One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one.

Focus on a real pain point that people are having, and organize everything in your messaging around that.

Why do people need a document manager in the first place?

What is this going to do for them that their existing solutions don’t do?

How is it going to be better than the existing document managers that they have?

(If you find yourself going down the ‘its Decentralized’ route, don’t, people simply do not care)

It doesn’t have to even be much better than what people have, as long as it knocks it out the park for that use case. Hell, GMail started as conversational email plus a load of storage.

It may make your messaging seem kind of sparse - that’s a good thing. People are time poor, and have time to dig into the features later.

But without it you’re going to end up building something that is kind of a lot of things, but not really good at anything.

I shelved a bunch of my "bright" ideas for time a time when I'm better at pitching when I realized "this will work if everyone just does it my way" wasn't a great plan :)

> One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one.

macOS, GNOME, iOS all seem to -successfully- have the less is more paradigm.

i have been going down exactly that path. i found a platform for collaboration and document management that i thought was awesome. i didn't create it, but it was GPL licensed and i tried to get people to use it. no luck. i eventually added a REST API and use it myself as a development platform for building websites.

so now i solve peoples problems using the tool that solves my problem.

Tell a good story.

A strong narrative is much more engaging and memorable than a list of features.

Your front page at http://getpolarized.io mostly consists of a huge screenshot. When I look at the screenshot, all I see is a PDF viewer with some highlighting. Everybody already has a PDF viewer included with their OS that supports highlighting; there's nothing interesting about that screenshot that shows me what is useful about Polar.

Good point!!! I'm going to revamp the home page to improve upon this.. part of the issue I have is that some of the features aren't really obviously cool once you don't have the whole.

For example web page archival is kind of cool but it becomes a LOT more exciting when you add document management, highlighting, document sharing, etc.

So, write a short pitch story where Anna has been using web archival for a month or so, while on the bus remembers this discussion on a topic she had with Jamie and having seen a relevant web article some time back. She then uses the search feature in the app on her phone to find it, highlights the important quote, and shares it to Jamie.

BTW can Jamie receive this highlighted document if she doesn't use Polar? Say as a PDF? That would be cool, and really help spreading the word about Polar, simply by usage.

Exactly! :)

Narratives are a huge turn off for me. They always just feel like marketing gimmicks, and some my understanding and interest in a product. I'm perfectly capable of seeing a list of features, and imagining how well they apply to my situation. So, if you use a story, you will lose customers like me (n=1). That being said, I love the idea of Polar, and I'm going to be researching more about it.

> Narratives are a huge turn off for me.

Yes, I get very suspicious of them as well. But in this case, the site is heavier on the "what" than on the "why". A little more "why" would be welcome.

Get someone else who is familiar with the project to help you out with writing public facing material. Another perspective always help.