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title: Postnote

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# Postnote

From the focus mode writer to wikis, the writing space is very competitive. Some lesser investigated realms are writing communities and writing tools. Let's break writing products into a few realms; editing, tooling, publishing and networking.

Editing alone has plenty of options though there are some key differentiators like online/offline and portability. But it would be hard to breakthrough on an editor alone. This is further challenged by strong SaaS editing experiences like Substack and Medium. This leaves tooling, publishing and networking.

Tooling seems to throw up some surprising options, I use Hemingway often alongside basic editors like IA Writer. The obvious opportunity is with grammar and style but Grammarly is the incumbent there. An unchallenged space is in non-linear composition, or assembling a web of snippets. This could be built out as tagging, collections or threading. Given text libraries like ProseMirror, there is a large unexplored possibility with robust referencing, eg. linking a line, a paragraph or a post to another line, paragraphy, post or link. However a hyperlinked editor might be niche to a smaller set of highly committed writers.

Publishing in an age of centralization is seeing a trend towards decentralization. Blogs are back. Specifically the widely observed use of Notion as a blogging platform. Write a note, host it. This document uses HackMD for handling publishing and permissions. But the concept seems to have been almost incidental to building a wiki. There is also a whole realm of hyperlinking that makes new kinds of storytelling possible.

Networking ideas is something left unexplored. Most platforms like Medium still focus on the discrete post. But a trend seen in both Tumblr and Are.na is the move towards collecting snippets. Seeing a post in a larger context. This might look like a single line or quote gathered into a collection.

Absent from this is any mention of styling. While there is always a request for Tumblr like features, a simpler route might be to serve up source Markdown to frameworks like Svelte with an API to handle collections.

## Postnote Summary

Who are you? Postnote is a group of concerned writers.
What do you do? Postnote change what is possible with publishing, referencing and collecting posts.
What's your vision. What if in writing, you could connect ideas in new ways. A community where sharing produces new forms. Where a quote from a book becomes the starting point for a new post which lives in a collection of inspirations.

## Customer
### Goals
An individual wants to capture structured and short notes. They write these notes to themselves typically but occasionally they want to share them with a group or the public. In sharing they hope that others might draw insights or offer feedback.

### Activities
Users want to paste their ideas into a place that's shareable but also their own. They want to develop their ideas offline, return to them later, choose when to post, when to update it, who to broadcast to, who to take comments from. Beyond that it remains your scratchpad, your postnote. You can always return to it. 

## Customer
### Goals
An organization wants to see increased knowledge sharing and camaraderie. They hope that by making work more visible, teams might draw deeper insights.

### Activities
Organizations train or incentivize their staff to use internal tools. It requires that they reduce friction in sharing insights. Much of this requires a minimum level of security but also the possibility of publicity. They'd ideally like teams to build a cadence into their updates. Part of what interests them is also have a machine readable format that can be used for theme or sentiment analysis. They want their staff to feel secure is sharing publicly or not.