First impression of a marketing manager

[Vijil]

Hi all,

I work as a marketing/comms manager so I see things through that lens.

I love the idea of anytype, and I’m here for the long haul, so take this as constructive crit from a non-coder, artistic but not at all detail oriented person.

First impression is actually much the same as obsidian or others - the website doesn’t make a super strong case for how this will improve my life. We’re all here because we get it, but the main thing that drew me in was “oh, it can import notion, that must mean it can do kanban and gantt”. Not so, yet. That’s cool and I’m happy to wait.

I think from a marketing perspective there is a lack of clear Value Propositions. That’s fine while you’re mostly getting coders and people who understand already what this kind of software is for, but as you grow it’ll become an issue. The key hoped for benefits for me are taking control back from the cloud over my digital life including project management, being digitally resilient (digital prepping…), and being able to host public pages from my local computer without having to use the cloud or build a website etc. - maybe that customer focus should be the primary messaging, not the internally impressive “this is next generation software” (It could be written by Charles Babbage himself on a difference engine for all I care, but what does it do for me?)

Lots of typos and odd grammar around the place too.

So really I’m just waiting for Kanban and calendar views for tasks, as well as hopefully gantt view with dependencies when you get around to it. Notion currently has some of those features but is painfully slow. My worry is that the relational linked notetaking aspect of this software is seen as primary, and the project management side is very much an afterthought, and as such I think it’s probably not going to be the software for me. The frustration is that nothing else does it the way I can see anytype doing it, if that makes sense.

Of course as a marketing strategy guy I have zero code knowledge (I hate detail), so I’m not sure I can help other than to note that open source software often biases heavily toward the use cases and personality types of coders. It’s good to try to account for that.

[lynxlove]

The app in it’s current state looks more like a note taking software, yes, but if you check the roadmap, you’ll see a lot of features are being / going to be worked on like Kanban, Calender views, Recurring tasks, Sharing to the web and collaboration. One thing that is not there might be the Gantt view but there are feature requests in the forum for the same and with enough love, the team would take it up with priority as well

[Oshyan]

I too wonder to what degree project management functions are encompassed in the long-term vision. There are few - if any - really good combined note-taking and project/task management tools, in my view. There are plenty that people use this way and say it works great for them (e.g. Roam, Notion), but I do not believe they actually work as well for a majority of people as tools dedicated to those respective things. So it is worth considering that if big, well-established companies are not able to fully merge these things very well (yet), it may be a lot to ask of Anytype team as well.

The bright side, however, is that unlike almost every other option - and especially the big companies I referenced - it will be open source and have a good plugin SDK, and that will hopefully mean that if there is enough demand in the community, someone(s) will develop these things if the team does not have enough resources to do so themselves. I could easily see a Gantt plugin being made, for example.