In a recent blog, we summarised why Subset exists: to enhance relationships and accelerate progress. Better saving, sharing and search means better relationships and more units of civilisational progress. In this post, we're doing something similarly simple. Instead of asking, "Why Subset?", we're asking, "What is Subset?"
Nikita Bier has a simple benchmark for such a devilishly tough question:
If you can't explain your app in fewer than 5 words, do you think your users will ever bother telling anyone about the app?
Before you have product-market fit, product development is not about "adding features"—but distilling a product to a simple marketable sentence. Adding features more often impairs growth.
We're on our way to meeting that standard, but we're not there yet. We haven't yet compressed Subset down to its densest, most communicable kernel. But we have done a little bit of street fighting mathematics and learned, when faced with tough problems, to relax the constraints in the name of progress. So we've answered a weaker form of the question above:
What type of thing is Subset?
Here's the negative answer, the type of thing Subset is not: a bookmarking tool, a read-later app, a note-taking or personal knowledge management system, an AI summariser, a task management widget, a content discovery platform, a sales and marketing suite, an enterprise automation solution, a news aggregator, an old school or new wave social media, an augment for creators, a community and collaboration entity.
Now here's the positive form, the type of thing Subset is:
A tool for third places
The "tool for" prefix comes from "tools for thought". As Maggie Appleton describes them:
[Their core function] appears to involve writing notes, connecting them to one another, exploring dynamic views, and then experiencing a kind of emergent wisdom. An enchanting promise.
"Third places" are environments distinct from home ("first place") and work ("second place"). Allie Conti says:
The term, which was coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s, essentially refers to a physical location other than work or home where there’s little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity. The historical examples that Oldenburg cites in his book The Great Good Place include French cafés, German American beer gardens, and English pubs, all of which appeal to people from various walks of life.
Combining the two, we can define "tools for third places" as things that deepen and enrich both synchronous and asynchronous peer-to-peer interactions. Their core operations are the saving, sharing and searching of things we find, for a whole range of reasons, most interesting and arresting.
Here's an example: you're at a cafe, meeting a friend. Imagine the conversation you have. It will probably require the plucking of a phone from a pocket or purse in order to reference or find something. It will likely include an urge to pull out a magic glass rectangle and summon a sliver of the world's information to flavour the unfolding dialogue.
That's the norm. Relationships (new or old) are sequences of interactions that reference other things, from experiences and stories to places and products. This is mostly verbal but it often escalates to the exchange of digital representations of discussed or discussion-adjacent things.
The technology we use makes this possible and adds some value, but it also adds unnecessary friction, interrupts flows and inputs irrelevance to an interaction. Even the liveliest yarn is murdered by a fumbling search for that picture, by an increasingly despairing mini-quest to find the name of that place, space, person or thing, and the dead time that accompanies it.
Not for much longer. Tools for third places, such as Subset, are coming. They'll eliminate friction, deepen connection and provide richer context in these scenarios. And our relationships and our cultures will be better for it.
