Here’s what I do for a living: I make little machines that can replicate themselves and can grow, and spit out great stuff.
Right now we are building a little machine at Knotable (it’s a company, not a machine, but it’s more like a machine than a government or club or family or party or street scene or other social entity –> well it is a social entity but it is a process and technology and methodology and it produces things. So it’s a sort of machine. What Drucker calls “management” is the key engineering input but there is a lot of other tech there too.)
What are we building? Well yes we are building Knotable — a web app that creates unprecedented spontaneous and structured collaboration spaces that let you get out of email or chat or live meetings or whatever else. You can put on your headphones and work on one thing at a time, but knock it out, and do the next and the next. It’s flow. It’s like writing a blog post when you are in the zone or like reading a book when the pages fly by.
But Knotable is also an iPhone app and Android app and Chrome extension and deep integration to Gmail/IMAP and even Facebook and even more: APIs to things like Salesforce and Asana and Trello.
Oh but it’s more than that — we have three floors with 180 desks at our HQ in NYC — http://tiny.cc/knotel
And it’s more than that also — it’s 10 teach-ins a month and 6 dinners and parties per month and host to major founder communities in New York like Founder Institute and Foudners Roundtable and venture firms that headquarter in our space — http://tiny.cc/knotelteaching
We are people and founders also. Everyone has side projects and some of them are awesome companies. Some of our neighbors here are building their own companies, and sometimes we personally are investors or our friendly venture firms are co-investors.
So Knotable is all that stuff.
It’s also one more thing — we are applying ourselves to creating and operating a great new magazine about focus, flow, lifehacking and getting things done — Knote at knote.com
We are going to collect together and analyze and present some of the latest, greatest, oldest, zaniest, and most effective ways of taking control of your mind and abilities to put them to greater ends. To achieve more and get it done with and do more things. Knotable is about that and we care deeply about it so we are thinking about it and writing about it, and sharing it with you here.
The machine
So today we are kicking off our effort to build that publication and put together the writers, editors, publishing and marketing effort need to start building up a great destination for this stuff.
Here’s what’s in the machine right now:
– 50 posts we wrote in the last 1 month by ourselves – some short and some longer
– 2-3 writers we have gotten to know and worked with a bit, 1-2 illustrators
– about 60-70 story/headline ideas
– a new WordPress site on knote.com on a new server instance
– some vague ideas about: building up a pool of writers, more illustrators, a deeper story pipeline, a publishing calendar, some twitter and social outlets, some paid promotion for our stories, and email newsletter subscription base
Let’s see what we can do in a few months time.