Savory in 2021

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It’s been a weird year for everyone. Despite the challenges we all faced getting through this rough year, I hope the arrival of new year gives you hope. The worst is behind us.

It was a special year for Savory. This is the year I took the plunge and actually launched Savory in May 2020. I had been using Savory as my primary bookmark manager for about an year before I made things official. Launching Savory became my so-called pandemic project and I am glad I did it.

2020 gave us a web app

Savory launched as a Chrome extension to give you a better bookmark manager experience in Chrome. But we always had bigger dreams.

We never officially announced, but we are a full-fledged mobile-friendly web app now! I guess this counts as an announcement. So, if you didn’t know, now you know. Go to app.getsavory.co to get to your bookmarks.

This is not the end of road for the chrome extension though. It will continue to be the best way to add and discover links when browsing in Chrome. We have a few things planned and excited to add more features in the coming months to the extension itself. We will also be creating extensions for Firefox and Safari.

Things I am excited about

I see these last 6 months as laying the foundation of what Savory will become. Going forward, I see three paths for Savory.

  • Be more like Pocket. Read-it-later app. Stash those juicy articles and read (or listen) to them in a distraction-free environment later.
  • Be more like Roam. Organize your research. Keep notes and make things easier to recall. You know it’s there, and you will be able to actually find it now.
  • Be more like (a newsletter curation tool). I read a bunch of newsletters which are just a list of cool, interesting links in some particular niche with some optional commentary. I am myself thinking of launching such a newsletter since I collect a lot of interesting links in a week. Savory may become something that helps you write such a newsletter.

These are not the only paths forward; just what I can see today.

Another thing I am excited about is researching and writing about workflows and case studies to get things done in the face of information overload. The original mission statement for Savory was to find that link you can’t remember anymore but know you have seen (and even saved) before.

I personally use Savory as a personal knowledge-base and as a queue for my reading list, podcast playlist and watchlist. I have a draft blogpost outlining my workflow how I use Savory and hope to publish it soon.

Other boring business stuff

The business side of stuff is part of why I started and launched Savory. I wanted to learn this boring stuff.

Improving user acquisition

AKA avoid the long, slow SaaS ramp of death. How do we get users, and then some more, and then actually retain those users?

I haven’t done much here yet — when we first launched on Hacker News, the post did not get much traction. Somebody actually posted us on Product Hunt which got us the initial users. Most of the new signups since have been driven organically by the chrome extension installs.

This year I plan to work on improving SEO to drive organic search traffic. I have some other content-marketing ideas like launching a newsletter backed by Savory. In addition, and one of my top priorities is to improve onboarding flow. This will include implementing in-product hints and guides as well as writing some help content on the website.

Paid plans

We will be launching a paid plan sometime this year. I am not yet sure about the structure and offerings included in the paid plan. The free plan will stick around.

I would love to hear from you. Email me (or tweet at me) if you have any feedback or ideas.

Happy new year!