TLDR; Bookmark is now Polairis! I’m also building a whole new version of the product — written entirely in code.

When I broke ground last March, I didn’t want to get stuck on what to name my modest side project. I decided to keep it intuitive and name it “Bookmark,” which fit the mental model of my early MVP.

However, from day one I had grander visions than to build a bookmarking tool and knew I’d have to rebrand further down the line.

I’m excited to share that Bookmark is now Polairis!

Why Polairis: Like the North Star, Polairis will help people navigate files and information in the workplace. I have no doubt that AI will be a part of the solution — hence, the spelling of Polairis. Get it?

A couple of additional thoughts:

• I considered naming best practices, like making it easy to pronounce and broad enough to allow the company to grow and evolve over time.

• I’ve already found in recent conversations that the name “Polairis” sets broader expectations about the product, which is so much more than a bookmarking tool!

This change in branding comes with a big pivot in the product roadmap.

After dozens of interviews and lots of feedback on Bookmark, I saw an opportunity to lean into building an internal search engine across a company’s tech stack.

My vision for Polairis is a tool to help you quickly find company files and discover knowledge across any source (Confluence, Jira, Notion, Google Drive, etc.) — without the hassle of creating or maintaining folders.

Today is Day 8 of coding Polairis from scratch in Python, HTML, and CSS using frameworks like Django. You can check out this 2-minute video of what I’ve built so far.

I want to give a huge shout-out to my technical advisor, Brian Yu, who has been guiding me through all kinds of challenges! If you’re feeling inspired to build a web app, I highly recommend Brian’s course on web programming as a great way to get started.

A final aside: I’ve always identified as a non-technical founder. Even after publishing the Bookmark extension to the Chrome Web Store, I still didn’t see myself as a developer because of my undergraduate degree in economics and my affinity for product and marketing.

With all the code I’ve been writing in the last year, I wonder what qualifications make someone “technical.” I was inspired by this podcast recently where Elizabeth Stone (CTO of Netflix) talks about her background as one of the few CTOs with a PhD in economics!

It’s easy to get caught up in labels like “technical” or “non-technical.” But what really matters is that I’m going to do whatever it takes to build a product people love — even if that means reinventing myself. 🙌

What’s New ✨

I’m going to experiment with publishing this newsletter on an ad hoc basis (every two to four weeks) rather than a strict biweekly cadence. This flexibility will help ensure that every update landing in your inbox is exciting and meaningful!

For those of you who want to continue using Bookmark, the product will continue to be available at letsbookmark.io. I shipped the following changes earlier this month:

• Search for links directly in the Chrome extension: You don’t need to open the Bookmark app to find the link you’re looking for. Just search for it in the extension! You should notice improved search results because I added support for fuzzy search using the open-source Fuse.js library.

• Check whether a link has already been saved: If you or any project collaborators already added a link to Bookmark, a green badge will appear when you click on the extension. This feature was previously a bit buggy, but it should work smoothly now.

• Confirmed that Bookmark is cookie-free: Earlier this week, Google announced a delay in third-party cookie deprecation. I audited the Bookmark extension, and it turns out, the product isn’t using any third-party cookies anyways. 🍪

From now on, I intend to focus entirely on building Polairis, but if you ever run into any bugs using Bookmark, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

What’s Cooking 🍳

Until I find a CTO, I plan to split my time pretty evenly between product development and customer acquisition. Using Apollo and LinkedIn, I’m building a CRM of target users at companies that match my ideal customer profile. The conversations so far are helping me better understand:

• Users’ existing workflows and how Polairis fits in

• Why someone is or isn’t compelled to use the product

• What changes would solve their pain points more effectively

To stay lean, I’ve been showing users mockups of product features I designed in Figma to get feedback before building.

This Week’s Ask 🙏

Polairis currently integrates with Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, and Notion. If there are any other integrations I can build that would get you excited about using the product, please let me know!

That’s it for now. In case you missed it, you can catch up on the March 29 update here. Until next time!

Nicole

Made with ❤️ from NYC. Shout-out to Brian Y. and Will C. for reviewing my drafts!