I'm in the home-stretch of adding a personal journaling feature to Kinopio. But Kinopio isn't a journaling app, and it'll always lack the advanced features of a dedicated journaling app. At the same time, Kinopio's spatial card connecting interface is way more expressive than any other digital journal.

My initial motivation for building journaling was seeing people already recording their day in Kinopio, and also wanting to provide more explicit reasons to use Kinopio everyday. You might not always have hard problems and new ideas to think and plan your way through, but daily journaling is a pretty enriching routine to get into. I also think I can make it pretty fun.

The other big experimental motivation is to attract different kinds of people. People that aren't explicitly looking for "tools for thought", mind-maps, or roam-like serious things – but instead are more passionate about the aspirational worlds of diary-ing, scrapbooking, and bullet journals.

I have two theories:

1) Building a product that appeals to diverse people/genders/interests/ages is healthier for the design/product/business long-term.

2) If you have fun using a tool for one thing, you'll bend over backwards to find other excuses to use it. To paraphrase a popular quote "if your favorite tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Kinopio is designed to be a pretty good hammer.

This month I experimented with promoting Kinopio by actively reaching out to newsletter writers, bloggers, youtubers, and podcasters whose work I like, and who've been interested in creative software or thinking tools. The recipients ranged from newer individuals to big established influencers. The plan was that I'd tell them about Kinopio, they'd check it out and if they liked it, would share it with their audience.

I spent days writing individual emails to about 30 people, but I didn't get a single response back.

There's a couple ways to interpret this:

1. Maybe they read the emails, checked out Kinopio, and thought it sucked
2. Maybe they get so much email that they ignored it (I only contacted people who publicly published their contact info and invited correspondence)
3. Maybe they haven't gotten to it yet

But regardless, I think the only take away is to not do direct outreach anymore, it's proven to be a waste of time.

The best results I've got so far were with people finding it themselves and telling others about it – as unknowable as that process is. Also posting on hackernews myself was surprisingly successful.

(I'm still interested in doing podcasts though, it's a fun medium that I have experience both hosting and being on. But the ineffectiveness of reaching out to people directly, dissuades me from reaching out.)

So there's that failure, but on the other hand, it means more time to do what I like: building new features, improvements, and drawing more frames.

I've been working on fixes and small features recently, especially stuff that improves the new user experience. Things like making sure invite flows and errors are clear and actionable.

All this is in prep for more dedicated marketing efforts aimed at widening the user base. This is super awk timing though, with the election and all the ugh around that, will people:

• check out? meaning nothing non-election will be seen or thought of
• be desperate for anything non-election related?
• remain unchanged in what they care about (especially globally)

hmm, what do you think?