Smart people and entrepreneurs need to consume, generate, and process massive amounts of information these days to maximize their success in the knowledge economy. These energetic people are bursting at the seams with thoughts, ideas, commentary, newly learned subjects, and more. It becomes hard to stay on top of things due to information overload: the exponentially rising difficulty and time commitment of organizing large amounts of diverse information across different services/platforms.
Note apps are limited in scope, used for narrow topics like class notes or shopping lists where a linear set of similar sized items, or multiple linear sets behind tags/folders allows for quick scrolling and retrieval. When there are multiple topics or information comes in different sizes a note app quickly becomes cluttered and unorganized, exponentially increasing the time needed to organize & retrieve it.
Initial Demographic: entrepreneurs and highly productive knowledge workers facing information overload
Nature of Information Overload: a constant stream of “knowledge items” of various sizes that are impossible to lump into one category, being exponentially more difficult/time-consuming to organize
Mem.ai is a newer app that is the closest yet to reflecting what's described in this write-up. It is rapidly developing and could really shake things up. Article talking about A16Z funding for Mem.ai
Ideaflow: Also has an approach similar to this write-up's, but has not been very impressive technically
Notes & knowledge apps: literally the most generic and deceptively difficult market to enter. Right now, changes including the transition to the knowledge economy, advances in neuroscience and information management, and remote working are driving a whole host of new market entrants of all shapes and sizes. The ground is churning with hypercompetition. However, as one HN user put it:
Things like Roam represent a very tiny fragment of a much larger puzzle that's existed for years prior to their existence. From a theoretical perspective, they are only novel insofar as they exist as concrete products today. Sometimes it's healthy when spaces heavily fragment due to hypercompetiton. It allows products with strong technical and theoretical groundwork to show up later and render the entire space effectively obsolete.
I think we are still looking for that "perfect" product.
A new type of knowledge base called a Metabase, due to the way it would integrate the Internet/computing so tightly with the physical world it can be classified as a Metaverse application.
Tagline: Revolutionize the human brain
Explain Like I'm Five: It's a second brain 1 billion times more powerful than yours! Like TikTok for your notes
Breakout Product Idea: idea/brainstorm categorizer (very related)
Don't show favoritism towards any one technical solution, architecture, or paradigm - The target demographic and their needs/problems should be extensively researched first, pound the dirt and talk to dozens of them. Then, technical solutions can be developed to meet those needs.
Solution should be built around specifics of the human brain’s consciousness and information processing, including:
The solution should have zero learning curve! You open it, and it makes sense instantly!
Needed specialists to build solution: Neuroscientists, UX researchers, algorithm designers, information architects
A powerful knowledge base system where you just throw things at it and it organizes them for you with no effort on your part. This prevents knowledge from piling up, and increases knowledge flow into the system.
You don't organize it personally, an AI trained on previous content and organized on neuroscience principles can process or dream about your knowledge and place it right where it needs to be, similar to how TikTok automatically knows what kinds of videos you like. No more need for thinking about your knowledge: the machine is the information architect. No more need for choosing between graphs, linear lists, infinite trees, combinations of folders and tags, etc.
In the United States, the transition to a full-blown knowledge economy has been in the works for years, with much tumult and social chaos as data reigns and physical jobs are automated away. To drive the breathtaking pace of innovation characterizing the last 100 years, the knowledge economy demands more and more human brainpower, now.
Our brains are already reaching the information overload barrier, beyond which only machines will be able to help us venture. I won't speak to the psychological and social effects of this, only that as a builder I know there is only one direction in which we can keep growing. While 100% brainpower like in the 2014 film 'Lucy' or 2011 film 'Limitless' is impossible, the human potential described by them is already in all of us. It just needs to be amplified to meet today's demands. A second brain or metabase's incalculable productivity gains would change humanity as a whole forever.
In the future with the development of BCI technology, we may see the concepts integrated, in effect reaching this 100% brainpower threshold. Language would cease being a bottleneck, with direct brain-to-brain & brain-to-computer communication minimizing the need for us to use sound and writing to convey our thoughts and build knowledge. If we were to have 'benevolent AI masters', I feel like they would be humans augmented with second brains, maximizing the full potential of AI while keeping the human gifts of sentience and creativity.
https://fortelabs.co/blog/basboverview/: Very well known and foundational course on second brain, super intensive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_management: overview of the new field developing around managing second brains and information overload
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex: very similar idea but its 80 years out of date
https://www.bytesized.xyz/tools-for-thought/: Andy Matuschak's brilliant thesis on second brain tools
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
https://daltonmabery.medium.com/what-apps-i-use-to-build-my-second-brain-5f5602dfeb3e
https://uxdesign.cc/building-a-second-brain-for-product-management-8a05cc4c5e4e
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTI6Mxu3YiI
Posted on Mon, 18 Mar 2024.