September PKM ONE Newsletter

Last time I wrote to you, I told you about my new writing app Essaymd. This time it’s about my new note-taking app, which I literally vibe-coded in 4 hours on a public holiday. I made wanotes on impulse, it is a WhatsApp-style PWA. The frustration of being unable to save some important WhatsApp chats got overwhelming hence I thought I would get some API from WhatsApp and forward it to my app, but this process was a bit complex.

Wanotes is a PWA, so it does not have the smoothness of a native app. But for whatever it is worth, I am a daily user and I hope you can be one.

Are SaaS businesses going to die?

Now I have created two apps, just cause I couldn’t find the workflow in the apps out there in the market. It makes me wonder. Will SaaS tech companies die, cause with natural language every person or one-man business will become a tech company. I mean if you use platforms like Lovable, the apps look out of this world, they are as good as any tech company can make.

Is the PKM dead?

I was generally getting a lot of engagement on X (when it was Twitter). But then I got busy with backpacking, and felt X was too commercial so my motivation to post on X is rather low. The newsletter also had some good traction, I remember having open rates of 40 percent almost. I have started wondering if the PKM community has become siloed and only Obsidian, Notion, tana, were being heard, and the rest of everyone was being ignored.

Improved UI of Essaymd

The first prototype for Essaymd was too convoluted. I felt the coding gets complex for UI which doesn't have the right logic. I wanted a bit too much. Now I have just removed all clutter, it is meant to do one thing and one thing only. Help you revise one sentence at a time. That has been my biggest grouse with all writing interfaces. Even something as beautiful as iA writer is useless for me as I get lost in all my convoluted vomit of words and sentences. Then again Grammarly is more of a nuisance than help, it used to screw up the meaning of entire sentences by changing the context. Now if Grammarly screws up, I can check it at the sentence level revision. online).

I added cloud sync too

Last time I had written how I couldn't get the authentication and cloud sync working. This was the toughest feature to get going. The problem was the security rules and something called race conditions (Should it take the local as first priority or cloud backup as the most recent copy), I kept losing my notes. It is still the biggest nightmare! I abused the LLM with all types of words and finally, it blurted out, “I will make saving logic like Google Docs” and voila saving fell in place.

Decision fatigue of using new apps.

I change apps every month, what worked for me last month doesn’t work for me this month. So now with my own customised app, I can keep improvising by adding and deleting things which are not very useful and if any passengers(users) in the process benefit, that would be awesome. I don’t get people who have used Evernote for the last 15 years, these are super humans for me.

My Vision for Essaymd

I want Essaymd to have a truly mobile app experience and I am so happy that this newsletter was written on my iPhone 12 mini. So I feel I have succeeded, unless there is a glitch while doing my sentence-by-sentence revision.😬I