Today marks a 60-day streak of committing code to Booklet:
Working daily, even if for a few minutes, keeps the work I’m doing front-of-mind. Then, when I later sit down to code, solutions seem to manifest much faster.
However, tomorrow I will be breaking this streak. I’m going off the grid for a few days on a technology-free vacation.
What’s Booklet?
Booklet is an app for private communities. It enables discussions, announcements, and member directories for social groups, professional networks, and even companies. It’s built for calmness and privacy. Instead of a million unread messages, posts are threaded and asynchronous, and you get one email summary of everything that happens each day. Instead of selling your data and barraging you with ads, it’s a simple subscription product built for utility.
Today people use Slack, Google Groups, or Facebook Groups as ad-hoc community tools. Slack groups are hard to keep up with. Google Groups are powerful, but hard to use. And, Facebook groups are built to keep you on looking at ads.
There are a lot of people starting to experiment with similar products. Some new ones include: Circle, Crowdstack, Meeps, Tribe, Edition, and even Twitter Communities. But, none of these entrants seem to grasp the potential for bottom-up adoption, and they haven’t yet rethought how social networks should change when they no longer make money on ads.
The blog posts “Community leaders deserve better: An open letter about community software” and “Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool” have been major influences in my thinking.
What have I accomplished since the last update?
Phew, long preamble!
Last week I shared a side navigation that I had built. But, I didn’t like it. So, this past week I redid the navigation. Take a look below:
There are still some refinements I’d like to make to the navigation. But, it’s 90% of the way there.
What’s next?
Vacation! But, shortly after that, I’m getting into the guts of Booklet by starting to build out the forum where members can post and reply to comments.
I’m thinking about how to show engagement in a calm way. Instead of a “like” button or upvotes, I’m thinking of showing how many people have viewed a post. That way, there’s a lightweight feedback mechanism to show that people are paying attention to what you write.
As soon as the forum and email notifications are working, I plan to move this updates from Substack into a Booklet group 🙌
How you can help ⬇️
Let me know what feedback you have on the new navigation!
Other thoughts ☁️
Did you know that Stripe uses Google Groups extensively internally?
Thanks 🙏