I use obsidian as a master management tool for work and life activities, personal knowledge management, creative artifact development, and education. The Ultimate Starter Vault is complete, easy to use, and a great daily driver for many looking for maximum out-of-the-box functionality. I am in sales and business development, and I already had a vault I'd been working on for several months. I wasn't looking for a new daily driver, but I was looking for performance chips and sticky tires. In addition, I was looking for practical examples and best practices on what I would consider advanced topics. I have completed several other Obsidian training packages, so I feel like I just graduated from PKM college, but my vault wasn't optimally supporting my work in the way I expected. I found the USV initially as I searched for a way to handle tasks, periodic notes, and especially project management more effectively. My work involves pulling and weaving many threads into strategic deliverables for internal teams and customers. USV vault gave me the hands-on workflows and templates I needed to make serious progress in just a few days. I reworked most of my templates and learned more about Templater in a few days than I had over the last couple of months. I've simplified several workflows; I ditched the Tasks plug-in for Todoist, dropped the Projects plug-in, and said goodbye to 20+ tags and frontmatter variables that weren't helping. John's approach to using the file name for critical dates has improved my periodic notes. Now I can create a note for any day, and every variable keys off that date rather than today's - hours of work saved for all kinds of dated notes. USV and John's videos also provided the first walk-through of QuickAdd, which made that plug-in click for me. If you manage many small projects and hundreds of tasks at any given time, the USV Projects approach might be a good fit for you. I've only gotten through a small part of all the content USV provides, but I am thrilled with my purchase.

I have learned so incredibly much from this vault, both from technics and mindsets. even though I have moved away from it and built my own, I have been heavily inspired by this vault. I also keep a copy in my obsidian sync to reference when I am stuck on something. If you want a good start or need to bolster your vault dont hesitate! this is well worth the price. as a side note John is super helpful and have always ben polite and answered my questions in a timely manner!

I loved every bit of it and it definitely gave me a lot of value, I highly recommend it to everyone that is looking for a powerful and yet extremely useful system to draw inspiration from! I have purchased Obsidian University, John's vault for school, and have combined my learnings across both products to create my own system for my upcoming studies.

Hi John, I've got one word to say about your Starter Vault - brilliant. I've been using Obsidian for a little bit now, initially for writing and then to start importing years worth of notes from a labyrinth of folders. So I started learning more about Obsidian itself and researching PKM as a practice. Among the very valuable resources I came across was your channel, this video, and ultimately your Starter Vault (which I have bought). It really is brilliant and working my way through the thorough guides contained within it I get a real sense of how much work has gone into producing it. Impressive, useful, and well worth the money. Also very useful for both practical and creative outcomes. I've always had several projects on the go - some personal, some study/learning related, and some creative. That hasn't changed so it's basically the same use cases. What's changed for me is the processes and tools used to collate and create from what has been an ever expanding and increasingly unwieldy collection of notes and assets. I have found your Ultimate Starter Vault a huge bonus to Obsidian's preexisting benefits with improved outcomes, regardless of the actual use case, and noticeably enhanced efficiency. It is comprehensive without appearing overwhelming, it's a complete solution if you want it to be yet flexible enough to put your own stamp on it, and as someone who enjoys discovering new skills I've learnt a lot while exploring it. Definitely well worth the money. Thanks.

I work at home and am starting a number of initiatives independently and with my spouse. I am using this vault for personal and life management and I am finding it spot on and tremendously helpful. All the right questions are there and I use it in the morning to start my day with focus, and in the evening to see what happened. All the elements I need are here, and some others that I may not use, but imagine are helpful for others.

Astonishing work. There doesn't seem to be currently any clean second brain setups like there are on Notion, but this system is exactly what us users who are transitioning from Notion to Obsidian are looking for. All the functionality of the program et get immediately started, without getting lost in endless hours of tutorials.

So I am customizing it in some ways but truly its foundation is all there for what I need. I run a web design company, part owner of a wallet making business, and manage a pool route with my cousin... I have a complicated life with many ongoing commitments and many short term projects nested within those broader commitments. The story is the same for everyone just I have a very diverse plate of food every day in my life. As for the philosophies and learning the system, I would say after month 1 or 2 I was fully integrated and basically could rebuild the whole thing from scratch in a few days - just chose to not and fully adopt what you had built instead. Partly because I have fallen into the trap of trying to cleanup my life and adhd hyperfocusing on the system and not doing anything to actually clean up my life in reality. So I just ran with it this time, and was like "good nuff" - want to note here, I am not knocking what you made as simple... I am praising your onboarding in teaching me foundationally everything I need to know to entirely adopt it as something different if I wanted to in many ways or for more specific use cases.