Hello and welcome to the inaugural Aboard Newsletter. I’m your host/cruise director, Paul Ford, and I’ll be joined here by my good friend and business partner Richard Ziade. We’re the co-founders of Aboard. Eventually we’ll button this up and make it fancy, but for now let’s get started and meet our Wednesday deadline.

What’s New With Aboard?

Oh God, a ton of little things and big things. The whole product is new and getting newer. Probably the biggest new thing is Tags, good old tags. Take a look down below:

Tags and Stacks? In one breakfast cereal? Sure! Stacks are for putting things into one sensible folder. Job Candidates, Vendors, Movies, Adoptable Cats, etc. Tags allow you to slice and dice infinitely. One cat can have 50 tags: Whiskers, Friendly, Good With Kids, Perfect Angel, etc. Our guiding principle is “People will do what they want so make it easier.”

Cool Boards

A lot of great Boards are being made. People are using it to manage healthcare for a kid, planning vacations and weddings, light bug tracking, etc. Here’s a recent one—a little on the newsy side: Dealing with orange wildfire air (strong endorsement for those giant box fan filters you can make for cheap.) Check it out!

What We’re Working On

We’ve been doing more user interviews. What’s gratifying is that the things that people want—we want those things too (especially a mobile app! SOON! SOOOOON!). So the app that you see (and want more from) is the app we see and want more from.

What’s tough is when you see the app through other people’s eyes you realize you’ve have a lot of fundamental communications work ahead—not just product work. I ask questions like…

• Did you know you can have more than one Board?
• Did you know you can click on a Card title to rename it?
• Did you know that you can add data to any Card?
• Did you know you can make Cards without adding a URL?
• Did you know that you can drag and drop Cards between Stacks?
• Did you know that there’s chat built in, once you invite someone to your Board?
• Did you know that you can chat?

And the answers are often “no.”

We’re hiding a lot of power, which is the right thing to do—people have enough software in their life, and we should wait patiently until they need us—but we need to tell people that the power is there, so they know. But people are busy. I mean I doubt you even read this far down the newsletter. So we’re figuring that out. All advice welcomed.

Aboard lets people organize data so they can act on it. We don’t have a perfect punchy tagline that encapsulates that yet.

Maybe the next newsletter can be about how scary that word “data” is, and how we’re trying to make it less scary (which is why “data” looks like “bookmarks” in Aboard).

Getting Help and Giving Feedback

We’d love to know how we’re doing, what drives you bananas. Feel free to hit reply and let us know. It’s all a gift at this point. You can also just email me at paul.ford@aboard.com. Whatever works.

The big question is always, “What would this it take for you to recommend Aboard to someone else? What would it need to do?” And the answers there are enlightening and help us guide the next phase.

We want to be useful!