Nobody Cares About Knowledge Graphs: A Critique of and Model for Knowledge Management Tool Design And Marketing

In my last post, I wrote about the unique value of Postulate as a knowledge management tool in terms of the vision for building a global knowledge graph. "Instead of having millions of silo'd individually maintained knowledge graphs, [have] one global graph that millions of people [contribute] to," went the pitch.

To me, this is a powerful idea. Those who research and think about knowledge management are similarly excited when I use shared vocabulary and concepts. But to literally everyone else, this is boring gibberish. Who cares about building knowledge graphs? Knowledge workers are researchers and writers, not graph theorists (well, except for actual graph theorists).

Beyond knowledge graphs specifically, focus on high-level marketing concepts is a problem that threatens tons of impactful and innovative tools in general. When talking to Linus today, I got so excited about Ideaflow that I started strategizing how to join the team. Yet I distinctly remember a few weeks or months ago coming across Ideaflow's landing page while searching for knowledge management tools and dismissing it as a useful candidate.



"We’re creating an ecosystem for humans and machines to work together to solve the world’s most important problems." It's a great pitch to investors, but a horrible one for consumers. Perhaps that's intentional; Ideaflow doesn't seem to be going after consumer growth yet. But regardless, it's an illustration of what not to do when marketing a tool to consumers.

How should we go about marketing such ambitious and innovative tools, then?

Consider Tesla's homepage.



Tesla is a deeply tech-driven company. Its vision is that of ambitious technologists, its product the result of industry-pushing innovation. Yet there is no mention whatsoever of even the fact that Teslas are EVs on the entire landing page.

Sure, Tesla has a ton of street cred, and its marketing situation looks very different to that of a fledgling company. But the non-tech-centric approach has been consistent across all of Tesla's marketing efforts, since the original roadster. Teslas are worthy of attention not because they're EVs driven by a mission to save humanity from extinction, but because they're sexy. They're beautifully designed; they're comfortable to drive; they're absurdly fast. The value prop delivered to customers is not that Teslas are good EVs, it's that they're good cars.

This is a well-known example. I'll return to software for an example that was more surprising to me: GitHub.



GitHub is a hugely impactful product, based on the innovative technology of Git. It's empowered millions of developers and teams to build complex projects, and hosed gasoline onto every spark of the open source movement. Yet, on its homepage, there's no mention of the macro-level impact that GitHub has had. Instead, messaging is focused on the micro-level benefits of using GitHub for teams: codebase redundancy, streamlined collaboration, package management.

These principles and applications are nothing more than marketing 101: when selling to a customer, consider the customer's problem and needs, not the high-level vision for the product. Going deeper, though, considering customer pain points first and higher-level vision second (or at least, at the appropriately higher level) is important in product design as well as marketing.

If you care at all about adoption, building a notetaking tools is not about building the optimal knowledge graph interface; it's not even about empowering users to process and manage their thoughts; it's about making it easier for users to do what they actually care about, whether that's publishing research, onboarding new employees, or whatever other use case is targeted.

There are successful tools that target knowledge management nuts: Roam especially does quite well on this model. But building a cult isn't the impact that I want to have; creating a new standard-bearer tool and platform for thought -- in the same way that Notion did for docs, Medium did for publishing, and GitHub did for code -- is the impact that I want to have. So, the validation I seek is not from knowledge management researchers who are most excited about abstract analyses, but from knowledge workers for whom it shouldn't require any amount of thought to enjoy using my product.



Thus, there are no mention of fleeting notes and permanent notes, of Zettelkasten, of evergreen notes, or anything else in Postulate's marketing. Rather, Postulate declares that it will make you more creative, and help you learn more effectively. It highlights that it will provide you a collaboration tool and publishing platform. In design, it is not made up of advanced, backlink-based interfaces and structures, but built out of the immediately understandable forms of blogs and fleeting notes.

The specific vision and value prop of Postulate is being continuously refined through conversations and new insights, but it seeks to bring the theory and power of graph-based knowledge management to a level of effortless intuition. Knowledge graphs are an emergent property of natural knowledge management in the first place: it is to natural knowledge management, in augmentations of the interfaces we've come to konw and love, where theory must be applied, not in entirely novel designs.