To revise our MVP launch date, discuss our funding model, and tell my personal story for starting Athens.
The Athens v1 MVP is not launching August 1st. We've completed much of the core product, but usability is not quite yet at the level where someone should use Athens over alternatives that are further along. Of course, each alternative has various tradeoffs, features, and philosophies — see Steve Yang's list of networked notetaking apps.
Deadlines are effective until they are not. Our original deadline largely succeeded at its job of helping us rally around a shared vision, prioritize effectively, and reach for more. However, working towards this deadline has also pushed me to my limits. I can't sustainably work 80-100 hours every week as I have been for the last 3.5 months.
Not only that, we could not and would not be here without the help and support of everyone. There are so many great people collaborating to make this product a reality, this is truly "collective intelligence" at work! Long-term, the best thing for Athens is to do the best thing for its contributors — everyone, myself included, contributing what they can, at a level that works for them.
Rather than just push the launch to another aggressive date, we will progressively improve and roll out our v1 beta to our first Athenians and Believers, described in Funding.
Furthermore, I'd like to explore other product development methodologies beyond aggressive "Elon-style" deadlines. If you've been keeping up, you know we like Basecamp: check out ‣ and Product Management at Athens. Basecamp works in 2 and 6-week cycles. Roam does this too. Well, we've essentially just done a 4-month cycle of sprinting, and a cool-down cycle is probably warranted. I'm not sure the exact same cycle format will work perfectly for Athens because we're not Basecamp or Roam. That said, alternating between new features and bugs/refactors makes sense to me. We can have this discussion in #🚀-product over the next few weeks. Remember, there isn't exactly a playbook for how software should be developed, let alone open-source software with contributors distributed all across the world.
A number of people have entered our Discord saying they want a "free Roam". This is my first time commenting on the topic of funding and pricing, and I'd like to set the record straight here: Athens isn't free Roam. Someone is paying for the development of Athens, with either money or time. Contributors are paying. I'm paying. And my parents are paying by supporting me and letting me live in their home (more on this in my story below).
A number of people have entered our Discord saying Roam's prices are extortionary. Sorry, if that were true, you should sue them for extortion. If that were true, Roam wouldn't have hit $1M ARR within 2 months of charging.
https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1285371859031126016
If that were true, that means Roam extorted me. That's false. I paid $500 like thousands of other people because I'm a true believer: I believe in Conor, I believe in Roam, and I believe in the #roamcult. I literally could not pay another $500 without taking loans. So trust me, it's not extortion.
The problem is consumers are conditioned to free or $5 software. In actuality, open-source maintainers are taking huge losses or the software is VC-backed under the premise that the startup will attain millions or billions of users. That's not my goal for Athens, certainly not anytime soon.
My goal for Athens right now is for a very small number of people to love us unconditionally. My goal for Athens is to co-create Athens with people who also have skin-in-the-game, either through money or sweat. If that's 5 people, that's fine by me. If that means I have to take on loans and more risk, that's fine by me!
I want to succeed by serving the people who have contributed the most. I need to know who wants Athens as badly as we do.
I want to make Stuart, Michael, Jeroen, and Jacob proud, who've contributed invaluable expertise backed by decades of domain expertise each.
I want to make Haoji, Timo, and Flancia proud, who took the initiative to donate $100/month (12x Roam Believer plan) without asking anything in return. These are the people I serve, because they have given the most to Athens, in terms of their material, cognitive, and emotional resources, and I'm going to make them proud if it's the last thing I do.
We are creating and will create vast amounts of value, and we should capture value proportionally. Being open-source shouldn't change that. In fact, arguably we should be capturing MORE value, not in spite of, but BECAUSE we're open-source.