I hope you are giving yourself time to reflect upon the year.

I need a lot of time to get into the reflective spirit. It started the night of the Product Hunt launch for Ideaverse Pro when I could sleep, which also happened to be December 1st, so the timing was great.

Did you have a theme for 2023? Mine was the Year of the Ideaverse. Theming a year is a magical bit of intention-setting.

If you're going to broadcast any new term in the world, there is one non-negotiable thing you need...

You need to believe in it yourself.

As far into the year as May, I was doubting my decision. I was doubting I wanted to push the concept of an "ideaverse". I was doubting my belief in it. I asked friends if they liked the idea of an ideaverse. They were positive about it. But sometimes others' positivity just feels like grains of sand: not convincing.

In May, I had no intention of renaming the LYT Kit into Ideaverse for Obsidian. In August, I had no intention of transforming Ideaverse for Obsidian into Ideaverse Pro as a paid product. But The Theme was cast on my year, like a spell.

It was working on me even when I didn't know how it was going to work.

At the start of this year, few people knew of an ideaverse. By the end of this year, well over 100,000 know of the term (based on a mixture of newsletter, YouTube videos, Twitter posts, Ideaverse downloads, and ProductHunt launches). That's pretty cool I think.

What allowed it to take off was the ongoing dialectic I was having with myself about the best definition for an ideaverse. I have a note with scores of entries trying to sum up what an ideaverse is. I was never satisfied because was trying to straddle the tangible "your linked notes" with the less tangible "everything around you". The big unlock was focusing on the "linked notes" part of it first. That clarified how to explain it and why it might pique someone's interest. The result is the following:

Ideaverse = All your ideas, connected

All this, from a theme for the year.

Do you have a theme for 2024?