Getting feedback from our users is one of the most important tasks we undertake. Do we take it too seriously? Some will say "yes," and we agree that too democratic => eventual product bloat, after adding everything that everybody ever wanted. So democratic rule has to be paired with what our Founders (original and subscribed) believe. But on the whole, Amplenote uses a democratic approach in planning what to build next.
Our user voting boards are the de facto roadmap for Amplenote. By implication, every user of Amplenote is a part-Founder of it, because they are influencing what gets built. Here is the tl;dr on how the voting boards compare:
Public Voting Board | Supporter Voting Board | |
Influence on Amplenote roadmap | Strong | Strong |
Purpose | What could make product useful to a larger audience? | What matters most to customers who sustain our development? |
Feature suggestions | Anyone can suggest | Those with votes to cast can suggest |
Vote expiration | No expiration | Expire if Supporter available votes drop |
Total vote limit (limit per feature) | No limit (one vote per feature) | Up to 15 votes available (up to 4 votes cast per feature) |
Suggestion expiration | No expiration | Expire if no votes are cast for suggestion |
Suggestion approval process | Admin-reviewed | Automatic, with periodic audits |
URL |
linkSource #1: Public feature voting board
The main public feature voting board can be found at https://amplenote.featureupvote.com.
This list keeps the full universe of ideas contributed by past and present Amplenote customers. Any user can sign up to the public feature voting board and make as many suggestions as they like. We strive to solve at least two of the top 10 public voted features with each release.
Example features we have launched due to demand from users: Peek Viewer: Sidebar for multi-note viewing, Inline Tags and Note Reference Filtering, and many, many more (filter by "Done" when visiting the board).
linkSource #2: Supporter voting board
The supporter feature voting board can be found at amplenote.com/suggested_features.
This list tracks what features will make the biggest difference to the Founders and other users who are actively supporting Amplenote (with money or time) on our journey. One user can potentially accumulate up to 15 votes for the Supporter voting board, though there is a limit of 4 votes cast on any particular suggestion.
Mini-Supporter Voting FAQ:
linkSource #3: Our founding team's vision of the Idea Execution Funnel
The Amplenote team has its own strategy on how to make Amplenote into the best product in the long-term. The gist of our strategy is to honor the vision of the Idea Execution Funnel, delivering a tool that firstly makes it simple to capture every idea you have, or web page you visit, or annotation you make to a book. Then, we have to make it easy to discard the content that isn't immediately actionable, and promote the tasks that you have told Amplenote are Important.
We think most people will probably think of Amplenote as "the best tasks and calendar app" before we're thought of as "the best notes app," so we lean more often toward task-centric and calendar-centric improvements over note-centric features, since we already compare favorably on note taking features compared to similar apps, but none of which integrate tasks & calendar features to the extent that Amplenote offers.
Example features we have launched due to our internal strategy: Calendar View: Detailed Visual Guide, How does Task Score work?, and What are Vault Notes and how do I create them?, Rich Footnotes and content previews.
linkSource #4: Email, Discord, ad hoc
These are largely channels that contribute to our roadmap via reporting bugs or anomalies in our existing feature set. Since we believe in fixing bugs before adding features, whenever we receive a reproducible report of a feature working incorrectly, that report will have a high likelihood of getting chosen for developer attention within a week or two.
linkPhilosophy
Our aspiration is to craft Amplenote into the consensus best choice for those who want a "task, calendar and note taking" app to help them figure out where to focus their limited willpower.
By the time Amplenote went live in 2019, behemoths like Evernote and Notion already had strong claims as the best note taking apps. Obsidian had made breathtaking progress in recent years. Not to mention numerous great task and calendar apps that exist.
However, few of today's best apps have a systematic method to capture and organize the will of their user base. Still fewer have the means to take whatever those top suggestions are and get them done. In its short history, Amplenote is growing a track record of getting ideas implemented once they've been voted into the top 10. We hope that by continuing to build an app that reflects the needs of its user base, we can create something unlike what has come before.