Why Roam is Cool

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People in my corner of Twitter love to talk about Roam. It made me wonder: What makes it so cool?

If you haven’t heard of it, Roam is “a note-taking tool for networked thought.” In layman’s terms that means it’s a notes app that lets you create links between pages, except anytime you link to page A on page B, it also shows a link back to page B on page A. This is called “bi-directional linking,” and it’s a nice way to keep things organized.

Confused? That’s ok. In fact, I think the main reason people like to talk about Roam on Twitter is that it’s hard to understand. There’s a learning curve not just to use the thing, but to even understand why you might want to use the thing. If you can get over that hump, it shows people how smart you are. So naturally people like to tweet about it.

(No shade to Roam fans! I write a newsletter for a living, so I am technically a professional at wanting people to know how smart I am.)

Anyway, the other day I saw a tweet from Roam’s founder that I think will be interesting to anyone who wants to create a product that achieves similar cult status:

“Not quite culty enough.” What does that mean? I think it’s a specific form of coolness.

(I’ll admit, I spent a lot of time this week reading about what makes things cool, because right now the opposite of cool is Quibi, and I was curious to learn what that was all about. Anyway, I digress.)

Coolness is a dance between familiarity and novelty. One way it’s often expressed is “most advanced yet acceptable.” The evolutionary psychology explanation is that we’re attracted to autonomy and independent thinking, so long as it’s not outright weird. The idea is that cool things don’t care too much about what other people (including you) think. They’re just doing their thing.

So how do you engineer that?