Corporate Viability FAQ

If you're concerned about using software without a big corporation behind it, we hope to address some concerns here:

Do we really expect to make any money selling a Journaling software product?

Our friends are really concerned about this, because there is no established market for journaling software. But current revenue is not the only reason we're doing this. We hope to expand it into other markets later, Journaling is small subset that we can get right, even from an early stage of implementation. Anyways, money can be over-rated when you're doing something that you're passionate about. And we are definitely passionate about where we are headed.

How long can you maintain a non-revenuing software product?

A long time :)

We keep our expenses very low. This gives us years to work until we get it right. If it's not useful to you yet, don't count us out. We're constantly releasing new features.

Eventually, we'll have enough features to attract lots of new and paying customers, but until then, we're patient, and we keep our heads down and the release train moving.

What about EverNote, OneNote, and other great competitors?

First, we're not truly competitors - because they serve different uses. Nor are we competitors with any of the other great mind mapping programs. These are great tools, much better than ours, for some purposes. Where ours is more appropriate, we're dedicated to putting out the best product we possibly can, and we hope you'll consider buying it when it's for sale.

You keep saying "We." We who?

Pete Carapetyan works full time on the project, and Jacquelyn Portele works part time. We are both investing our time, thinking someday we'll sell enough to make a little payback. But that's about as "we" as it gets - a very small team.

Does Journal Better hint at where our product line is headed in the future?

We hope to be opaque about features that we're not implementing yet.. A diary or journaling product is a modest subset of our long term goals, and a necessary foundation. But we won't stop there. 

Yikes, that's not much of an elevator speech!

If you're looking for an elevator speech it would be something like "We're excited about providing helpful software for users all over the world  We hope our product helps people think, or if not, we hope that people will let us know how we could be more helpful."

You're talking about pricing this product at $1 per user per machine ?? What the heck? Are you crazy?

We get this a lot. We think free sends the wrong message. Just the same, free is the price that you'd have to pay for FreeMind or Evernote or a pad of paper. $1 might be a happy medium. We really don't know about such matters.

So we'll charge a little bit, and know that we are much stronger as a company with a wide base of customers than a narrow base.