K-Stash: A search engine for your useful links – for devs and researchers

Doing the math here, for you to make a starter engineering salary off this project, you'd need to hit $10,000/month - which would mean around 40,000 paying basic users or 12,000 paying pro users.

If this hits the front page you'd maybe get around 50,000 hits to the site - which means your conversion needs to be around 80% (for Basic).

Whereas if you had a free plan and a pro plan that was $25/month - you'd only need 400 people. Which is a conversion of 8% from this particular traffic source.

Your call, but I think lower prices these days speak to me as the developer not being all-in on their particular product - even if you are, it's just the optics of it.

If I really need this, you can bet I'd pay $25/month for it.

The Roam Research guys do a good job at this, even if their product is not yet at 90% refinement, just the fact that they are willing to charge a higher price makes me believe they will actually put the work into it to make it better. There are students and researchers that do NOT want to bother with storing the files to build that graph, hooking up VSCode with a graph-editor addon (there are many), all they want is a thing that does what it says it does. And they pay well for it.

I stash my useful links in Asana. For those who haven't used it, Asana is like a big, organized to-do list. Each link I want to keep becomes an Asana task. I can organize them the Asana way, using tags or projects (task lists), or I can just put useful words in the description so I can search for them later.

Asana probably wasn't built for this use case, but it works pretty darn well. My most important workflow is being able to send the current webpage I'm reading to Asana using just a few taps, and Asana supports that easily -- the official Chrome extension is specifically for doing this, and the Asana apps support the Android and iOS share integrations.

In addition -- and this is important too -- I feel pretty confident that Asana (and thus my data) will still be around in 5-10 years. I'm not sure if I can say that about almost all of its competitors.

Note: I'm not affiliated with Asana. I'm familiar with Asana because I used it at work, but other to-do apps might also work for bookmarking. If you have one in mind, let me know in the replies!

I know that's a bit of a downer take, and maybe I should just not hang out on HN with this attitude, but I really wonder if I'm that alone with this opinion...? It's the same issue I have with roam research, the same issue I had with Mendeley.