Monthly update for May ~ July 2021

Rewrote the entire web ui.

Hi there!

This is the 46rd full month (3 YEARS and 10 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. Hope you are doing well and staying safe!

Product updates

Over the past 3 months, we’ve done one and only one thing: Rewrote the entire web ui of listennotes.com. That’s it :)

Specifically, we migrated from Bootstrap & jQuery to Tailwind & alpine, and upgraded ReactJs & Webpack to the latest versions. Of course, we also fixed some bugs, paid some technical debt, and made the code base a bit more maintainable.

At this moment, ListenNotes.com has evolved into a complex web app, which has many public pages and way more internal pages that are invisible to users.

I think Listen Notes has entered the mature stage. Most of future improvements will be invisible to most users (e.g., niche features for paid users, improving data quality & infra…) or only be useful to a small portion of users (e.g., adding one more search filter…).

I wouldn’t say Listen Notes is “finished”. But I’m afraid that adding new (user-facing) product features may just make the user experience worse - "gild the lily" or "画蛇添足" (draw legs on a snake; overdo things).

wenbin.org @wenbinf

Digital products could have a “finished” state, which is great for users, but bad for companies. Dropbox could’ve been a finished product in 2012. Simple and focused personal storage solution. But it can’t justify the valuation of Dropbox, the company. Same for Evernote. https://t.co/bvNgkyA3Y6

Taylor Pearson @TaylorPearsonMe

I feel like some companies could create a new paid plan where people paid to not get the latest updates. Like I would pay 2x as much for 2016 Evernote as I would for 2021 Evernote.

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Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!