Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Their homepage is really bad.

It shows a handful of UI examples but I still have no idea what is special about Roam except that it apparently has hyperlinks, hashtags and versioning?

There is no link in any main part of the page to get a list of features? Or how it works? I have to find some links in the footer... which take forever to load and give you a scary "No changes to the help database will be saved." message... and one is a "complete course" (way too long), another is a long "white paper" (way too detailed).

And I can't even try it out without giving them my credit card?

Maybe this is a great, revolutionary app. But they're sure making it as difficult as possible for me to figure out why that might be.

A $200M valuation and they can't even hire a marketer or even a PM to put together a homepage that gives me good reasons why I should use it?

For anyone looking to understand Roam, I would suggest searching "roam cult" or "#roamcult" on Twitter.

I'm not one of them — but there is a hardcode, devoted fan base that are convinced it's the best thing since sliced bread. Whenever that occurs, it's worth trying to understand why.

I think the bad homepage is (somewhat) intentional: they only want people who are willing to look past the home screen and actually give it a try... and (I believe) they want to avoid the audience who is trying it just because of a flashy landing page.

Thanks for the search term.

But it's funny, what you see as positives I see as negatives. When something has a devoted fan base but nobody else uses it, it tells me it's something incredibly niche for a reason, and therefore probably not applicable to me.

And a bad homepage would be a horrible intention. Why would any product ever avoid an audience? Why would you only want people willing to look past a bad homepage? That sounds like it's screening for people who have a lot of time to waste. I'm not sure why that would be your target audience.

I agree about the terrible homepage. I had looked previously (when they weren't accepting new sign-ups) and assumed it was Mac-only based on the screenshots.

I created an account today (realizing it was actually web-based, no client at all) to try it out and like you, couldn't believe that there was no way to do so without giving credit card info.

However, the "thanks for registering" email does include a link to a playground/test site.

https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help

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