Making Sublime

A personal moment of pause before launching Sublime

Aug 12, 2023

I’ve been quietly working on something new for the past year. It’s called Sublime, and it’s launching privately soon. I’m going to share the more practical details about Sublime next week, but this post is less about Sublime and more about what building it has felt like — a beautiful rollercoaster ride of feelings I am going to share with you.

It’s been eighteen months since I quit my job to work on startupy full-time.

I first billed startupy as a community-powered database of startup knowledge, organized associatively.

But the vision was always bigger than that. Wikipedia is great for facts. But where do you go when you want the most interesting, human, subjective ideas on a topic?

Google has been SEO’d into ruin.

People are curating their own little knowledge bases in private corners of the Internet, but this content is scattered and poorly indexed.

What if we could stitch together these graphs?

What if you had a more tasteful version of Evernote, where you’re not alone with your ideas?

What if there was a simpler, more communal way to build your second brain?

That was the vision for startupy; to weave together a human-curated graph of the best ideas on the Internet.

When we launched startupy in April 2022, it immediately became clear that the mission struck a chord but the product was mediocre. The idea of curating and collecting the Internet in multiplayer mode was there, but startupy was missing a strong notion of usability, product design, and individual utility.

I wanted to make something really great and I got kind of sad and overwhelmed that I wasn’t there yet. Do you know what I mean?

Three months into launching, we said fuck it. Let’s start from scratch.

We started working on Sublime last Summer.

Most of that time was spent thinking. We went through at least six major revisions. We started from scratch many times. We spent countless hours huddled over our laptops, turning nothing into something. We let go of what startupy was so Sublime could become what it is. It’s surprising how often the answer was reduce, eliminate, keep it simple. How long the stretches of bone-deep frustration were. How much an insight that feels obvious in hindsight felt like banging our head against a wall at the time. How much progress doesn’t always feel like progress.

I am ashamed of how many Sundays I sat in my backyard with my two year old thinking, this is boring, secretly wanting to be back in my laptop, because the pieces of the puzzle weren’t coming together. The gazillion Instacart orders I’ve placed while I pee, the frantic check-ins with my team, the relentless optimization of every microsecond of my life just so I could spend more time working on Sublime.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t have this intense drive to make something. But I just do. Sublime has pulled me in like quicksand.

Above all, I’ve struggled with how difficult it is to obsess over something that is hard to describe in words. By the uphill search for the right words, language, and lens that can help others see Sublime as clearly as I do.

A few years ago, I published one of those think pieces about finding “language market fit”. I still get emails from frustrated founders seeking help with positioning.

Now in the arena it hits differently.

We’ve been so conditioned to place things into neat categories.

Kind of like a Github for ideas. Or Pinterest for knowledge. But also not quite like that.

Concretely, Sublime is a tool to collect and connect anything interesting you find on the Internet. It’s the simplest way to build your own curated, self-organizing library with all the quotes, links, articles, thoughts, images, and anything else you find interesting.

It’s part bookmarking, part note-taking, part social network. But it’s also none of those things.

Bookmarking sounds so unexciting. I’m not bookmarking. I’m curating, collecting, highlighting, and connecting ideas! I’m building an intellectual resonance trail! I’m converting my favorite content into a living network of connected ideas!

It’s not quite a note-taking or journaling app either. I’ve tried journaling, but the habit never stuck with me. I can’t help but imagine a future me rolling my eyes at whatever I wrote. Sublime is a different kind of notebook – where you collect and connect your favorite quotes, links, articles, highlights, videos, thoughts, images. It feels so much lighter to have others’ words as intermediaries.

And it’s not a social network in the broadcast-y way we’re used to. Yes, other people can explore my Sublime library and I can take a peek into theirs, but I’m not curating my sublime library to build an audience. I’m quietly exposing parts of my library, in case it may resonate with others.

So what do I tell my family at the dinner table when they ask me what I do?

A repository of all that is interesting to you, intertwingled with everyone else’s?

A ridiculously simple way to capture anything interesting you come across?

An living library of all the things you find interesting?

The best way to create your own curated knowledge base?

A simpler, more communal way to build your second brain?

A zettelkasteny social network that feels less conference, more library?

A lifetool, for people like me obsessed with collecting and connecting the dots.

And maybe that’s part of the problem, trying to be legible to everyone. The tug of war of wanting to water things down for mass adoption versus building something I want for myself and trusting the others will come.

The inability to explain myself has at times made me doubt myself.

I’ve romanticized the lives of woodworkers and bakers and interior designers. It must be nice to give someone a finished product, a physical thing, and experience the tangible benefit of your creations.

In software, there’s no finish line. There’s always more to build. And that means it’s easier to justify staying behind the screen, piling one more feature than staring into the abyss, exposing your work to criticism, not knowing how anyone will respond.

The hard part is that for me, “ready” has almost always been “when it feels perfect.”

Sublime will never be ready in the way I wish it was, but I think it’s ready to exit my head and enter your hearts.

So here’s my plan: early next week, I’m going to invite the first batch of people to try Sublime. Paying subscribers of this newsletter, as well as early members of the startupy community will come first.

If you want to be part of a small group of people testing out Sublime privately before it launches publicly in a few months, look out for another email from me next week.

My goal for the next few months is to find 2,000 of the most wholesome thinkers and tinkerers and make them fall in love with Sublime.

If you got this far, thank you. I know sending this email is a blip on everyone’s radar. But for me, it’s an important milestone. So thank you for putting me in conversation with myself, and with you. 🙏

Sari

P.S. If you were a regular reader of my original newsletter, Check your Pulse, you’ll know I always described it as a newsletter designed to make you feel human, calm, intellectually and creatively nourished. In many ways, it took a long time to end up right at the beginning, because Sublime feels like my original newsletter went through a spiritual awakening and developed product taste.