(2020-09-18) Baschez Roams Road Ahead

Nathan Baschez on Roam's road ahead. So I feel pretty certain that Roam’s road to justifying the $200m valuation leads directly to team collaboration and enterprise use. Which feels, to be honest, a little... depressing?

VCs have invested in a startup at a price that’s got half of tech twitter

What happens next is what matters.

Can Roam justify the hype?

The worst software businesses, conventional wisdom says, are todo lists.

Personal todo lists don’t depend on others using the same system (no network effects) and it doesn’t matter to most people if your old todos aren’t there (low switching costs). It’s a tough business

So one way people have overcome it in the past is to adopt a sort of “[[come for the tool, stay for the network” strategy.

how can Roam do this? What’s their tool, why do people like it, and how can they parlay that into a network?

The reason people love Roam is because it increases the expected value of their notes.

It’s more like growing your own personal wikipedia over time. Every time you take a note, you can tag

the coolest part is those pages also know about the pages that link to it. The links are “bidirectional” — meaning when you look at a page, it will tell you all the pages that link to it

For example, here’s my page on Intel, which I haven’t written anything in yet, but automatically gathers all the notes I’ve ever taken about the company

The more you use it, the more it feels like a programmable environment like Excel, rather than a regular note-taking app

Queries are particularly powerful.

You might be wondering: who really needs this stuff? It seems kinda intense. And it’s a good question.

useful for situations such as writing, research, therapy, people management, or anytime you need to ingest a large amount of information, remember it, and come up with new ideas.

there are two roads ahead for Roam.

• The default trajectory leads towards intellectual nerds, purchasing on their own and using Roam privately.
• The swerve leads towards organizational collaboration, network effects, and enterprise customers.

In other words, Roam could be the thing the scientist uses for fun to organize their book notes, or they could also be the thing that same scientist uses at work to collaborate with colleagues on discovering new truths, paid for by their employer. To achieve that second direction, Roam will have to switch tracks.

Turns out, building a network effect is much more complex than simply adding collaboration features!

Paradoxically, I think the best thing they can do for now is make it a better single-player experience, while having shared databases working in the background the whole time.

The core question for Roam is: what kind of teams will use it? Which tools does it replace, and which tools does it co-exist with?

On the other hand, maybe I’ve got Roam all wrong.

If you take a bong rip and close your eyes, you can imagine a world where Roam is a new sort of internet. Where people can publish ideas and reference each other’s ideas in deep, interlinked ways. It’d be like a giant public brain, instead of a private second brain. (Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts)

The only problem is, I’ve seen a lot of “public Roams” but I never enjoy the reading experience. Non-linear “digital gardens” of notes are of immense usefulness, but only so long as the individual nodes provide quality linear reading experiences.

Plus, what would Roam’s financial position in this ecosystem of interlinked writing even be? Would they charge writers? Likely not

So I feel pretty certain that Roam’s road to justifying the $200m valuation leads directly to team collaboration and enterprise use. Which feels, to be honest, a little... depressing?