Obsidian as an example of thoughtful pricing strategy and the power of product tradeoffs
OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, published a brief “love letter” to the notes app Obsidian, giving his approval to the product and the company’s approach to running a software business.
I agree with everything Karpathy said. Moreover though, Obsidian is a fascinating example of thoughtful pricing & product strategy, and the tradeoffs that follow. Even if you’re not an Obsidian user, or haven’t heard of Obsidian, there is plenty of best practice and some interesting strategy questions here. No prior knowledge is assumed.
I should add:
I’m a long-term paying customer, but have no other commercial or personal relationship with the company
I’ve relied solely on publicly available information [^1] and my own analysis to write this.
This is an unapologetic nerd-out over an app (and company) which I use and pay for.
What is Obsidian and how is it differentiated?
A notes & writing app, launched in 2020, available for most popular desktop and mobile devices. It’s an alternative to products like Apple Notes, Evernote and Notion, and differentiates itself by:
Extensibility. Obsidian enables third-party plugins — of which there are ~1700 (mostly free and open source) — to wildly extend the app’s capabilities and usecases beyond a traditional notes app.
Using locally stored [^2] Markdown files which can be read & edited by many other apps & services, and remain accessible when you’re offline. Obsidian’s CEO — Steph Ango — describes this as the “file-over-app philosophy” [^3].
Allowing users unusual freedom in customising the app’s layout, and theming the interface to their personal tastes & requirements.
This Fast Company post is a good intro to Obsidian’s origins and community, and describes how it developed a cult following among a userbase of a million+ users, some of whom describe it as a second brain or Personal Knowledge Manager.
In this post, I will focus on:
How Obsidian segments customers via its pricing structure
Why I consider Obsidian such an interesting example of simple & effective pricing strategy
The tradeoffs inherent in Obsidian’s product and business choices
How Obsidian segments paying users
Obsidian is free to use with no time limitations, but offers optional paid propositions which segment customers via:
features
user type
a fun combination of status signalling, early access & fandom.
This sounds like a confusing mix of monetisation options, but, as we’ll see, it is deliberate customer segmentation based on user needs and willingness to pay.
Segment 1. Syncing
Syncing is a necessity for anyone who uses more than one device, and Obsidian has two pricing propositions for it:
Obsidian’s paid syncing proposition was recently sub-segmented into these two pricing tiers[^4] with the objectives of accessing more users from the low-end market and converting more free users into paying users. The two tiers are differentiated by four value metrics:
Number of synced vaults [^5]
Total storage space
Maximum file size
Length of retained version
These four value metrics have been chosen so as to minimise cannibalised revenue from users who are willing to pay $8 per month, but don’t need all the capabilities of the Sync Plus offering. For example, I have only one vault to sync but I also have >1 GB of files in that vault. So I can’t downgrade to the less expensive Standard Sync tier, and I keep paying $8 per month.
Given that syncing is essential for so many users, my assumption is that this is by far Obsidian’s largest revenue source. However, the most interesting thing about Obsidian’s paid sync capability is how it superficially appears to compete with several free sync options available in Obsidian’s Community Plugins Store.
Some of these plugins come with warnings to indicate they might not be completely reliable:
!!!Caution!!! ALWAYS, ALWAYS, backup your vault before using this plugin.
Use it at your own risk: This plugin is currently in development. There is a risk of data corruption or loss when using the plugin. Ensure you have backups of your important data… Don’t interrupt: Do not close Obsidian while syncing, especially when uploading data to the server (an upload icon will be shown). Otherwise, expect data corruption or loss.
For Obsidian’s leadership, a short-sighted response would be to ban third-party sync plugins on the grounds that:
Third-party sync plugins can endanger user data. Document syncing is notoriously difficult to do quickly, reliably and at scale, and customer data loss is the worst possible user experience. It’s a reputational risk even if a third-party plugin is at fault.
These plugins appear to compete with Obsidian’s paid sync proposition and deprive it of revenue.
However, I’d be amazed if Obsidian’s leadership ever went down that road [^6].
First, it would annoy developers upon whom Obsidian relies to donate their time to enable its key differentiator i.e. extensibility via plugins. As we’ll discuss, extensibility and developer goodwill are essential to growing Obsidian’s serviceable addressable market.
Second and counterintuitively, the extent to which third-party sync plugins actually compete with Obsidian’s first-party sync function is pretty limited. This is because so many users who adopt a free third-party sync plugin will fall into at least one of the following categories:
Unable to pay. I.e. they cannot afford the fee and so — if they want to use Obsidian across multiple devices — they have no alternative but to use a free option.
A requirement to sync with a third-party cloud service. I.e. these users want to sync with some other service, rather than Obsidian’s own sync service. Those third-party services may be paid (e.g. Dropbox), but the third-party sync plugin is free [^7].
Unwilling to pay.
Some users have quasi-religious objections to recurring software subscriptions
Some users won’t pay for functionality they perceive as technically trivial to implement themselves
Some users are confident in their ability to deal with the consequences of potentially unreliable plugins relative to the value they place on their own time spent dealing with those consequences. Or: some people like doing things the hard way.
So, there is a compelling argument that many users of free third-party sync plugins still wouldn’t pay for the first-party sync service if the third-party plugins were banned. That being the case, there is less (and – I suspect – much less) revenue cannibalisation than might be expected from third-party plugins. In fact, Obsidian even officially supports “free” syncing between Apple devices via iCloud, although it is slow, less private and functionally limited compared to Obsidian’s recommended paid option.
The presence of free sync plugins and the users who adopt them is an interesting example of the difference between substitute solutions and competing solutions depending on the customer’s needs & willingness to pay. Given the necessity of sync to so many users, it is tempting to view the free third-party sync plugins as competing with the first-party paid sync service. But for users who are unable to pay or refuse to pay, the actual competitors are other free or low-cost notes apps which offer free syncing (e.g. Apple Notes, Simplenote). In the absence of free sync plugins, these users wouldn’t pay for Obsidian’s sync proposition because they wouldn’t use Obsidian. Obsidian’s official support for a free-but-not-great iCloud sync is an effective hedge against those users going elsewhere.
Segment 2: Publishing
This allows paying customers to publish selected content from their Obsidian vault to public web pages in the form of a blog or personal website. This customer segment also has some third-party plugin options, but the competitive dynamic is more straightforward than sync. Here, Obsidian is competing on ease-of-setup, ease-of-use and long-term reliability vs:
Self-hosted publishing, which typically requires technical knowledge and payment by the publisher.
Third-party hosting which still requires somebody to pay. The host must either charge the document owner, or find some other way of monetising the content (e.g. advertising).
Segment 3: Personal vs professional use
These charges are defined by who the user is rather than the functionality they require or how frequently they use it. An unusual [^8] wrinkle is that the differentiation between personal and commercial usage is unenforceable. Obsidian does not collect user data or telemetry, so this fee relies on the honour principle. I’d love to know how much revenue it actually brings in!
Segment 4: Beta access, status signalling & virtual merch!
Obsidian has a cohort of enthusiasts, many of whom contribute by testing betas, writing plugins and helping other users in the forums. This customer segment is monetised via Obsidian’s Catalyst tier. Charging for access to betas is unusual, but Catalyst comes with status-signalling via online badges and access to exclusive channels on Obsidian’s Discord server.
Obsidian’s ability to get a subset of users — to pay for the privilege of donating their own time to improve & support the product — tells us much about the love this product induces. Online status badges available exclusively to Catalyst members arguably make the Catalyst tier a form of virtual “merch”.
Why Obsidian doesn’t offer a Sync & Publish bundle
Obsidian does not offer a Sync + Publish bundle for a lower price than the two individual propositions purchased separately. This is because a bundle of these two capabilities would be revenue dilutive.
Successful bundling enables the vendor to drive more revenue in aggregate and deliver more value to customers by selling multiple propositions together for a lower price than if they were sold individually. There are many online resources about the economics of bundling and how/why it works. So I won’t write a full introduction to bundling here, but I recommend this post as an excellent & entertaining short summary.
What happens when customers are presented with a-la-carte products?
If you present any a-la-carte product to any customer at any specified price then that customer’s response will (broadly) fall into one of three buckets [^9]:
Enthusiastic. Yes, I want this product. The price is acceptable. I want to buy it.
Casual. Hmmm... This product would be nice to have, but I’m not willing to spend that much on it now.
Uninterested. I’ve no interest in this product. I won’t buy it, and I wouldn’t spend money on it, even if it was much cheaper.
The casual customer is the one to focus on here. The amount they were willing to spend on the product – but didn’t because the price was too high – is a deadweight loss. Bundles work by converting a chunk of deadweight loss into revenue, but they only work in some circumstances.
Bundles work best when:
They aggregate demand from lots of customers who are enthusiastic for at least one part of the bundle and casual about (some) other parts of the bundle.
Different customers are enthusiastic or casual for different parts of the bundle.
Effective bundles are revenue accretive when they monetise more deadweight loss from casual customers than they cannibalise by discounting to enthusiastic customers who would’ve paid full price for multiple a-la-carte options.
Bundles have their limits though. In particular:
They cannot convert an uninterested customer into a casual or enthusiastic customer. If you have no interest in Obsidian Publishing and would not pay for it at any price, then you won’t change your mind just because it’s in a bundle.
If the customer is uninterested in all parts of the bundle, then they won’t buy it.
Generally, the fewer the parts in the bundle, the harder it is to make the bundle revenue accretive.
The problems with a Sync + Publish bundle are:
Sync is an essential capability for customers who need it. I.e. the vast majority of potential customers will be enthusiastic or uninterested, but not casual.
Obsidian Publishing is similarly binary. You either have a need for it, or you don’t.
Moreover, web publishing has notoriously high switching costs. If you’re already happily publishing to another platform (e.g. Substack, Wordpress etc) and especially if you already have a following there, then Obsidian Publish provides precious few reasons to switch [^10].
So a Sync + Publishing bundle would be revenue dilutive because:
It would cannibalise revenue from customers who were willing to pay full price for both propositions individually
It would only minimally monetise deadweight loss from potential casual customers because there are so few of them
With only two constituent parts, there are no other opportunities to monetise deadweight loss from casual customers.
Why is the notes business so difficult?
A lot of people write notes. All knowledge workers, administrators, managers, educators and students need to write notes; and people make notes in their personal lives. The market for notes apps can be confidently sized in billions of users. But that doesn’t make it an attractive market for newcomers:
Competing with free defaults. Apple Notes, Microsoft’s OneNote and Google’s Keep are all “free” in their respective ecosystems, and are more than adequate for many people’s needs.
Competing with paid [^11]. There are plenty of capable & well-known options (e.g. Evernote, Notion); and less famous paid competitors (e.g. AmpleNote). Plus younger startups who’ve raised venture capital (Mem) and so are less reliant on cash flow for their operations.
Switching costs. Some apps make it inconvenient to migrate notes into a competing solution. Even if a user wants to adopt a new solution, it can be (too) painful to move.
Administrative hurdles. Many laptops and mobile devices are administered by company IT teams who prohibit or restrict the installation of third-party apps.
Mandated alternatives. Some companies mandate the use of third-party team-focused solutions (e.g. Notion) which may overlap with intended Obsidian usecases for affected users.
The fifth point connects to another constraint: Obsidian is primarily a single player experience. While it has enabled shared vaults, the implementation is limited compared to team-focused solutions like Notion [^12]. This is — at least in part — a consequence of Obsidian’s “file over app” philosophy which prioritises user control of their own locally stored files & data. Moreover, Obsidian’s other differentiators of extensibility and visual customisation would be less welcome in multiplayer corporate environments: how many IT admins want their users to download third-party plugins which are granted access to employee data?
This is not accidental. Obsidian’s leadership have not deliberately built the proposition to be unattractive to corporate & multiplayer environments. Rather, they made a series of intentional decisions which — like so many choices in product development — are inherently tradeoffs. The file-over-app philosophy and focus on extensibility attract demand from some market segments, while losing it from others.
Obsidian’s CEO — Steph Ango — tweeted:
Obsidian’s product strategy & the benefits of extensibility
Obsidian’s small team [^13] has steadily iterated their proposition, and most of the work falls into five buckets. The relevance of these buckets will become clear when we discuss the strategic benefits Obsidian derives from its extensibility.
1. Table-stakes. This characterised much of Obsidian’s earliest development as features like tags, lists and find-and-replace were added, plus a mobile app.
2. Developer-facing capabilities. Steadily improving support for plugins and the “surface area” with which they can interact; plus CSS-based theming so that every aspect of the app’s look-and-feel can be customised via downloadable themes and snippets.
3. Features for most / mainstream users. Adding new functionality which is useful to users regardless of technical ability e.g. multi-window support, inline PDFs, and the canvas/drawing feature.
4. Improving accessibility and user experience for less technical users. For example: better onboarding for new users; defaulting to a WYSIWYG-like Live Preview mode which hides Markdown syntax; creating a new default UI theme which makes Obsidian look like a modern app; and a visual table editor [^14]. These are all developments which took an existing Obsidian capability, and made it easier to use or more accessible.
5. Bug-fixing & reliability. Self-explanatory but vital.
The strategic benefits of Obsidian’s extensibility: 1. Core team focus
Obsidian’s extensibility enables the core development team to be unusually focused & intentional on a small number of product development priorities, while offloading “non core” product development to third-party developers, who donate their time for free.
Ango defined first-party development priorities as features which:
Cannot be achieved by a plugin
Are useful to at least 80% of people
Obsidian’s pace of development and the product’s stability is a testament to what can be achieved by a small team. It is also a payoff from Obsidian’s deep extensibility, which enables developers to extend Obsidian’s functionality with their own plugins. Those plugins can be surprisingly powerful, or charmingly niche, or just a simple improvement. This leaves the Obsidian team to work on “core” functionality, which is usually
Functionality which benefits from being officially supported and fully integrated into the proposition. For example, a recent update overhauled support for right-to-left (RTL) languages like Hebrew and Arabic.
Steadily enlarges the common base of functionality upon which plugin developers can build and extend
Useful to users of all technical abilities.
It’s worth dwelling on how the core team’s unusual narrow development focus combines with the plugin ecosystem to improve user perceptions of the proposition. Most software forums, Discords and app-specific Slack groups are characterised by users endlessly pleading with an app’s developers to add a “missing” feature, or grousing that they’re unable to fulfil a desired usecase with their favoured app. At the most extreme, the forum mutates into a toxic roll-call of complaints and “announcements” from soon-to-be-ex-users who are “leaving” the product for a competitor.
Obsidian doesn’t have this problem. Its developer community has steadily filled the feature gaps and extended its capabilities with plugin-after-plugin. And Obsidian’s team has remained notably focused and intentional about their product development priorities [^15]. A focused core team, a (mostly) happy user base, and a wildly expansive set of optional features & capabilities leads us to Obsidian’s second extensibility payoff.
The strategic benefits of Obsidian’s extensibility: 2. Enlarging the addressable market
Substantial plugin-delivered capabilities enable Obsidian to replace other apps and services, and enlarge Obsidian’s addressable market.
Many plugins extend Obsidian’s capabilities far beyond the plausible remit of a notes app, and allow Obsidian to serve user needs which would otherwise be met by other applications & services. For example:
The Kanban plugin gives users, well, a Kanban wall. It’s not as full-featured as a dedicated solution like Trello, and it lacks multiplayer, but for an individual user with modest requirements, it’s a good solution.
The Excalidraw plugin enables drawing and diagramming inside Obsidian. It lacks the advanced capabilities of heavyweight diagramming apps like LucidChart, Omnigraffle or MS Visio, but it is a viable solution for casual diagramming, and is where many of my own diagrams start.
The Longform plugin makes it easier to write long projects and novels, and renders Obsidian a viable alternative to dedicated writing apps like Ulysses or Scrivener.
The Tasks plugin is a flexible alternative to dedicated task managers like ToDoist
The Spaced Repetition plugin can enable Obsidian to replace Anki
Moreover, plugins also connect Obsidian to many third-party services like Readwise and Todoist which makes Obsidian and those third services more useful together.
The result is that extensibility enables Obsidian to appeal to three customer segments other than those users who only want a powerful notes app.
The all-in-one segment. For some users, Obsidian becomes a single app to “do it all” (or “do a lot”, or — at least — “do more than just notes”). This is appealing to those users who perceive simplicity and/or efficiency benefits in an integrated solution which contains multiple tools and workflows in one place.
The money-saving segment. Some users want to reduce their recurring spend on apps & services, or cannot otherwise afford multiple paid apps & services.
The power user segment. Some users want levels of customisation, functionality & inter-app connectivity which are not available in most notes propositions.
Obsidian is also a viable option for simple note-taking without plugins, but you’d have to be pretty passionate about the file-over-app philosophy to choose it over the free/bundled defaults from Apple, Google & Microsoft [^16]. This is also an example of clear user segmentation. Users with the most modest requirements have little reason to deviate from those default options, nor pay for something more flexible. Obsidian is not chasing those users.
What is Obsidian trying to achieve, and what comes next?
Obsidian uses a low-key product-led growth (PLG) strategy:
The product’s ever-expanding capabilities and steady refinements attract new users whose needs are not met by their current applications.
The product gets incrementally more useful to existing Obsidian users, which reduces churn.
New users can adopt Obsidian for free, onboard themselves, and use Obsidian’s importer tool to bring in notes from other apps.
However, Obsidian deliberately forgoes two of the hallmarks of PLG companies:
It doesn’t use analytics/telemetry to define or refine the product roadmap. The management team lacks data on how many active users the product has and what they’re doing with it. As Obsidian does not collect telemetry, the team relies on their own judgement and community feedback to decide what to prioritise.
It has limited collaboration features and weak network effects. The file-over-app philosophy makes Obsidian primarily a single-player experience.
Ango has forsworn raising venture capital and intends to keep the company’s headcount low. The absence of VC investors reduces the exit imperative, but also constrains paid user acquisition activities. That constraint can be presented positively in terms of sustainability and alignment with a product-led growth strategy. But it also bounds how far and how quickly Obsidian can grow its userbase.
Early adopters or an established niche?
One way of thinking about the growth question is to ask another question: is Obsidian’s userbase composed primarily of early adopters or an established niche?
The early adopter model would posit that current Obsidian users are early [^17] in recognising the benefits of advanced tools offering capabilities which are often labelled with terms like personal knowledge managers (PKMs) and second brains. Ango has stated this position in interviews. In the early adopter model, Obsidian has not yet crossed the chasm [^18], but, if/when it does, a huge addressable market awaits.
In contrast, the established niche position argues there have been notes app power users for as long as third-party notes apps have existed, or, at least since Evernote launched in 2006. Terms like second brain and PKM are just neologisms to describe concepts which have been around for decades [^19]. Obsidian is a better mousetrap, but it is pursuing the same established niche of users or customer types who’ve always sought out more powerful repositories for their notes and information. With an established niche, Obsidian has plenty of growth potential but post-chasm hockey stick growth curves are not part of its future.
An established niche can still be a growing niche. But it is a far cry from the early adopter model in which the vast majority of potential users are still using free default apps and are yet to engage with a more powerful notes app or PKM.
Moreover, to the extent that the capabilities of a PKM proposition are useful or appealing to a larger market, there is no moat around those capabilities. Incumbents can add those features to their own propositions, just as Apple has done by adding tags and linked notes to Apple Notes.
So Obsidian’s moat is limited to the combinatorial customisability of its plugins. I.e. no other app can plausibly replicate all the Obsidian plugins [^20] nor enable a user to install just the desired combination of those plugins for that user’s specific requirements.
Collaboration as a missing vector for user growth
Multi-user document collaboration is an indispensable part of many workflows, but is missing from Obsidian. If I want someone else to comment on, edit or propose edits to my work, then I must export my content to MS Word or pursue a laborious process to get it into Google Docs [^21]. This omission reinforces Obsidian’s single-player status and is — at least in part — the tradeoff from the privacy-focused file-over-app approach, which makes it harder (but not impossible) for the Obsidian developer team to implement simple & reliable online collaboration [^22].
A few plugin developers have attempted to remedy this. However, these plugins unavoidably rely on third-party services and mostly resemble proofs-of-concept more than viable solutions [^23]. The reality is that there is no straightforward & robust method to collaborate on an Obsidian doc without exporting into another app or service. This is a killer for work-in-progress because:
Getting content into the third-party app while preserving all the formatting is onerous or impossible – even with dedicated export plugins.
To continue working on a doc in Obsidian which has been collaborated on elsewhere requires any outside-of-Obsidian collaboration output to be manually added back into the Obsidian doc afterwards. This is impractical, inappropriate or impossible for many workflows.
This missing capability matters beyond the first-order limitations because:
Collaboration is a valuable channel for exposing Obsidian to new potential users. Anybody who receives a link to an Obsidian doc — which they can open, comment and edit in their browser [^24] — is a potential future user.
Collaborative tooling would reinforce Obsidian’s status as a tool for writing more than “just” notes. I.e. this is a place for drafting blog posts, reports and other formal documents.
Collaboration features will make Obsidian a viable tool for teams.
Collaboration can (and should!) be incrementally monetised as a paid feature subscription. Perhaps with view-only & commenting offered for free, while editing and proposing edits require a subscription.
This shouldn’t be outsourced to plugin developers, not least because it would rely on user data & content being processed by and stored on third-party servers [^25].
So?
Companies often have their problems reported and picked apart when they miss targets, make redundancies or deviate from stratospheric user acquisition trajectories.
Obsidian shouldn’t have that problem. If your aspiration is to thoughtfully iterate on an already-beloved monetisable app for a small subset of the addressable market; and you are not chasing a liquidity event; and your fixed costs are capped by a small team size; and you have no public reporting requirements; then you are building a sustainable independent software business, not a TechCrunch staple.
Obsidian is not chasing unicorn status, but all management teams desire growth [^26]. Obsidian will grow its user base via PLG and minimise churn as extensibility renders it ever more useful to existing users.
However, Obsidian’s growth potential is inherently constrained:
The longstanding and built-in limitations of the notes app market.
The degree to which Obsidian is actually going after a well-established niche vs targeting an “early” market.
The current absence of collaboration features, through which it forfeits an obvious growth vector.
The third issue could be remedied with further development. The first two are more difficult, but the solution may be found in positioning Obsidian as more than “just” an excellent notes app as it steadily encroaches on the capabilities of a range of other third-party tools & solutions.
Obsidian is a remarkable – and sometimes delightful – app whose extensibility gives it unique power & flexibility. Its opinionated founders and CEO are clear-eyed about the product’s strengths & limitations, and the company they are trying to build. They have pursued a thoughtful approach to monetisation and deployed a pricing scheme which effectively segments customers based on requirements and willingness to pay. I’m excited to see where they take the product and the company over the coming years.
Footnotes
[1] Obsidian’s management team has not published data about usage or revenue, other than claiming over a million users. As Obsidian does not collect user data or telemetry, it’s likely the Obsidian team have minimal visibility on the popularity or use of their own product. The absence of publicly available data means this post is almost free of numbers.
[2] I.e. stored on your device’s hard disc, rather than in the cloud.
[3] “File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artefacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom… File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.” (Steph Ango, “File over app”). I’m not usually a fan of boldly stated software philosophies because they tend to be an indication the philosopher has lost touch with the objective of actually solving real user problems (See every discussion you’ve had with crypto-enthusiasts for examples). However, I’ll make an exception here, because it’s unnecessary to believe or have any interest in the underlying “file over app” philosophy in order to value the day-to-day user-facing benefits which stem from it.
[4] Previously, an $8 per month tier was the only option
[5] A “vault” is Obsidian’s term for the user’s home folder of notes
[6] Third-party sync plugins are not only allowed, but Obsidian mentions third-party options in its own help materials on syncing.
[7] For completeness, I believe there is also a further Android-specific scenario in which some users download fourth-party Dropbox apps and use those to sync their Obsidian vaults.
[8] Reliance on the honour principle is unusual but not unique to Obsidian. However, it does seem to be mostly limited to developer tools, or software which attracts more technically savvy users. Another example would be the text editor Sublime Text. In practical terms, there is little difference between “Donationware” which encourages users to “donate” to the software’s authors, and Obsidian’s commercial license.
[9] This is true for literally anything, from a supermarket egg sandwich, to a notes app, through to buying a house. Of course, there are gradations – especially when shopping for something where the price is negotiable.
[10] As noted above, there are several plugins which make it easy to publish content from Obsidian into third party publishing solutions.
[11] Toolfinder has a comprehensive round-up of the paid and free options. At the time of writing, it includes 52 different propositions.
[12] For example, multiple users can edit single files simultaneously and teams cannot be larger than 10 people. It is possible to further develop Obsidian as a tool for teams and — at the time of writing — “sync collaboration improvements” are in active development on the Obsidian roadmap. But, file-over-app means there is no “single source of truth” in the cloud, upon which most other multiplayer tools rely in order to enable simultaneous multi-user collaboration and trouble-free syncing for large teams. Obsidian’s CEO — Steph Ango — referenced the challenges of enabling better collaboration or developing a browser-based version of Obsidian in this interview.
[13] Obsidian’s CEO said he plans to keep the team no larger than 12 people
[14] Manually creating a table in Markdown is a profoundly wearisome experience
[15] Obsidian is a good example of what Transistor’s co-founder calls a “calm company”
[16] A family member with modest note-taking requirements asked me to recommend an app. I suggested Apple Notes.
[17] For more on the concept of early adopters, and the broader thesis around the adoption of technology products by different customer types, Crossing the Chasm is the foundational text.
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
[19] The concept of linking your thinking by connecting your own notes together into a knowledge graph was popularised by Roam Research starting from 2017. However I would argue its present-day importance as a differentiator is overstated:
1. The feature has since been copied by many other apps, including even Apple’s own free Notes app.
2. It’s long been possible to connect or associate notes together inside other apps via tags, even if this capability was less granular than the note-to-note connections in Roam and Obsidian.
3. This is still just one feature among others which constitute the domain of PKMs and second brains.
[20] Interestingly, a competitor – Amplenote – is offering bounties for third party developers to create Amplenote plugins. In some cases, these bounties explicitly reference a requirement to match an existing Obsidian plugin. At the time of writing, the largest bounty is $2000 for “a plugin that adds drawing or sketch capability, akin to the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin”
[21] …which is exactly what I had to do for this post.
[22] At the time of writing, there is a “sync collaboration improvements” item on Obsidian’s public roadmap, but it appears to be an iterative improvement to the existing shared vault feature, rather than enabling collaboration with non Obsidian users, or Obsidian users who don't have access to a shared vault. The item description says: “Sync collaboration improvements. Improved version history and new Sync sidebar for vault-wide changes."
[23] PeerDraft is the most advanced option. But, at the time of writing, it is functionally hobbled in vital areas E.g. it only supports synchronous collaboration, so you’re out of luck if a colleague wants to review a doc while you’re offline. It’s also closed source & developed by a single third-party developer which will give anyone pause for thought before sharing confidential docs. Another example is the attempted integration with Stashpad. This is similarly functionally hobbled to the extent that it drives home the requirement for a first-party solution.
[24] FTAoD. This is not a call for a full Obsidian web client. Rather, a browser-based method for a non-Obsidian user to read, comment upon and propose edits to selected files shared from an Obsidian user’s vault.
[25] See footnote above on PeerDraft’s limitations.
[26] I’ve deliberately omitted discussion of even the idea of enterprise sales activity because I don’t think it’s relevant or even plausible. It would be hard to reconcile with Obsidian’s culture or philosophy, and, as discussed, Obsidian is (currently) a weak proposition for teams.
