hi, thank you very much for the insights!
TBH I didn’t expect that so many ppl come to give us suggestions on logseq’s business model, so thank you all
I started to think about monetization since I got some investment seed from some friends last year. You know, they support me to keep it open source and make it a really good app first. Even though I told them that logseq might not make money for the first 2 ~ 3 years, I still need to think about it to make the team sustainable.
The long-term goal for logseq is to create a privacy-first platform for knowledge sharing and management, we want to make it distractions-free to write and connect any thoughts, work together with other communities to improve the way how young students can access the knowledge, and group together to contribute to their interests. So, it’s not just a notetaking app or a “cheaper roam research”.
The different thing about logseq being an outliner notetaking app is that we care about privacy (local-first, encryption) and it works well with markdown and org-mode files, but still provides similar features as roam because both logseq and roam are using the same database.
The donations might be working for one person if we really keep pushing users to donate us, but it will definitely not work for the whole team because we already have 6 full-time developers now, there’re VCs getting in touch with us, we don’t expect this so early, so we’ll talk with them when the app gets more stable.
I’m not sure how many users are going to pay for additional features (publishing, sync, whiteboard etc), the top priority for us now is to polish the features and make it stable for daily usage, if people really love it and want to pay for it, that’s great, and if people think the free version already works for them, that’s super awesome! What I believe is that the more values we create for the users, the more chance this project can survive compared to the other apps.
As for logseq for teams and real-time collaboration, it’s on our roadmap, we’ll be there but it might take more than one year.
The reason we open sourced logseq’s frontend is that we hope logseq can be used and developed in the next several decades, just like other OSS projects such as Tiddlywiki and Emacs/Vim. Also, we’ve stopped developing new features for the last two months, to make sure logseq having a small core and most features can be implemented as plugins later.
I made a lot of mistakes then I did my projects. Most of them died but some still alive
You have to fail to succeed, right? Again, thank you very much for the helpful insights! We’ll think more about the business and trying our best to make logseq a really good app.