alan_chan_tw

Yes, we will consider doing that. Thank you for sharing ParityDeals; it looks very useful and might save us some time re-implementing the entire billing system. We will also have an education plan in the future, but it is not our current top priority compared to product building.

I think the right time to raise fund is when you meet the following conditions:

- Your company has early signs of success (great user retention/growth/team/insights) that are enough for the investor at your company's stage to bet on you.

- The investments can be really helpful for your company.

In my case, it took me less than two weeks to close funding and get back to building products. One of the core reasons is that our product has a really good user retention, and we have a clear plan on what we need to do to achieve our long-term vision.

I think the most common problem I faced is that there's a lot of noise in this market. People request thousands of features, and we need to have clear guidelines on "what not to build." The solution is actually quite simple — we make it clear both internally and externally that Heptabase is a tool for making sense of complex topics, and we won't build anything that's not helpful for this purpose until we solve this problem really, really well.

Money is not a constraint as we are already profitable. If I can only pick one thing to build next, I'll choose to build a collaborative platform on top of Heptabase that empowers people to discuss and research complex topics together using our card-based system. I'm a big fan of the Polymath project and I see many limitations with the blog interface that we can address with a new design.

We've started addressing this earlier this year. We now support adding tags and properties to cards. Each tag is like a database (where you can create tables and kanban views for it), and you can reuse properties across tags. You can follow these two guides to see what we've built so far, and there is more to come, such as creating relation properties that you can associate with cards under another tag, and supporting more types of views.

https://wiki.heptabase.com/getting-started-with-heptabase

https://wiki.heptabase.com/tags-and-kanban

What does your product do?

Currently, Heptabase is a tool that helps you learn and research complex topics visually. You can create whiteboards that are designed for complex knowledge work instead of just drawing or brainstorming. For example:

You can place your rich-text note cards on a whiteboard, reuse cards across whiteboards, break down large cards into smaller ones by dragging blocks out of them, arrange cards into mind maps and sections that support auto-layout, organize whiteboards into a hierarchy, link whiteboards to each other, etc. We also support adding other file types such as images, audios, videos, and PDFs to a whiteboard. For PDF files, you can create highlights and annotations and easily drag them onto the whiteboard to make sense of them alongside other knowledge.

It's impossible to list all the features Heptabase has in a comment. I suggest checking out this post to learn more. What I can share is that most of the features are about bringing the information you need to make sense of into Heptabase and giving you the power to turn it into a structure that actually makes sense.

Who is your target market? Who or what are your main competitors and what advantages do you bring?

Our initial market is product managers and researchers (from industry and academia), essentially individuals who need to dedicate a significant amount of time to consuming a large amount of information in order to produce better research work. We have conducted several hundred user interviews, and the majority of users use Heptabase for learning, research, and planning. In this initial market, our primary competitors are other note-taking, whiteboarding, and mindmapping apps.

At the moment, we have three advantages, in my opinion:

- Design: We've put a lot of effort into creating great design and UI/UX that focuses on helping users learn and conduct research, rather than bloating it with hundreds of features that can do too many things and lose focus. Most people just want a tool for focused thinking and are intimidated by the number of things they need to learn and set up in other "second-brain apps" before they can actually start spending time "making sense of complex topics." In Heptabase, you can get into the flow of sense-making on day one, and we make the entire process very fun and intuitive. This also reflects on our customer retention — over 70% of our users who subscribed in January 2022 continue to use Heptabase after 20 months. We've grown to over 10,000 paying users with $0 marketing expenses and purely through word-of-mouth.

- Technology: Both our rich-text editor and whiteboards are incredibly powerful and intuitive to use. Most companies excel at one, but we excel at both, according to many of our users whom you can find in our Discord community. We also bring together the best capabilities from local-first apps and cloud-first apps. Heptabase syncs data across desktop, mobile, and web on all platforms in real-time with granular version control of your notes, while maintaining full offline access so you don't need an internet connection to use it.

- Long-term: I suggest just check out this article.

What is the cost to me?

It costs $11.99/month (monthly subscription) or $8.99/month (yearly subscription). You can cancel your subscriptions anytime and still have access to everything. You can export everything into markdown + YAML so that you can use it in other apps.