The Fall of Roam

Roam Research is AWESOME and it’s inevitable failure fills me with sadness.

Roam Research is light scripting language that’s ostensibly a note taking tool. It had a viral surge of popularity in 2020, driven by (1) the intense emotions generated by making a simple programming language available to people who never had it before, the way Excel and Looker did, and (2) a social network of people creating and sharing their “scripts”.

The “Summer of Roam” was a wonderful time for folks with an obsessive love of productivity tools (of which I am one). The audacity of bringing innovation to note-taking tools, the cleverness and warmth of the community, the ability for new heights of customization were and still are incredible. I’m still a daily user, and wrote this draft on Roam Research.

Nevertheless, the fall is inevitable, as the social network effect fades and the competition heats up. The odds of Roam’s valuation going up from 200M are extremely low.

Social Network

Eugene Wei’s framework for the three types of value a social network is helpful in teasing out the aspects of why Roam’s moment in the sun was more akin to a social network than a productivity app.

Utility

Roam, despite not being particularly easy to use, had some innovative features. Leaning hard into the powers of graph databases with bi-directional linking, encouraging hierarchical data structures through bullet points, always opening on a daily notes page, and the ability to query/embed other parts of your content in one place worked fantastically together, creating a fresh experience. Then third-party scripts working on top of Roam add features for super-users, like navigating anywhere and manipulating any data with a few hotkeys and scripts so your daily pages are automatically set up any way you want, and much much more.

Entertainment

The richness of the features, and more importantly the struggle to find those features helped Roam’s virality, prompting a virtuous cycle where users look for guidance online, and super-users are rewarded. Call it the Snapchat effect, where that rush of discovering new functionality brings a rush endorphins and welcomes users to a community, and prompts them to keep going deeper.

Social Capital

When new users are coming on quickly, super-users have even more incentive to find and post more content. It also brings in people that aren’t super users but see the opportunity. Writers like Nat Eliason and Tiago Forte built significant followings with articles and classes on how to use Roam.

Slowing flywheel

When the rate of innovation and possibilities of new possible content slows, and the user-base starts to decrease, that positively reinforcing loop slows down though and the returns of posting content diminish significantly. Not only are there fewer users to consume your content, but your brand risks being attached to a failure. Nat is mostly writing about Crypto now, and Tiago is advocating for Notion and creating classes for how to get online recognition through writing.

By the time you’re reading this, that flywheel has likely come to a full stop, and normal market forces are pushing in. Beyond that Roam’s unintuitive and not innovating as quickly, it’s expensive for a note-taking tool, and a wave competitors sprung up after Roam’s visibility skyrocketed. They are attempting different approaches both on the business strategy side and on the product side.

Obsidian is very similar to Roam, while pushing for more privacy and better integrations, targeting the more tech-conscious consumers, but Athens Research wins most shameless clone, they are hoping by being open-source and charging enterprises the community will build out Roam’s features on their own (I’m skeptical). Mem has natively built out some features of Roam to allow for better workflow, allowing quick save and quick access to the app, more hotkeys, and an attempt at partially automating the second sidebar. Notion is different as they are more popular and not graph-based, but they too are borrowing features from Roam, like two-way links.

Notion will be the big winner, because of the combination of simplicity to start and and coming depth of integrations, but there may be niches for specific groups, like professional researchers or VCs.

Predictions

Roam will keep puttering on for a while. There won’t be big new innovations either from Roam or from 3rd-parties, but there are enough people who invested in learning the tool and aren’t overly price sensitive to keep running a lean business for a long time. Because Roam can be so customized by super-users, and their early users tended to be people who rely on organizing written information for their professional lives, there won’t be a sudden drop-off, there will just have more more churned than new users.