As long as @RoamResearch position themselves as a "notetaking tool" they're fighting an uphill battle.

They need to position themselves as an alternative to note taking tools, a new category called ______.

That is how they win.

Suddenly, ROAM makes note-taking old fashioned!

2/ As long as they are trying to dethrone note-taking, people are constantly asking "Can Roam do everything that Evernote can do? Notion?"

If they create new category, this reverses.

Can note taking tools surface knowledge like Roam, can they connect knowledge like Roam?

3/ And Roam doesn't want to compete on "being better at note taking!" That's not where it shines. It wants you to recognize that fundamentally the important part about notes isn't "taking them."

4/ This is of course a classic positioning strategy, and one that David Ogilvy used to make Dove a household name. Not as a soap, but as "moisturizing bar w/ cleansing properties."

5/ But fundamentally @RoamResearch has a deeper claim to this straetgy

Dove was made by chemists trying to solve the "soap problem" , then marketed as new.

@RoamResearch isn't trying to solve the "note-taking problem", it's creating affordances note-taking apps don't consider.

6/ So fundamentally, Dove's positioning strategy was merely a neat marketing trick, whereas with @RoamResearch, you literally can't be congruent with your product without creating a new category.

7/ You can even see in the #roamcult that the people who GET @RoamResearch already see it as a new category. When people ask for alternatives, they're not suggesting other note-taking apps, they're suggesting open-source Roam clones.

8/ But Roam's landing page and content marketing aren't making "new category" easy to see, and in fact are actively fighting against it by calling Roam a notetaking app.

The way they win is by leaning into this new category, rather than fighting it.