I’ve been quiet on the publishing front since the Minimal Note-Taking book came out, however there’s been a reason for this, and I’m back today with one of the most exciting developments in a long time…
For the last two weeks I’ve been in Armenia and Georgia, spending time with a friend I had not seen in a year. This friend works night shifts, which gave me some time to do work of my own.
And even though I was a little too scattered to do any real writing, I did some building on the side, and this spiralled into a project that I wanted to experiment with as a priority for quite a while…
One evening near the start of the trip, I opened Hermes with Claude Opus 5.5, described a vision and a few of the features, and around 20 minutes later I had a clear working version of a web app.
I have taken to calling it the PARAZETTEL Platform, and it is now live!
And so in this piece I wanted to share why I chose to build this platform, what it’s like there, and how you can even get inside…
Why I switched away from Skool
Skool served really well as a simple way to run a community and see whether people wanted it before investing in something custom.
The problem is that it’s completely rigid in terms of visuals, content delivery and many more things, and charges a pretty penny for even the simplest features (think analytics, integrations and welcome messaging).
Of course Skool wins on sheer traction, community and support, however it feels as though everything there is a little angled towards bringing everyone into the ecosystem, rather than prioritising learning. j
I have utmost respect for Sam Ovens and Alex Hormozi as the main faces behind the platform – I’m sure it’s generating them a lot of money and that it suits for community owners who are a little less technical, but I just felt as though I was limited whilst we were using it.
With the quality of AI agents now, especially Claude Opus 5.5, building something for yourself is more realistic than it used to be. I have been doing this with ProseLab since March, so I knew I could do it for PARAZETTEL as well.
For a while we were missing the content and structure in our resources to make it worthwhile to build things out, but with the introduction of the Foundations program, now was the right time to migrate everything over, as we’re naturally restructuring slightly anyway.
So here’s what’s changed, and how this was custom-built to optimise the teaching and learning that we do around PKM…
The new platform’s changes
The new platform puts the teaching first, rather than a forum and activity leaderboards. Inside, there is a dedicated Foundations space for the 10-lesson program, and discussion and resources around these, and pages that are designed specifically for PARAZETTEL lessons, including delivering files, live sessions and more…
Building custom also lets me choose the best tool for each part of the experience instead of forcing everything into one platform, and controlling how and when people get to interact with these things.
The community has moved to Discord (and is there if you want it, not forced upon you as the front and centre of the experience). Live sessions run through Google Meet, and I can set them up in my Google Calendar. Resend can handle member emails and content notifications, and I can bill everyone through Stripe and invite them to the platform without the required $99/month headache to do so on Skool.
The platform also gives me room to move towards proper video streaming rather than relying forever on embedded YouTube or Loom videos…
There’s more scope for connectors to third-party platforms as well, so that I don’t have to spend as much time setting integration workarounds and the like, being boxed into using a very small subset of softwares.
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Another interesting thing about this setup now is that I can run all of it from personal platforms. I host the analytics, so nothing’s sent off my servers, and the course lessons and videos come from my own Stream and CDN accounts, rather than the ones that Skool or YouTube dictate.
And, it goes without saying that the entire program backend is course and session notes hosted in an Obsidian vault, the same way I do my personal and business websites.
This is going to give me more practical opportunities to explain my workflows and setups based around using AI and Obsidian together in the future as well, which I definitely plan on doing…
What comes next?
I want to record many more sessions and webinars about how we’re building things like this website, article workflows and more. We’ve merged the courses into an all-in-one classroom that I can continually contribute to rather than allowing finite courses to stagnate, which gives more scope for live sessions and on-demand content from members inside the Platform.
A lot of those sessions will cover how my workflows have changed because of AI, because this has been pivotal over the course of the year. I will show how I use Hermes in conjunction with my personal Obsidian vaults, how I built this platform and the website, and how the same ideas carry across some of my other projects.
We are also going to build out the Obssistant offer around the above, integrating modern tools with plain text. It has been the standout thing to come from my work around note-taking and knowledge work in 2026. However at the same time we’ll continue to monitor the Foundations program and improve it as more people pass through and leave their insights on it.
This will come more easily to me, as the Foundations Program, the Classroom, and the wider PARAZETTEL library now have one place to live. That should make it easier for me to keep improving the material without squeezing everything into someone else’s fixed structure.
We also just reached 2,000 followers on Medium. I am grateful that so many people are still here to see what PARAZETTEL becomes next. Thank you!
Please stay tuned, and if you are in any way interested in what we’ve got to share, please head below where you can learn more about PARAZETTEL and watch the first lesson of the Foundations program for free…
