DeveloPassion's Newsletter #174 - Aftermath

Welcome

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

This week I've resumed my Knowledge Management coaching sessions, and it's been a blast. I always have a ton of fun exchanging ideas, tips, and tricks about PKM and Obsidian.

I've also had fun launching the Obsidian Starter Kit on Product Hunt. More on this in The Lab section!

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

As I've announced before, last week I launched the Obsidian Starter Kit on Product Hunt. It was my first launch, and even though I didn't make it to the top of the ladder, I think I did all right.

I did my best to promote the launch everywhere I could:

• Mail to past customers
• Messages to the PKM communities on Slack, Reddit and Discord
• Blog posts on Ghost, Medium, Substack
• Newsletter announcement
• Tweets
• HackerNews post
• IndieHackers post
• HashNode post
• Banner on top of the Website
• ...

In total, we managed to 57 upvotes and 18 comments/testimonials:

Since the launch, we have now reached 92 followers, and 15 reviews:

Launching on Product Hunt had a positive impact on different levels:

• More awareness about the product
• Many visits to the landing page
• A few sales
• Useful feedback
• More customer testimonials I can use to help me convince future prospects

Moreover, the product page will remain online on Product Hunt's Website:

Obsidian Starter Kit - Product Information, Latest Updates, and Reviews 2024 | Product Hunt

Organizing knowledge with Obsidian has never been easier. Discover the ideal combination of structure templates, plugins, and automation rules making it a breeze to organize thoughts, ideas, knowledge, and wisdom, at scale. Manage knowledge productively.

Product Hunt

This is also interesting, because it will continue to drive traffic to the product, and to my own website. That's a long-term SEO benefit.

Last but not least, it's possible to launch the same product multiple times on the platform, meaning that I could try it again later (e.g., after each major release).

I've learned a few lessons with the first launch. I shared those on X:

PS: The launch promotion will remain active until the end of August. You can get a 25% on the Obsidian Starter Kit, using the following code: xorertt 🎉🎉🎉

Obsidian Starter Kit

Jump straight to stress-free note-making with Obsidian

Obsidian Starter Kit

Business

No real progress since the last edition. We're still at $112 per month:

You are 19 paid members out of 1701 members. And you guys are my real true fans, then top 1% ❤️.

If you care about what I do, then don't hesitate to show it:

New articles

I've published a short piece about how to assemble new pieces of content by reusing your existing notes:

How to create new content using your existing notes

Transform atomic notes into cohesive linear content with this step-by-step guide.

Sébastien DuboisSebastien Dubois

It's a really straightforward process. The more notes you have at your disposal, the more pathways there are through your knowledge base, and the more content you can create.

Notes of the week

I've started centralizing information about Obsidian on the following note:

Useful resources for Obsidian - DeveloPassion

Useful resources for Obsidian - DeveloPassion

DeveloPassion

My goal is to create a hub of information about Obsidian, sharing useful links, recommendations, and best practices.

I've also published various other notes this week, for instance about learning curves, the forgetting curve, the spacing effect, and spaced repetition.

Quotes of the week

• Birds born in a cage think flying is a disease — Alejandro Josorowski
• Which games you play is more important than how well you play them — Naval Ravikant

Thinking and learning

If you're new to Knowledge Management, then you might be interested in my recent thread:

I stumbled this interesting taxonomy for tracking people using Obsidian:

A taxonomy for tracking people using Obsidian

Maybe you’re an introvert. Or a salesperson. Or shudder both. Whatever it is, people love to believe that you care about their lives and…

MediumEnsley Tan

It's something that I do heavily in my own vault and in the Obsidian Starter Kit, but I could probably take a few ideas out of that article to improve my approach.

I currently distinguish between "persons" and "contacts", because contacts are people I actually know, meet, and exchange with. As such, I record more information about them (both personal and professional). I'm okay publishing notes about persons, but I keep contact notes to myself.

Some ideas: track interactions with contacts, and add reminders to re-engage with contacts, for birthdays, special occasions, etc

The "Folders vs Tags" debate will never end:

🌲 Yet Another Hot Take on “Folders vs Tags”

I like folders due to their cross compatibility, future proofing, interoperability, flexibility, focus, clarity, automation management &etc.

Obsidian IcebergEleanor Konik

I won't try to convince you that one is better than the other. There's no point. But I will say this: both are useful and valuable. I should probably write an article with my own take on this topic. So far, I only have one discussing tagging specifically:

Best Practices for Tagging Notes in a PKM System

Tags are a great way to categorize, describe and track your notes. This post will show you how to approach tagging the notes in your PKM

Sébastien DuboisSebastien Dubois

I'm still in love with the Johnny Decimal system. I'm not a zealot, but seeing neatly organized folders everywhere makes me feel good:

The Johnny Decimal System

Discover how the Johnny Decimal system simplifies information organization, making data filing and retrieval simple, efficient, and intuitive

Sébastien DuboisSebastien Dubois

Bob Doto's explanation of what permanent notes are:

What is a Permanent Note? (Correcting Some Common Misunderstandings)

The term “permanent note” comes from Sonke Ahrens’ book [^1] where the author refers to two categories of notes permanently stored in the slip-box: “the ma…

Writing by Bob Doto

I deeply agree with the following article. More people should use Markdown:

Why I Use Markdown, and Why You Should Too

Why using Markdown for your writing tasks provides unmatched simplicity, flexibility, and control

MediumRyan Elston

Is progressive summarization as recommended by Tiago Forte, good or bad?

The Potential Side Effects of Progressive Summarization

Let’s explore the underlying habits “Progressive Summarization” might indirectly develop -along the second-order effects it might create.

MediumNick Milo

Fun stuff

I've decided to add this section to discuss a bit more about my learning experiments...

This week, I've started exploring FLUX.1, a new image generation model developed by Black Forest Labs. It's able to generate amazing and hyper realistic images. Interestingly, it's also capable of generating text much better than other models I've tried before. Last but not least, it can be fine-tuned to generate very specific images (e.g., pictures of you doing various things in various places 😂)

For this experiment, I've decided to use Replicate.com, and their JavaScript/TypeScript API, as shown in this example. The end result is a React/Next.js/Prime React/Tailwind application that I have deployed on Vercel:

This application enables me to generate images using the FLUX.1 model through Replicate's infrastructure. The source code is available on GitHub, but I wouldn't say that this is a good example 😂

Next up, I plan to create an Obsidian plugin for Replicate. My idea is to make it a breeze to generate images (or text) using different models, right from Obsidian, for instance by selecting a line of text in the editor and by invoking a command or context menu entry 🚀.

I also want to create fine-tuned versions of the model for my own needs, following this tutorial:

Fine-tune FLUX.1 with your own images

We’ve added fine-tuning (LoRA) support to FLUX.1 image generation models. You can train FLUX.1 on your own images with one line of code using the Replicate API.