When some people ask me what Netintui is, they really want to know how Netintui is going to make money. What is the commodity that it sells, and why will people be interested in buying that item? These are legitimate concerns, but in my opinion, they are the wrong questions.
When intelligent people ask questions, they ask on a deeper level. When common people ask questions, they inquire about noticeable graphs and balance sheets—something tangible for them, like a battery percentage. This is how our world works; we sometimes have to live with that. (I have to live with that.) Yet, when you are building something where the results of what you are building and the progress you're making have no obvious battery percentage, people become confused and ask strange questions.
It's not people's fault. They can't see beyond certain realities. And that's why advertising exists. Mass marketing aims to simplify the most complex and unrealistic results of certain products and projects so that the hoi polloi can understand. Sometimes, this leads to over-simplifications, making the proposition an utter lie compared to what the product actually is. But people don't care! They just want you to give them a promise of what the product or project stands to bring.
In the case of Netintui, I will relate it to the Wright brothers building an aeroplane. Now, that was the media's oversimplification of what they were building. I know that because the Wright brothers did not say to themselves that they were building an aeroplane. They didn't even know what an aeroplane was. They didn't know what it could become. They didn't envision what diverse use cases humanity would apply aeroplanes to. They didn't! They only understood that they needed to discover how to make a flying object. They needed to discover the underlying aerodynamic principles by which flight could happen. And when they finally did, humanity progressed their discovery to the complexities we have today.
Starting out building products for an industry and a market that people understand is a simple endeavour. It's like starting a company that sells shoes. It's understandable to regular people because there is a paradigm to explain that it exists. People will only require you to explain why they should buy your shoes and not others. And I think that's what people are trying to rationalize with Netintui Notes. They keep asking why they should use Notes when Medium, Substack, Tumblr etc., exist. I think it's like asking the Wright brothers why humanity would need a flying object (or aeroplane) when it already had hot-air balloons. Of course, they couldn't see the possibilities. And that was fine.
So for me, it's totally fine. I get the skepticism: What is this? How is it different? What's its differentiation? What about its value proposition? And all that. People are trying to understand tomorrow's realities with today's experiences. It's not that simple. Those questions were only invented for today's product development principles. Taking them to be the Bible for explaining future narratives of creating tools for humanity will be unintelligent. Man creates trends. And trends evolve because man's behaviours with one another likewise evolve. To objectify the principles used to explain a trend will, again, be unintelligent.
So, here's my advice: If you can't contribute to the vision, just sit and watch. (And also beta test.)
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Joshua Francis.Just some thoughts.