2023-06-01. Why We're Building Aboard

Richard.

I'm in a marketing mood.

Well, we usually go out there and give advice about stuff and we have some good emails that we wanna respond to, but you know, we, you and I have a day job. We are building a product that deep inside we think for those who use it and commit to it, we'll make better internet. Exactly. And so look, this podcast is about how we are figuring out the world. And this product is a huge part of how we're figuring out the world.

It is. And so you may be asking, but wait, what's wrong with the internet? We're gonna walk through that. Let's

do that.

I have a theory.

What's your theory?

I have a theory that the popularity behind like to-do list apps like reminders on iPhone, which is very good by the way. They're to-do list. Do is another one things. There's one called things

Okay, no, I'm watching in real time. As our audience count goes down, like the CNN vote,

Here's the

where are we going here?

Uh, the reason people like them is cuz they're quiet and they're safe, but it turns out to do just about anything. You gotta open a browser. Nobody talks about the browser anymore, but pretty much to do

anything.

You gotta open the

So, so first of all, computers didn't used to be quite so annoying, but boy are they annoying now. Even the Mac, I always think, you know, when their little icon bounce jumps up and down in the dock.

why would anything jump up and down? It's

like a toddler. It wants your attention, you know, it's just like, Hey, hey, I'm, I'm getting there, huh? Look at me. Look at me. I'm gonna, you're gonna, and I'm like, you are. Microsoft Word. Could you calm the hell down? Calm the hell down. Yeah,

Yeah, exactly. And, and, The, probably the pinnacle of Annoyingness is navigating the internet.

It is, no, I'm sorry. The pinnacle of Annoyingness is navigating the internet plus browser notifications. Oh, and they test it? No, they've, everybody pretends like that's the worst feature that's ever been added.

We might add it to our product of board.com.

Yeah. But no, look, I, you know, when I, you know, when I turn them on, I turn them on for Google Calendar when I'm using it in Yeah, like if, if there is a What

Bed, bath and Beyond?

the thing, man. If it is a information service where it's going to give me notifications about the information I put in Slack or the, or the people that I'm working with put in Slack, et cetera, um, Google Calendar, maybe Gmail. I'm okay with the browser notification, yes. But otherwise, it's an unholy crime and every media organization that wants to jam those bad boys down, my eyeballs needs to go look at itself in the mirror and say, what are we really about here?

I, I, you know, everyone. I think what happens is the volume level is so high that you're trying to come in like one decibel higher just to get

I'll tell you what happens cuz I've watched you be a product manager. We're gonna need notifications. I saw that they're doing 'em over at, um,

I'm, I'm bad that way. Yeah. I'm driven by Envy As a product manager,

hates 'em Rich. Everybody hates notifications. Nobody wants them in there. Yeah, well we're gonna need them. Yeah.

So I wanna talk about the web through a different lens here to sort of outline I think what's happened and how we cope with it today.

Okay. So wait, what's the problem?

There's a few problems. A, it's slow. It's just slow. The internet is slow because when you go to read the article, like a bunch of uninvited guests are in your computer and it takes a long time to do anything because it's trying to understand who you are and advertise and target you and all that. So

We should explain that to people. The process of loading a webpage, it's like, imagine if you were hosting a dinner, okay, everybody's coming over to have dinner at your house.

and like an extra 80 people

an extra 80 people show up, and they all have unusual dietary requirements. And it's not like I, I, I can't have dairy. It's like, I can only have oat milk and I'm going to, and if you give it to me, un un, unless I get my oat milk, I am not gonna allow this dinner to move forward. And there's 80 of, that's when a webpage loads, that's what happens.

Exactly. So it's slow. A another related point is that it feels creepy. Like I was looking for sandals three days ago, and then I visited like. Uh, you know, financial times.com and it advertised the sandal there. So there's a lot of backroom dealing with, with your data. So

I can boil this, I can boil this into one statement for you. Now that you're saying it. The browser has become a bureaucracy.

That's a great way to put it.

Okay. It is. All of this consensus, all of these constraints and systems have been built into the web browser and into the web as a platform.

Exactly. And so it's slow, it's intrusive. Your behavioral data is getting tossed around and bartered in, in, in backroom deals. But let's go even more subtler. There's something else that's happened on the web, which is we seek, we go to the web because we want information. That's it. That's pretty much it. Like yeah, there are apps you can use on there and it does cool stuff, but like so many people get on the internet to get information.

Well, no, hold on. It's also like the number one software delivery platform for other kinds of transactions

It, it is, but I, I'm just comparing, um, Wikipedia with a s an e-commerce store, like

People spend more time looking at Wikipedia than they do in the Chase banking app,

Researching, uh, the best, uh, garden raise beds. Yes. Uh, you're using, you're looking for instruction. Look, while you're doing that, you will get pitched a lot of products, but you're looking for knowledge and information.

and if we count social media as knowledge and information, which fighting aside, that's the intent, uh, then that's, I think that is unequivocally true. I'm gonna go with

That's right. Now I'm gonna give one more example of why the web's a mess, which is actually less to do with, you know, bots and ad tracking and all that. And more to do with just how, um, Sort of underhanded. It's become, I, I was looking for a screen recording software for my Mac, and you end up on these lists, top five screen recording software. And all of the lists are published by screen recording software companies that put their product at number one. VPN is

Well, no, but

right top vpn. And it's like, whoa. This was written by Nord vpn.

So this is web marketing today. I mean, we used to do this at the agency, right? So at the agency you would write a piece of content that would be like 10 reason how to pick a great agency. Yeah. And it, it tend, it tended that the 10 ways to pick a great agency happened to really align with our service offering. You know, now, and it would be like, you might be ironic about it, you might throw it out.

deceptive than top 10 New York City agencies and we put ourselves at number one. That would be

wait, no, that's not silly. You can pay people to do that for you. That's what people do. Yeah, we would get pitched that all the time.

So holy hell like, pause and think about this. When did it become such an ugly thing to just do anything?

Oh, 2007. February.

February, 2007. The web is really just a bunch of data points. It's it's data. The whole web is really a, a, a, a web of data. These end points are websites, information. uh, if you want to talk a little, technically, sometimes it's an API endpoint,

right? But the web is other people's databases. That's real.

The web is other people's databases. And when you look at the web that way, there is one node that is just the crown jewel. It is like if, as you're brushing the dirt to see if there are little beads of gold and, and there is one more data point, that data node, let me call them nodes, that is more valuable than any other, and that is you. You're special, Paul. fantastic. And you're incredibly

I'm utterly unique.

And

hold on, let me give my social security number to this person who just asked for it to show how unique I am.

Don't do that. Okay. Do, don't do that. But, and so if you look at it that way, right? And you peel back. All of the gaming that goes on, which is for human eyeballs. It is just data. Mm-hmm. Right. And when you think about it, if you could give me the web cleansed of all that manipulation and all the gaming, I know I have to go get it. I'll go get it. But once I find what I want, can I have it and can I have it in a place where I can be productive and useful and I can actually convey.

This was the motivation for the product we built, which is called aboard, aboard.com, et cetera.

Yes. And, and I guess what we're a board is sort of going back to to-do lists, which are, you know, quiet places. What's nice about, like, apps, there was this trend at one point where if you wanted to write, your whole screen went white and it, and it just snowed in the

that was wonderful. That was a great moment.

But, you know, I think the appeal of a lot of these, those kinds of tools is that they're just quiet. Like it's away from the mayhem of the

This is what we've built. Look, I, I wanna, you know, we're bringing people in, we're waving them in. You know, if you DM the Abort account, we might find a way to get you in even sooner. You know, we did just do the Nord VPN thing. We're like, what's the best tool for organizing and controlling the web A board?

I don't know if a board is the best

No, it may not be. That's true.

What I do know is that, um, The idea of carving out more productive spaces has always been away from the web. So when you look at tools like Airtable and um, other productivity tools out

They happen to run on the

They happen to run on

what they love is the web's collaborative +nature They're like, oh, it's so easy to get, like, everyone can, yeah, I can share a link

is amazing. It's actually great. I can invite Paul to Todoist and we can have a shared to-do

list. Yeah. But there's no pages.

well, it's, it's away from the web and, and, and really our. I've been a fan of Andy Bio

for a long time. Yeah, yeah. Sure.

Sure. Probably one of the like, original curators of the internet stuff. Culture for what? 20 years? 25 years. Um, and he kindly tweeted out, uh, and shared on his, his, his feed, his RSS feed. Bless his heart. It still works. Um, that, you know, Paul Ford reached the, released a social bookmarking tool.

Mm-hmm.

I, you know, it was nostalgic. There was a product called Delicious many years ago which Yahoo acquired and then somehow put away behind the, um, food court snacks. But let's put that aside. Um, and you and I looked at each other as like, uh oh, like, what? Is that all we are? Um, so what are we, Paul, I'm going to throw it to you now.

First of all, I think it's okay for people to look at a thing and go, oh, that's for social bookmarking, because that, that's a utility in Andy's head when he saw this And it's totally what we put out made it look that way.

Oh, it's also kind of funny. It, it's not, it doesn't exist today. There really aren't many.

There's Pinterest, there's some stuff, but not, like, not in a.

about Pinterest for a minute, but go ahead. Okay,

so what are we, we're actually. There isn't an exact category for what we are because you could look at us and you could say, oh, they're low code. Oh, they're data management. Oh, they're spreadsheet plus. Oh, it's social bookmarking. It brings in the web. You can add cards, make cards. I mean, all these sort of like software things. I'll tell you what we really are. We're a place to make a clean, well lit space on the internet for you and a couple of friends or coworkers, and then.

Yes,

But. It's in the web, it's of the web and it can go back out to the web, which is unusual for software as a service type of tools. Most of them say, Hey, thanks, we'll we'll bring some stuff in. Yeah.

Yeah.

And then let's not really put it back out again.

and so if we think about the web as a data layer, not just as a place that holds images, a good way to look at a board, one of the ways to look at a board is a board doesn't. Have a bias towards what you're bringing into it, but it wants to look at the web differently. It wants to let you pluck what you find valuable, bring it to another place, and then invite others in to talk about it, to get some things done, to work on things and whatnot.

Sure.

Sure. The spreadsheet is still the number one way to kind of hold a bunch of stuff. And there are teams of people who do that for other people. Yeah. Right. And we wanted to build something that made it really easy to, uh, bring information in and then be productive because people skipped the bring in, bring information in. Now this sounds like this was one really long ad, uh, and yes,

yes. It does sound that

Oh,

What you gonna do? It's all right. They can't all be like, I mean, this is what we work on all day.

This is what we work on all day now. What is it for? But what is it for? That's a great question, and we're figuring that out and we're learning from people as to what they can use it for. What we do know is this. When you talk to people, AI is exploding now everywhere, but if you ever talk to anyone about how they work, whether it be a real estate agent or an interior designer, it is like the stone age.

Alright. I, you know, this is what we've been building. I, here's the thing. I want people to use this thing, not because it could theoretically make us money. As far as I know, anyone using this thing is costing me a lot of money right now. So if you want to cost me a lot of money, go ahead and check out a board. That's fine.

It is free today. We're still learning about how people use it and how they want to use it. Um, and uh, I really enjoyed just nakedly marketing this thing today.

I don't see this as naked marketing. You and I have, uh, this is, we, we got to do the thing. We're very lucky. So this is the, the, we're very lucky and we're taking advantage of our luck, which is we could kind of sit in a room and dabble and, you know, I could get into drones. You know, and, and like

racing, drone racing. Yeah.

stuff like that, that stuff is cool. I really like it. But instead, we were like, okay, we're in a position. Can we make a slightly better internet? Can we make a thing that, can we test our big software ideas in the world and the world might kick us in the face? So I'm ready for that.

Yes. Look, our. We have really old internet passports, like they were stamped way before. A lot of people's, and we've watched it evolve a certain way. We still believe in people and finding utility and, and feeling useful on the internet, and a lot of people want that. But man, it's a grind

Yeah. You know, we're like Soviet internet in the era of Putin like it. Hey is all right. Alright. Alright. Well look

what you think. Excuse me. Tell us what you think. And sign up. Uh, if you, we will give you an inside track if you try, uh, sign up for a beta [email protected]. We'll let you in. Just, uh, uh, ping us, uh, either at [email protected] or follow us at z ford on, on Twitter, and uh, send us a note.

Sounds like a plan. All right, we'll talk to everybody soon. Take care. Bye.