Project Commonplace
Over the last week, I’ve started working on something during the Surplus startup accelerator program.
My week started with Theo Ryzhenkov and me brainstorming together about what we might want to build, and then both of us naming a pretty similar idea/problem space.
§ The Problem
The problem revolves around two situations:
- I’m regularly reading a nice piece, or watching a good video, and think that I’d very much like to recommend it to friends of mine. But I’m currently watching the video, and doing that right now makes me get out of that, so—I don’t.
- At different times, I’m regularly in the mood to read, watch, or listen to something, and know that someone already recommended something to me—but I neither know who of my friends it was, nor in which messenger/email message/personal conversation I got the recommendation.
Both of these situations suck: That they exist means that we spend more time on the platforms, just looking at what our feeds hand us.
§ What We Built
And over the last few days, we made a thing: The name is commonplace (after commonplace books) for now.
Here, have a look at the launch posts from the other Surplus teams:
Go check them out!
And since the most important thing about startups is listening to your users.
Please, please tell us about your experience while going through that flow (the more brutal the better):
- What was unintuitive?
- Which click was redundant?
- Where was something displayed in an inconsistent way?
Knowing that from your side would be incredibly helpful (and you can be sure we’re going to respond fast)!
You can tell me, Theo, or you can just comment under this paragraph—click the flag on the left of it.
But so far, that only tackles the pain from situation 2.
For the pain in situation 1, we made a browser extension that lets you capture your tabs for recommending them to friends later (whose first version we’re going to publish in the coming days).