The new user survey was open for several months in 2021, where we were prompting new Dendron users within VS Code itself. We had a few thousand respondents take the opportunity to give us feedback.

What backgrounds do our users have?

Users were asked about their backgrounds. Just over half of respondents had a background asSoftware Developers (53%), while the next largest group wereStudents (14%).

Approximations of remaining background options:

• Researcher (7%)
• Manager (7%)
• DevOps (7%)
• Technical Writer (4%)

TheOther (8%) were spread across the following groups:

The percentages are in relation to the total number of respondents inOther

• Systems/Infrastructure/IT/InfoSec Administrators/Engineers (13%)
  • Solutions Architects
  • InfoSec / CyberSecurity
  • Systems Engineers/Administrators
  • etc.
• General Hobbyist/Multipotentialite/Polymath (8%)
• Data Scientist (6%)
• Artist (Designer/Musician/etc.) (5%)
• Author/Writer/Blogger (3%)
• Teacher/Professor (3%)

There were some smaller groups that stood out in theOther category, having one to three respondents:

• Therapists
• Legal (Lawyers/Law Graduates)
• GeoChemistry
• Pharmacist
• Biologist
• D&D Player
• Dentist

What are people using Dendron for?

New users were able to select all that applied. A majority of users are coming to Dendron, first and foremost, for aPersonal Knowledge Base (80%) solution.

Approximations of remaining uses:

• Todos and Agenda (57%)
• Research (47%)
• Meeting notes (45%)
• Team knowledge base (29%)
• Publishing (22%)

TheOther (18%) included the following groups:

The percentages are in relation to the total number of respondents inOther

• Student/Learning/Class/Academia Notes (4%)
• Journaling (4%)
• Content Creation and Non-fiction/Fiction Writing (3%)
• Project / Software Documentation (2%)
• System/Product Configuration and Design (2%)
• CRM (1%)
• Second Brain (1%)
• Gaming Notes (D&D, RPGs, General) (1%)

There were some smaller groups that stood out in theOther category, having one to three respondents:

• Scripted/Automated documentation creation
• Tracking, Reading, and Taking Notes on Books
• Recipes / Cookbook
• Drafting GitHub issues/MRs
• Event planning
• Presentations

Are users coming from any existing tools?

New users were able to select all that applied. More users said they were coming fromNo Previous Tool (26%) than users who found themselves looking at Dendron after something else, withOneNote (25%) coming in a close second.

Approximations of remaining previous (or parallel) tools:

• Notion (23%)
• Google Keep (19%)
• Obsidian (18%)
• Evernote (14%)
• Roam (5%)
• Logseq (5%)
• Foam (5%)

15% of respondents provided additional information underOther, providing a total of over70 different tools and workflows. Here are the topOther tools listed.

The percentages are in relation to the total number of respondents inOther

• Joplin (9%)
• org-mode / org-roam / emacs (6%)
• Bear (6%)
• Apple Notes (4%)
• Plain Markdown or text files (4%)
• Trello / Confluence / Jira (4%)
• Typora (3%)
• Physical notes (2%)

Do users have plans on publishing their notes?

New users were only able to select a single response, if they were to respond to this question at all. A majority of users wereCurious (39%) about publishing, or otherwise already sayingYes (36%) to planning publishing. The remaining respondents saidNo (25%) and were not interested.

What's Next

We've set aside the majority of this quarter, and the last, to iterate on the feedback you've given us (specific details to come in a future blog post).
We are committed to making Dendron the absolute best tool and community for thought in 2022 and beyond!

If you like to be part of the effort, please take part in the2022 Dendron User Survey and help us build a better tool for thought 🌱

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Interested in creating your own knowledge base using markdown, git, and VSCode? Get started withDendron today.