My app has idea type swamp

A while ago I submitted Disorganized to an AI for evaluating ideas after the creator posted about it on reddit.

Your idea, "Disorganized," falls into the "Swamp" category, meaning the market is filled with mediocre solutions for personal organization and note-taking. […] Don’t build it - Source

When posting the results to me the creator said “this could be rough”. It wasn’t, because it’s not news. The AI is voicing the same reaction that I’ve received over, and over, and over: WHY does the world need another note-taking app?

I understand why most people question my decision to build Disorganized, another productivity app should be the last thing that the world need, but there is more to it.

Slack wasn’t the first chat app

I wonder what people said when the Slack founders pitched their ideas. Maybe the initial reaction was “but aren’t there already chat apps?”.

There sure were video conferencing solutions before Zoom, ways to buy cheap things from China before Teemu, and Youtube was already massive before TikTok.

We take all of these for granted today but none are completely ground-breaking innovations. They are, at best, incremental improvements to solutions that existed before them.

Regardless of whether you believe Disorganized is an improvement over its competitors, you should acknowledge that incremental improvement is a viable strategy.

In fact, thinking about my own private life, most things that I enjoy today are incremental improvements over things I already had. My phone is a bit better than my last one, as is my electric toothbrush. We don’t think about these things because they are, well, incremental. But they still happen and the companies behind these things are highly successful, sometimes even the new ones.

The note-taking market is huge: Everyone takes or should take notes, and everyone has their own preferences and use-cases.

Why would you do B2C?

In software startup circles I often hear that B2C is a pain and why would you do it? Usually motivated by…

End users expect a polished product

Why do we assume that releasing a polished product is impossible? Of course, it is impossible if you only give yourself a month of work before the first release, something that you apparently must do if you want to be a real software entrepreneur.

The version of Disorganized I had after one month was garbage. Even worse, if I had launched that version it would have been unfixable, because fixing it required breaking all existing notes which is not acceptable if you have users.

End users don't have any money/patience.

End users certainly tend to have less money to spend than companies, but there are also way more of them. Similar argument applies to patience. If you piss off a user or two (I really try my best not to), then there are others. If you piss of a company or two, maybe you just lost 10% of your customer base?

Back to the swamp

AI analysis acknowledges that the productivity market is filled with mediocre solutions. Maybe the reason that we see app after app is that nobody has nailed it yet. Personally, I found that existing solutions were either too basic or so filled with features stacked on top of each other that using them became a drag.

Disorganized is my highly opinionated take on what is and what isn’t important when taking notes. Setting a task as high vs low priority isn’t important, because they’re rarely executed in that order anyway. Colors, highlighting, and careful organization also isn’t important because text search is a thing and adding friction to writing notes is the worst possible thing you can do.

Conclusion

Disorganized might not take off. Maybe it won’t get traction, maybe someone else will build something better, or maybe I’ll just fall short. That’s fine.

But it won’t be because more note-taking apps are a bad idea. It’ll be because execution matters. It doesn’t matter if there are thousands of other solutions, if using all of them hurts then there is still room for improvement.

Incremental improvement isn’t flashy, but it works. That’s how real progress usually happens - one small step at a time.