"What does Sublime actually do?"

Going out of my comfort zone and trying the 'show, don’t tell' thing

Apr 20, 2024

After reading The Day the Crayons Quit to my son’s 1st grade class yesterday, one of his classmates asked what I did for work.

I thought about it for a second.

I wanted to say something about the lost promises of today’s internet and how my work is reimagining the web.

Instead, I said I am building an app that helps you save and remember all the things you learn about and love and don't want to forget.

It turns out that sometimes, Sublime being “Just An App” instead of “A more human Internet,” is freeing.

A lot of people tell me they love the vibe of everything we’re doing at Sublime but they have no idea what Sublime actually does.

In this piece, I am gonna do a deep-dive on the concrete ways Sublime makes my life better. And how I think it could make yours better too.

It’s “show, don’t tell” in a way I don’t think I’ve managed to talk about it before.

Capturing the ‘whoa’

Ezra Klein wrote a really f*cking good piece this week that I wish I’d written on why the internet robs us of our own intentionality while making our digital lives so shitty:

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.

This passage stopped me in my tracks, so I highlighted it with Sublime’s browser extension and saved it to my Sublime library:

You can also save via our iOS app and directly from our website:

Collections = Intentions

Everything you save to Sublime is a card.

Cards can be organized into ‘collections.’

When I create a collection, I’m setting an intention for something I want to explore – a concept, idea, or question that I want to slowly organize my thoughts around.

In this case, I added the Ezra Klein passage to these collections I am nurturing:

Why curation is important
The inconvenience of convenience
Dreaming of a better internet
Intentionality
Making Sublime
Sublime workshop (this collection’s private – it’s where I’m collecting raw material for a workshop I have in mind).

So far so good…

I found a passage that made me go “whoa” and added it to several collections in my library – some public, some private.

Leave the tagging to the robots

Our brains think in associations, not folders.

Which is why we designed Sublime so that a card can simultaneously live in many collections

I could write a book about why we have collections instead of tags (TL;DR: tags are robot stuff) but I love how one of our early believers described the categorization mechanism:

You’re not alone

If you nerd out on knowledge management stuff you’ve probably heard the phrase PKM. It stands for personal knowledge management. Most PKM tools are about creating your own private repository of ideas.

Sublime is less PKM and more CKM – communal knowledge management.

Instead of living on an island somewhere out on the web, the ideas you collect intelligently bump into other people’s.

Here’s what that means: when you add a card to Sublime, you can instantly see related cards from other people’s libraries.

For example, when I clicked into the Ezra Klein passage I discovered this very cool and related screenshot that someone else in the Sublime community saved to their library:

I also found this neat, related article by Charlie Warzel on digital hoarding. I scanned the highlights, added one of them to my dreaming of a better internet collection, and then kept clicking through related cards.

The whole experience feels to me like a very wholesome “choose your own adventure” game:

The “related” feature is very useful when I’m wrestling with how to articulate a thought, or navigating an idea space and want contextual serendipity.

But it doesn’t feel like the mindless scrolling of social media.

The difference is subtle, but important.

Here’s how one of our early believers describes it:

Scrolling through Twitter led to more scrolling and then a feeling of emptiness and guilt for wasting time when I finally managed to leave the app — scrolling through Sublime more often than not led me to putting away my phone, getting a breath of fresh air, and getting to work on that passion project I’d put aside years ago.

Good search = insurance for my mind

That really inspiring quote on parenting you saw months ago means nothing if you can’t reference it when your toddler is yelling because you gave him the red plate instead of the blue plate.

Our search is smart, which means I can describe something I know is in my library but can’t remember the exact words for (note: the Glennon Doyle parenting quote is very good).

Good search means I can surface the right insight when I’m writing an essay, preparing for a podcast, drafting an email, giving advice to a friend, having a conversation at dinner, or… and I cannot believe I’m about to be that person… when I’m trying to upgrade my comments game on Twitter.

The other day, Paul Graham tweeted this.

I knew I had saved a funny, similar idea in my library, so I pasted the content of his tweet in my library’s search bar, turned on smart search, and found exactly the image I was thinking about.

My reply to Paul’s tweet got 174 likes. I am sorry but also it does work! 🙈

You’re not starting from zero

If you’re thinking “Sari, you’ve saved thousands of things to your library… it would take years for me to reap these benefits if I start from scratch today” don’t worry:

You can search and save anything from Sublime's entire universe of cards. If I wanted to build on my thesis on intentionality and the attention economy I could ask "What is the attention economy doing to us" and see all the cool stuff that comes up (actual search results for that query here). I’m obviously biased, but I think Sublime is one of the best content libraries on the Internet.
And if you use Kindle or Readwise, you can import your existing highlights to Sublime. People are loving this and we’re working on more ways to import the stuff that matters to you.

Think-in-bio is the new link-in-bio

A lot of what I collect on Sublime I do privately.

But everything I make public lives on sublime.app/sari.

My very own think-in-bio.

A think-in-bio is like giving others an API for your mind.

To be able to follow people like Packy McCormick, Rob Hardy, Natalie Audelo, Steve Schlafman and see what they’re saving to their Sublime library clues me into their influences in a way that feels more authentic – their Sublime presence emerges as a byproduct of the ideas they’re collecting and the concepts you’re wrestling with as opposed to performing the identity they want other people to see.

Software with a soul

Most tools in the space look like they were made for compulsive self-optimizers that think they are one tool away from achieving productivity nirvana.

I’m sorry, but I cannot get into flow state in a tool that looks like this:

I prefer to surrender to my nature, embrace the creative mess that is my mind, and use a tool with soul:

Join us

Sublime wouldn’t exist without this newsletter – the very ideas at the core of the product were developed through years of writing and conversations with you that confirmed my hunches weren’t crazy.

If you got all the way here (thank you!) and are not yet on Sublime, I would love to invite you to come grow this new world with us.

Two options:

1. Become a Sublime premium member and get access now.

We have a choose-what-feels right pricing model, and here’s what that gets you:

Unlimited access to all of Sublime’s premium features.
Members-only gatherings, workshops, and live Q&As. The next one is coming soon, where
Alex Dobrenko`
and I will be chatting live about how we think about incorporating AI stuff into the product in a way that doesn’t feel lame.
A 1:1 concierge “let’s build your library” onboarding call with me or someone from my team.
Access to our paid Substack posts.
A peek at our vision deck.
An exclusive 1st badge on your profile (188/1000 left).
Plus, the warm and fuzzy feeling of supporting a company whose values you believe in.

2. Join our wantlist.

We’re still in closed beta and have a wantlist of 30k ish people. We let a few hundred in every week. We’re not doing this to be exclusive. We’re just in the early stages of Sublime, and are intentionally going slow.

Writing and sharing in this way is very foreign to me, but I’m experimenting with more ways to talk about Sublime in ways that feel alive and honest and a little bit out of my comfort zone. Let me know what you think!

And if you have questions about Sublime and whether it might work for you, please reach out - I genuinely love talking through it with people.

P.S. If you know Ezra Klein, please tell him we think there’s an app he’d really love. My 3-year BHAG is to get him to love and use Sublime, and I’m gonna walk on walls until I make it happen.