Summon

Summon was the first big project I worked on. It started as a fun experiment. The idea was to build a tool for collecting links that I've browsed through on the internet. I'm pretty bad at organizing things, so I thought that if I have a tool for myself, maybe I'll be more disciplined about it.

I had no idea that it would become this big. Honestly, it turned out pretty decent. I mean, it's my primary tool to collect links and jot down thoughts. So I guess it was a success?

The app has been living and breathing for over a year now, and it sort of works. Some things have broken over time, but hey, that's life :).

Vision

The vision behind Summon was to be the fastest tool to curate all that you consume on the internet. It's different from other bookmarking/curation tools in that it is primarily focused on the speed of content retrieval and resuming your work. In essence, the tool should get out of your way as soon as possible. Though it felt short of the vision, there are figments of this vision at various points in the app.

Anyway, some of the notable features are:

Dashboard like view for all kinds of content right on the front page. Helps you scan and operate on it with minimal steps.
Command K like search feature for any item. You can resume browser sessions right from the search results.
Ability to save links, images and short tweet-like notes into separate collections called "streams". You can publish a stream to the public. It has a nice timeline view.
Ability to save and resume browser sessions. You can even resume a specific tab group or tabs that belong to the same domain from a previous browsing session.
Ability to save and retrieve content within the telegram bot.

Most importantly, it laid the groundwork for me to experiment and take on more projects. You should always pick projects above your current execution levels. There's minimal risk and infinite re

Audience Response

I did not have any plans to be strategic about acquiring users for this project. However, as I kept posting about the project's progress on Twitter, enough people got interested over time. In the end, I released it when I felt it was ready and made some demo videos. But I wasn't intentional about getting more users to use it. To be honest, it is not a finished piece of software.

But I get happy whenever someone reaches out to me and mentions it. How they loved the vision and how they got inspired to build something.

To be exact, there are a total of 68 users (not active) that did sign up and try the app. I got to talk to some of them and found out some interesting ways people think out personal software tools. Anyway, there's always one user that keeps it running: me :).

Learnings

I believe in this thing that if you are not making mistakes, you are not pushing hard enough. If you are, then you continue pushing while being aware of the mistakes you are committing. The creative momentum is hard to stop once it is set in motion.

The point of mistakes is to not make them again. But you have to make them, to learn the lessons. Although I'm pretty happy how the project worked out, with the help of hindsight, I can't help but see the cracks that could have been avoided. Here are some of them:

I didn't seek out enough external feedback. External feedback is important. Humans are extremely good at justifying things that help them avoid the pain of truth. Sometimes truth can be demotivating. It can detract you from the plan of action. While I agree that avoiding the cold truth is a good tactic early on, when you are weeks and months into a project, feedback actually helps to clear the brain fog. Keeps you lean with the requirements and allows you to focus on usability. When you are building only for yourself, every other idea seems like a great one.
I didn't write unit tests. After a certain threshold of complexity, software starts to get cumbersome to maintain. If you don't have a big picture of what you might be breaking by adding more features, you are in trouble. And you will break things. In the end, you end up wasting more time in this cycle of breaking and repairing. Unit tests are not a silver bullet, but they give you the kind of instant feedback that prevents you from being lazy with quality. So don't avoid unit tests.
I didn't invest in the product pitch. No matter how good the product is in practice, no one is going to use it if the messaging is not clear and inviting. For the users, the first product isn't the software but the words that are used to describe it. When the words fail to convey the story, the product fails. I found this aspect to be more difficult than actually building the product. Because it's easy to build something and slap a story on top of it, but it's difficult to convert your ideas into a genuine story and then execute on that.

But... there are good things too. The biggest unlock was that I can just do things. Although I worked on it for over a year, on and off, I did not give up. That, for me, is a big win. I really needed this newfound confidence. That I can now take things from ideas to finished products. As of now, execution is less of a problem for me than figuring out what to invest my time and effort in.

Future plans

I'm not a person who thinks too far in the future, but I do have ideas on making it better, specifically focused on a certain kind of audience. Roughly, I'm thinking of cutting down unrelated features and focusing on giving the user more control of their data, as this is a tool meant to curate personal stuff.

Another core focus would be snappy UX, things such as keyboard-based controls to find and act on content in the minimum steps possible. I'm counting on my design skills getting better by that time.

Anyway, here are some beautiful screenshots of the app: