W1 Product Teardown: Brisknote
Note: Per Medium policy, I am reaffirming that I am not sponsored by nor advertising this product. Like any product that I am using in this Product Teardown series, they are only here for the purposes of education and discussion. A URL to the product will not be included.
For my opening Product Review, I’ll be taking a look at Brisknote. I wrote this last week, before launching this blog publication.
The app was posted on the Product Hunt website Saturday, February 16, 2019, Week 1 of the accelerator program. The product comes with a brief description; “tab notes that sync across devices.” I selected this product because as I learn about Product Management, I have been using something similar to take and share notes across my devices: Evernote. Brisknote also differentiates itself as a middle ground between sticky notes and complex note-taking software.
Although there are several products that can fulfill this function of taking notes and sharing notes across multiple devices, I’ll move forward with the templated analysis where applicable.
Does this product solve a problem?
Absolutely. Similar to Evernote, OneNote, or even another service like Dropbox, Brisknote offers an enhancement to productivity by eliminating the middleman during information storage and sharing. Instead of having to transfer files over, Brisknote offers the ability to synchronize notes using its service through both a mobile app as well as a browser add-on.
Pain Analysis
I view the combined issue of (1) having another step during the transfer of information via secondary means while (2) potentially lowering organizational ability as a pain that could be classified at least a medium magnitude. This is because the pain can be compounding — although the pain can start as benign, the longer time goes, the incremental tasks and organizational loss will add up quickly. Depending on the work environment or context of use, the frequency of this pain has the potential to be high, especially as more users or devices become involved.
The ability to synchronize across multiple devices eliminates a lot of unknown factors, in the form of “where was this stored?” while eliminating the risk of losing a device and all of the information on it.
Hypothesis
So what is a possible hypothesis that the product manager for Brisknote would use? It would be similar to the train of thought for other products in its class. The hypothesis itself could also be expressed in multiple parts, as I found difficulty in consolidating all of the benefits into just one statement.
“The product could succeed because people want to have ready access to their notes/information” would be a good start, and I would add onto this with supplemental hypotheses such as “The product could succeed because people want to share information in an efficient way” or “The product could succeed because people dislike using multiple devices to manage their information.”
Persona/Empathy Analysis
Using contextual clues from analyzing the problem and taking guesses at the hypothesis that a product manager would have for Brisknote, it is possible to build at least one persona which may be applicable to the product. Using the Persona template provided in the Udemy Product Management Course and following along with the suggestion for an adjective and name which start with the same letter, I’ll introduce: Busy Brittany.
Busy Brittany fits a potential persona of Brisknote. She has what looks to be multiple sets of documents to manage, a constantly ringing phone, and is clearly stressed from the photograph.
What are the details of this persona? Without gathering a group of similar people together to interview, I’ll guess that this is a person who has information or resources from multiple sources, sometimes paper/physical sources, and is having trouble keeping track of everything. A possible goal of Busy Brittany, as she seeks an app that could solve her pain, could simply be “I want to keep my resources organized.”
And although Busy Brittany is not a real person, looking at an empathy map and at least putting consideration into the environment of the potential user placed her in a hectic office environment. Maybe a corporate setting? Legal setting? Research scientist? Some of the people who could populate a space like this along with her, could be team members looking to collaborate or even a manager looking for expedited progress on an important project.
The User Experience
I went ahead and downloaded Brisknote from the Product Hunt app on my phone. I’ll walk through some of my thoughts as I got to install the app and explore it a bit more.
First of all, the developer for the app has already built a website for the product, and put both the mobile and browser apps on their respective platforms… so far so good!
Right after opening the mobile app after download, I was greeted with a plain splash page. Although I did not expect any fancy graphics or even a slogan/value proposition, the only button available to me was to sign in through Google.
As a personal preference, I am generally not a fan of always signing in through Google, from a security standpoint. It is possible that I’m not familiar with the software itself — is it an easier way to do the splash screen in the MVP with a Google sign-in, and add in an email option later? I created a dummy email to play around a bit.
The app itself had very light visuals and got straight to the point. After logging in with my dummy email, I was greeted with a familiar “Plus Sign” button and instructions on getting started. I also investigated the drop-down menu on the top left portion of the tab bar, only to be met with my inability to screenshot properly on my phone and always closing it. The information contained in the drop-down menu was directly available on the website for Brisknote.
The features, as expected, would be familiar after using Evernote for a while. After all, this is supposed to be a middle ground between basic (sticky notes) and complex. The app responded well to the tap-to-touch boxes, and I experimented with some of the text formatting. Minus the always present challenges of highlighting text on a mobile device (not a symptom of this app), Brisknote felt very friendly to use.
The scroll bar at the top also led to some more features for text formatting.
I wrapped up the product demo by trying out the remaining features in the text formatting bar, which just included some highlighting capability, URL linking, and superscripting/subscripting. And just like that, the test note was wrapped up, concluding the tour of available features. Test Note #1 was saved to the app and appeared on the home page after logging back in.
Definitely not the suite of options like Evernote has (or what paid competitors offer), with one of the more noticeable missing features the ability to interact with pictures or figures. I am wondering if it was looking to be a middle ground, are there still features that it must have, at a minimum?
However, on a basic level, it would still be able to address a pain. Now, what about the browser side of things? I got on my desktop and logged on to the Brisknote website.
The Brisknote website had a link to the Chrome Web Store, making it easy to install the browser version of the service.
An icon popped up on the top right-hand side of the Chrome UI, indicating that we were surely ready to go! And then…
I clicked the button a couple of times.
Uh, what?
Hello?
Oh, right. You have to open up a new tab in Chrome in order to use the service. The button on the top right-hand side of the Chrome UI doesn’t do anything outside of the generic options offered inside the browser, such as removing the App altogether. From a UX perspective, I wish hovering over the button didn’t provide another description of Brisknote, and instead could have popped up a message like, “Open a New Tab to Get Started!”
That said, after signing in with the dummy email, there was Test Note #1, just like I left it.
I created a second test note to see how quickly it would synchronize between the browser version and mobile version, and the upload/response was instant.
I did notice that I couldn’t drag or re-order the two Test Notes, so whatever I wrote first stayed in that order.
There also wasn’t an option to group anything together in the form of Notebooks, a feature on Evernote that I have been enjoying.
That said, this felt like a successful navigation of Brisknote and understanding the features that it offered. At this stage in its development, and the “always free” model that was shown on the website, the only concern I had in terms of Pirate Metrics focused on the acquisition piece, which I had already ran into with the Google only sign-in process.
The last piece for this product review would be to find out where it fits in the current ecosystem.
SWOT Analysis & Competition
There were a few items of concern that I had coming out of the initial product review and UX navigation that I had on my mind before heading into an ecosystem analysis. First of all, due to the current capabilities offered by Brisknote, I found that the SWOT Analysis would be very similar to other information-sharing/productivity services. Although it wants to be in the middle ground, it may not have a choice because of this overlap.
The current state of the product did have additional elements in each of the Strengths and Weaknesses quadrants compared to something like Evernote. However, I felt that this was mainly because the reduced features presented development opportunities for the future, while being a weakness for the present.
While a SWOT is certainly not a zero-sum exercise, it was hard to place a heavier “weight” on a development opportunity that someone else in the ecosystem had already tried and implemented (for example, picture capabilities in Evernote) as compared to the threat of a competitor that could tower over the current capabilities of Brisknote.
And if Brisknote didn’t want to go in that direction, where else could it look?
This is what I came up with in the initial draft of the SWOT Analysis:
From a competitor perspective, I wanted to get a good idea of where Brisknote could stand in the current information-sharing/productivity market. Looking at CrunchBase, it lists Evernote as competing with something called Pocket. So, I’ll use that in the lineup. I also know of OneNote, a paid service that can be obtained through an Office 365 subscription. Finally, a quick google search offered another competitor, which was a similar product — Simplenote. This last one was a… free, text-only note-sharing service. Yikes.
I created a Feature Table to understand where Brisknote stood in the ecosystem, knowing that its intent may not be to directly compete with some of these services.
Trying to find out more information about Pocket and available storage size was somewhat difficult, as the help files on their website did not provide a straight answer. It is worth to note that the model for Brisknote and Simplenote are very close, as I say this without having the opportunity to deep dive into the UI of Simplenote. OneNote becomes the priciest option, the only service that requires a paid subscription for access. Evernote and Pocket, within the context of this Feature Table, are hard to pinpoint as direct competitors.
I had almost reached the end of my product review for Brisknote, and completing the Feature Table (to the best of my ability) raised some final questions before I could close the door.
Final Thoughts for Brisknote
There are challenges ahead for Brisknote if it wants to remain as a middle ground option between sticky notes and the more complex programs that reside in its ecosystem. Information-sharing/productivity software are definitely able to solve pain that is present for the theoretical “Busy Brittany” persona. I found the app itself comfortable and easy to use, with the exception of a couple of UI hiccups (most notably navigating the browser version).
That said, once I performed the SWOT Analysis and Feature Table comparison, I started to question if it truly could differentiate itself from available services.
For example, if Brisknote is indeed Text-Only, then what happens if I look at the Feature Table from a Text-Only perspective?
As it would be extremely difficult to fill 1 TB or 60 GB worth of space with pure text, is the “Text-Only but Always Free” model truly beneficial to Brisknote’s model? How would the app monetize and support itself? What would the app monetize?
After all, three years ago Simplenote became open-source, without a premium business model. Could Brisknote test and amplify the Text-Only aspect of its model? Maybe cater specifically to a targeted demographic such as coders, who do not need the additional capability?
It seems that in the meantime, I’ll have to continue to wonder on these questions.
Thank you so much for taking your time to read. This concludes my Week 1 Product Teardown, featuring Brisknote.
