About six or seven years ago, within Ant Group, we incubated a knowledge management tool called Yuque. It was deeply loved by millions of users. Sadly, due to various reasons, we couldn't continue operating it. After more than two years of reflection and regrouping, we are once again embarking on the journey of SaaS product entrepreneurship, this time to chase the dream in our hearts!
So today, I'm thrilled to share some exciting news with everyone: Mind Bicycle's first AI product is officially live! As the CPO, I'll be documenting this entire entrepreneurial journey and sharing my thoughts and challenges in developing YouMind. Keep in mind, this isn't the official company line, but rather my personal perspective as a product person, chronicling the evolution of our product.
What is YouMind?
YouMind is a tool designed to assist creators in the age of AI. "Creation" is indeed a very broad term. When people hear "creation," they might first think of writing articles. But in today's diverse world, creation itself has evolved into an action, no longer limited to specific outputs. This action is how creators express themselves and showcase their inner thoughts to the world.
The core problem YouMind aims to solve today isn't just providing users with a final product, like a document or a canvas. We are more interested in focusing on the entire creative process, from defining the topic, to gathering materials, expanding ideas, and finally organizing and outputting the result. We hope to assist creators through a streamlined process, helping them fully express their ideas from the initial spark of inspiration to the final execution.
The entire creative process is indeed very broad, so in the initial phase, we will focus on the material collection and organization stage. Our priority is to help users quickly find relevant information and broaden their knowledge base after an idea sparks.
To put it more bluntly, we want to leverage the advantages of large language models to make the process of finding information smoother and more efficient for everyone. Building on this foundation, we will gradually improve the entire chain of assisted creation.
We're Not Just Stopping at "Saving"
Some might wonder, how did YouMind come about? Actually, this kind of need has been around for a long time; it’s nothing new. Many mature products have appeared in the market over the past decade. But unfortunately, most of these products in the past ten years have only scratched the surface, merely focusing on "saving" content.
"Saving" is indeed a fundamental need. As I mentioned in my book "The Awakening of Knowledge Management," people's anxiety about knowledge sometimes drives them to want to hoard all information, regardless of its usefulness – just save it first, they think.
But in reality, simply mechanically saving content won't bring substantial improvements to the creative process. On the contrary, we might get bogged down in endless "saving," gradually losing our sense of control over knowledge management and creation.
Therefore, today's YouMind isn't aimed at solving the problem of "saving" itself, but rather at exploring the "why" behind the "saving" behavior. We are trying to break down this "why" and integrate it into every aspect of YouMind. For example, our browser extension isn't just a simple storage tool like Readwise. It's not just about storage; more importantly, before users click "save," it provides a simple judgment mechanism to help users initially assess whether the content they are collecting is relevant to their creative topic. Furthermore, we also support partial saving – even a paragraph of text or a single image. We want users to only save truly valuable content to YouMind for future creation.
When you enter YouMind's webpage, we also haven't provided traditional folders for organizing saved content. Instead, we've innovatively launched the "Board" feature. You can think of it as an independent creative project space. By collecting materials within this space, you can further explore inspiration, conduct secondary creation, and even directly output the final results, such as podcasts, videos, and more.
So you see, YouMind isn't simply about "saving," although it does include "saving" functionality. Our core vision is to help users accurately find truly valuable materials, thereby better facilitating brainstorming and ultimately completing their desired creations.
Why Now?
Then some people might be curious and ask, "Mature products existed ten years ago, so why are you still doing this? Isn't this just go back?" Of course not!
We are in an era of rapid change, especially the rapid development of large language models in the past two years. This has made us feel the disruptive changes LLMs are bringing to the creator workflow. Many things that were unimaginable in the past have become reality in just two short years.
As a creator myself, I deeply understand this. In the past, I might have needed to spend an entire day switching back and forth between Google, Wikipedia, and various other platforms to find the information I needed, and then go through tedious reading and organization. But now, I just need to clearly describe my needs in a dialogue box, and the AI system can quickly help me complete information searching, interpretation, and even intelligent summarization.
This greatly shortens the creative process. More importantly, it can effectively expand the creator's thinking, allowing everyone to express their ideas more accurately and deeply.
Therefore, now represents a promising time to launch this type of tool. As a Chinese saying goes, we are seeing a favorable alignment of 'right timing, advantageous conditions, and supportive people.' While challenges exist, the timing aligns with rapid technological development, the conditions benefit from advances in large language models, and our decade of experience in knowledge management tools positions us to understand and address real user needs
Under the combined effect of 'right timing, advantageous conditions, and supportive people.' , the birth of YouMind is by no means accidental; it can even be said to be inevitable. Of course, when we started brainstorming entrepreneurial directions at the end of 2023, we also considered other possibilities, such as video editors, voice synthesis, and even personal knowledge assistants, among others.
But that's another story for another time. Maybe I'll keep sharing the decision-making process in my future posts.
Mind Bicycle CPO CaiCai
Jan 24, 2025