shown in the default graph view.
On a deeper level, I think people who are obsessed with note taking are doing it wrong. I only do it to jot down things to follow up on from a meeting or a conversation. Anything more than that disrupts active listening and keeps you from actually participating in the discussion.
In an academic setting, I would focus on listening and understanding the lecture and referred to the text when it came time to study. I’d maybe take notes for the occasional class where lectures didn’t follow the text, but usually would just get them from classmates who were more dedicated transcribers.
The other thing is that notes tend to be ephemeral in my use case. Things to research or follow-ups from a meetings are basically a task list with a limited shelf life. I do jot down creative ideas in a few notebooks that I’ve kept over the years but that starts to approach journaling, which is a different beast. I guess software could make sense for that but writing by hand would have to become the rate limiting factor for me to cross the threshold.
(We work more remote now, we need to take notes, let's do it online, investor frenzy).
So I’ll try to add my perspective after having used and paid for it since they started charging - even though I’m for sure not a hardcore user (yet).
The first problem is calling it a note taking app in the first place. What fits much better IMHO is the term knowledge graph.
The best analog I read is that it’s an extension to your brain. Because your brain works associative, Roam makes it incredibly easy to create bi-directional links between notes.
Wrapping any term in a note in [[]] creates a bi-directional link. I.e. it creates a separate page for the highlighted term automatically which you can then fill with content. On that new page you will also see all the places in other notes that mention the term. This way you create a Wikipedia-style collection of notes very quickly. This is the most basic way to explain it I can think of.
The thing is, it’s not really that easy to grasp it and it has quite a learning curve. But once you start getting it, it is super, super powerful.
I don’t like the whole cult thing around it but the bad website, ugly UI, high price is simply because “they can” and to keep growth under control I think. A few weeks after they started charging their founder mentioned somewhere that they already crossed 1MM ARR.
The app still has a long way to go to be ready for mass adoption (a mobile app for example would help) but I’m sure that they can somehow figure out UX with that funding.
That being said, I’m not sure they have a lot of technical leverage that would stop others from adapting their ideas and concepts.