24Sep22 | I’m joining ‘Write of Passage’

Feels like a good time to join one of the most prestigious writing programs on the planet.

Few years ago I was so invested in productivity as a concept, then as years went by, I found myself gradually niched in to one form of it, which is Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).

In 2018 & 19, heading out of college, I knew I wanted to start writing online but never had a space to do so, and was just exploring where to start. I was fascinated by the fact that someone can write as much they want in a dedicated space that’s forever, and that could be considered a vault of their ideas, knowledge, and progression of thought. I tinkered with lots of tools because I was genuinely interested in software that enabled that cause.

Late 2020, I started writing online, but was investing a stupid amount of time into each post I publish, which was wrong. I eventually discovered that my writing output could be much more effortless if I had a system of managing thoughts & notes.

Then at some point during covid I found that video of this micro-influencer talking about a practice called “building a second brain” or BASB – It was the most random introduction to one of the most important topics I’d ever come into. I thought she may be onto something, and she referred to Tiago Forte, I read the post in the description, followed Tiago, and read about BASB on twitter. I thought it was so awesome as a concept. Then found Tiago was teaching an online course of the same name.

At the same time I was also journaling, so I was doing two different types of writing; writing about topics for my blog, and writing my daily journal.

Few months fly by and I join a BASB cohort in 2021 (it used to run for 2 cohorts per year, currently discontinued), and at the same time I was also working on that system I mentioned. Back then I didn’t know the word PKM, but I thought if I had this system in place, my life would be in more order, which was my primary aim to start with. After BASB, I had my PKM set up, and I discovered there are even more types of note-taking than I used to know. Then found people turning their everyday knowledge into entire online brains, like this one, or this. I actually did a small collection of similar published second brains I found online.

Another term for a “published second brain” is also a “digital garden”:

BASB introduced me to this PKM world, and put lots of things in context for me. I found answers to lots of questions I had while writing, storing, and sharing knowledge.

Since then, note-taking Twitter has been filled with references to this spin-out program that felt more advanced, more niched-in, called “Write of Passage”, even its founder David Perell was himself a student of BASB. So I’ve been following Perell’s writings and tweets for a few years, and then 2 months ago I receive an email that the upcoming Write of Passage cohort is sadly going to be the last one due to a change in the business direction. The course comes at a whooping price of $4,000 but I thankfully got in last minute on a scholarship.

The reason these programs come at very high price points is that their content is quite life-changing if you follow along. I can certainly attest to that after BASB.

After BASB, I was working on a social platform called faves.media. The notes I took around this time are the most detailed technical notes I have to date. I was documenting everything, from things I learn to challenges to case studies. Less like a journal, and more like a detailed log of everything that was happening, a Second Brain. These notes helped me several times, and still do.

During 2022, I was working on a Computer Vision startup with my friend. We were doing good progress and we were onto good things. At some point AI Vision felt like a natural progression of my career; it had the combination of: early breakout technology, high-pay, and good business opportunities. At this point I had been working in this space since 2018, way before AI broke out.

During this time, I remember there was this conference, at which there was a breakout activity where each one would talk about an off-topic subject. I started a table around “Building a Second Brain”, few minutes in, everyone joined. It seems everyone is silently suffering from information fatigue one way or another.

Shortly after, my pull towards starting a second-brain product was much higher. I kept working on both in parallel for a few months until I eventually decided to stop working on the vision company and pursued the new PKM SaaS. During this time, and through 2023, this choice has enabled me to learn a lot about software architecture, talk with lots of people who are interested in PKM, and generally be more invested in consumer SaaS.

Luckily enough, this was also around the same time when LLMs commoditization began. It was clear then that this type of product would immensely benefit from this new tech. At the time I was working for a crypto company as a Data Engineer. I was splitting my time between working on both and I knew my days working like this were numbered.

Early 2024 we started implementing our first vision of hyperspaces.live, and it took multiple infra & design iterations, until eventually we were able to launch in September. For the most part, this is not just a normal MVP, because it took more than it should, but rather what we like to call an “over-priced” MVP, because we were not able to sacrifice on any part of the pipeline until release (September 24th, 2024 – currently in beta), and we held a very high bar for design & engineering.

As an avid note taker, at some point I realized that all types of notes felt inherently connected. So a big part of organizing my notes was always about tying them together based on their contexts, topics, and how they originated from my daily experiences.

As I continued to do this, the friction towards storing & retrieving my thoughts started increasing significantly, because this review process (organizing notes) was so time-intensive, so eventually note-taking about things in my life as a practice came with much more friction than I intended.

I can't properly state the amount of brainpower it takes someone to build a full second brain that's fully categorized, organized, and tagged. In our first brain, we don’t categorize things. Our first brain is cluttered because it's designed to be so. But by forcing every thought or idea to be categorized, we do two things:

• Condense the idea to a form that can be categorized, thus mistakenly rip it off any fuller expression it might have.
• Add future debt to ourselves for all the subsequent ideas of the same category, that now must conform to the same category of the current idea, else we invalidate the whole category.

So I eventually thought, the nearest point an artificial brain and a biological brain could meet is through a software that allows note-taking through time, not through categories. If all the ideas we ever had are available on a timeline, and no context is ever lost, then organization & friction become much more less of a problem. Although they might still be there, but with much less implications on our day-to-day note-taking.

This is the core complexity that pushed me to start a new solution to solve for easier capture, organization, and retrieval of thoughts. I wanted to come up with a true effortless system, which also means one that incurs high degree of automation because most of existing PKM systems are not. And then after taking with some people from the community, I found many of them were suffering from the same problems I was suffering from.

Sadly a problem with managing your thoughts doesn’t just stop there, it brings a wide array of other problems, like information fatigue, lack of clarity of thought, feeling under-unexpressed, and lack of productivity. The act of writing is in itself an act of thinking clearly.

Super excited for how the next few weeks will unfold, as they mark the early days of Hyperspaces and being involved in Write of Passage in parallel. Through Write of Passage, we aim to get Hyperspaces in as many hands as possible, trying to provide that value to note-taking enthusiasts and knowledge workers from every domain, which we’re already working around the clock to achieve. So far we’ve received some good feedback about the design and some requests for next features, which we hope we’ll use to bring the product to maturity during the next few months.