Lessons I'm still learning
after almost one year of Sublime
I’ve learned so much over the past year of making Sublime. Here are some reflections and realizations I’ve had along the way.
On Wednesday, August 14th, I’ll be hosting a live session where I’ll dive deeper into these lessons and answer any questions – about the company, me, financials, whatever you are curious about.
Alex is also hosting a live Sublime&Chill this coming Wednesday, August 7th from 1-2pm EST – an hour of ambient Brian Eno tunes, cozy co-presence vibes, and the space to devote to gardening your Sublime library.
Attendance for both events is free for Sublime Premium members.
As ever, thank you.
Good things take time
When the founder of NVIDIA said that people with very high expectations have low resilience because they are not accustomed to failure or adversity, it felt like he was subtweeting me.
I followed the classic overachiever A+ student to Ivy League to i-banking job after college pipeline all the way to my starting startupy which ended up becoming Sublime.
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about building Sublime is that everything has taken longer than I thought.
Most things we’ve done, we’ve had to re-do – sometimes multiple times – before we got them right.
Simplicity takes an enormous amount of time and effort.
Just when I’d feel we were doing great, I’d see a Twitter thread about how someone’s startup “did 1mm in ARR in just 30 days” and, what’s more, I could do the exact same thing if I just followed the eight tips THREAD.
I’d click in and get fooled, yet again, by unreasonable, stifling, and possibly fictional points of reference.
Maybe I just needed to play the game better or go viral on TikTok like every other consumer startup, but first I’d need to figure out how TikTok worked because going on there made me feel ancient… but maybe we could hire an influencer – I wonder how much Mr. Beast costs ugh.
Self-loathing and what-ifs galore. All pointing to one truth: we weren’t doing it like everyone else, so we were doing it wrong.
But that was just it – we were doing it our own way, at our own pace.
Comparison is the thief of joy and sensible business strategy too.
My job is not to think about what exists but rather what I want that does not yet exist.
Though the occasional doom loop still happens, I have figured out a way to work with time, instead of against it, with one simple mantra: assume it will take a while and plan accordingly.
I’ve baked time into our projections so that we can feel good and secure about letting things unfold naturally.
Everyone is in a rush.
Whether it’s the VC ticking timebombs, ego, or hiring too fast (despite Silicon Valley’s best efforts, nine women can’t make a baby in a month), everyone is in a hurry. And so we have decided to do the opposite – to stay alive long enough to see the good things happen.
We are not building Sublime to sell it.
We are not rushing for a Series A.
We are not chasing trends.
We are looking for what is timeless, what is quietly profound.
I’ve found peace in letting things unfold at their own pace. In knowing that it’s not a question of whether Sublime will work, but about committing a decade plus to making it work.
Choose the game you want to play
I had an AHA moment recently.
My financial goal with Sublime is to build a business where 100k people pay an average of $100/yr with a team of under 10 people. We’re 1% of the way there. It may take a decade to get there, but I genuinely think we can make it happen.
The combination of an ambitious vision with a longer timeline for execution feels good.
Plus, it fits my life.
I have two spectacular callings in life right now.
First, I’m a mother of three beautiful (read: very demanding) boys. Second, I’m making Sublime. Sometimes, these two callings feel so fucking hard and at odds with each other.
But I have been feeling more clear headed since I explicitly defined the rules of the game we’re playing. At least with Sublime – the kids, not so much.
For me, winning the game means building a sustainable company that embodies the intangible cultural properties that matter to me. It’s about cultivating a very specific reputation. I'd like for people to come to Sublime and say: “I feel intellectually nourished and creatively inspired here.”
The funny thing about coming up with your own definition of success is it becomes easier to make decisions.
Knowing that Sublime doesn’t need to appeal to millions of people, I feel more confident being bolder, more opinionated, less safe, more us in our designs.
Decisions that used to take hours of tinkering agony now seem to make themselves, and it’s all because we’ve defined the scale and values that move us.
Utility and spirit make a powerful combo
Utility is table stakes.
A product has to solve a clear need for people and get the basic stuff right – performance, reliability, availability across browsers and operating systems, etc.
But more than a tool, Sublime is a spirit.
It’s an invitation into a calmer, more intentional way of being.
I legitimately don’t think we could have gotten 1,000 paying customers with just the utility part. People connect with what we’re doing emotionally, not just functionally.
Our zine, the time we spend nurturing this newsletter, sharing stories about the sounds on our website, even our choose what you pay pricing model,…
I loved the response Justin had to Greg Isenberg’s shoutout of our pricing model on Twitter – “they’re selling more than a PKM. It’s a movement.”
Positioning is messy
Back when I ran the strategy team at a startup studio, I would often stand in a fancy conference room full of executives, and project, with full confidence, slides with aphorisms like: ”Brands don’t need purpose. They should help customers achieve their purpose.”
I KNOW that the most important thing to do when you’re launching a brand is to explain to people why the f*ck they should care. Why do you exist? Why are you different?
And yet the thing I used to do for other companies in my sleep is what currently keeps me up at night.
Sublime continues to be my nebulous life project. Part web clipper, part PKM, part communal search engine for inspiration.
People want to compare us to other things.
Are you a Pinterest for knowledge? What’s the difference between you and Notion?
But Sublime doesn’t fit neatly in a box.
Practically, the biggest difference between Sublime and other knowledge management tools is that Sublime is multi-player. The multiplayer-ness means you can put in a thought or idea (privately or publicly) and immediately get related inspo from other people’s libraries.
Ideologically, Sublime embodies a different attitude, aesthetic, and language from the productivity-focused optimization approach of the PKM space.
Sublime is for choosing and doing over organizing.
For aliveness over exhaustiveness.
For deepening our intention over hijacking our attention.
Here’s a slide I shared with our team last month:
I love the Jimmy Buffet quote.
But right now, I feel so inside my head.
This is all so abstract and hard to pin down when it comes to writing copy for a landing page.
This is our current landing page copy – it still doesn’t feel right.
Why should people save the things that make them go “whoa”?
We don’t do a good enough job of hitting on the unique benefits of curating a knowledge library on Sublime. I’m not satisfied with where we’re at, but I have also come to appreciate that the most meaningful things cannot be explained concisely. With our partners, our best friends, our children even, we fall in love over time, not after saying hello.
Why should it be any different with software?
Alright, I could keep going but I’m out of time so I’m gonna wrap up here.
Just one more lesson: hire people who solve problems you didn’t ask them to solve.
Like Alex did earlier this week when Sublime’s site was down.
If any of this stuff resonated and you’re a Sublime Premium member, join us for our State of Sublime townhall. Spots are limited for extra coziness.
In other news
Sublime featured in deepculture
Huge thank you to our friends at
for the shoutout last week - we’ve been huge fans of their curation for years, so being mentioned is a big honor.If you’re looking for a quick weekly link roundup of things like 37signals’ Guide to Making Decisions (which was also featured in last week’s post),
is worth checking out.
Sublime also featured in Advisorator
The kind words keep on comin’.
Advisorator is Jared Newman’s longtime newsletter on tech tips and recs from which monitor to buy to which password manager to use, so we appreciate the kind words here (even if we disagree on whether Sublime is full of ‘superficially-deep thoughts’ lol).
Sublimers out in the wild
Besides writing the incredible
, Sara Campbell is launching The Fire Inside, a project/inquiry into how we “cultivate the new generation of empowered and awakened women the world desperately needs to come into balance?” Sara’s gathering her inspo for The Fire Inside here.
The 2024 Tiny Awards nominations are out. The brainchild of
‘s Kristoffer and Web Curios’ Matt Webb, Tiny Awards “…exist to celebrate the personal internet…the other web, the one that is small and handmade and isn’t trying to sell you anything or monetise anything but which instead is about people using the digital tools we all have access to to make the sorts of small, personal experiences that you tend not to see ‘in feed’.” Check out the nominations and go vote for your fav.Few things have spoken so directly into our souls lately than River Kenna’s post Soul-Making Productivity: A Process Manifesto.
That's one part of what I'm aiming at with soul-making productivity. I want a way of stoking the fire, and not just that — a way of devoting myself to the fire, of courting it and nurturing it, and of teaching it how to work with me, how to help along this project we're engaged in together, this effort to take an idea from the ether and sculpt some patch of reality into its shape. I want to partner and collaborate with the fire, to apprentice myself to the process of creation, rather than trying to diminish and deform the fire so it works purely on the terms my own conscious mind sets.
Are you a Sublime member who’s doing cool stuff? Let us know - DM me here on Substack or email Alex at alex@sublime.app.
“My job is not to think about what exists but rather what I want that does not yet exist.”🔥
To be completely honest, I still don’t understand how to use my new Sublime account. But even though the technophobic part of me finds it frustrating af, I’m gonna keep getting in there and messing with it until it makes sense to my brain. Because I deeply FEEL what you are doing is incredible and important and a gift to the future of our world. Thank you for believing in you (us).
Thanks, Sari. Glad to be building here. Relate a lot to the challenge of explaining what you’re doing. I’ve been lucky to work on a handful of truly original projects and that seems to always be the case.