Yet Another Review/Rate My Startup Request

by witten • 18 years ago

12 41 18 years ago

I've been working on this product (with some unrelated consulting on the side) for nearly a year. Just to head off some obvious comments, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Web browser support for the web-based product itself is fairly restricted. So no Safari, and no Opera. Yet.

I realize the product is a little general-purpose, and that makes a unique selling proposition more difficult to craft. I also realize that you kind folks on HN are not the target market.

I'm trying to build a sustainable business, so I'm not interested in tips for attracting investors/buyers.

If you must say a comment along the lines of, "I don't see how this is any different than all the other wiki / notebook / word processor software out there," then please at least read some of the tour or try the demo first. If it's still not clear, then obviously I need to improve my explanation of the product.

So, what do you think? My main goal at this point is to improve traffic and build a larger customer base. I have a handful of paying customers now, but not nearly "enough". Part of the problem might be that convincing consumers (rather than businesses) to pay a recurring fee is a tough sell.

Anyway, thanks in advance.

witten22• 18 years ago

I've been working on this product (with some unrelated consulting on the side) for nearly a year. Just to head off some obvious comments, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Web browser support for the web-based product itself is fairly restricted. So no Safari, and no Opera. Yet.

I realize the product is a little general-purpose, and that makes a unique selling proposition more difficult to craft. I also realize that you kind folks on HN are not the target market.

Tags are in the works.

I'm trying to build a sustainable business, so I'm not interested in tips for attracting investors/buyers.

If you must post a comment along the lines of, "I don't see how this is any different than all the other wiki / notebook / word processor software out there," then please at least read some of the tour or try the demo first. If it's still not clear, then obviously I need to improve my explanation of the product.

Anyway, thanks in advance.

tx2• 18 years ago

I've been looking for something like this for a while: currently I use Tomboy on Linux but the UI is too basic. I love your attention to detail: Ctrl+B makes my selection bold - fantastic.

Are you going to open the code? I'm sure you've used tons of other people's work: come on, contribute some back!

I'd love to run it on my laptop: since the software is truly personal, without any sharing/collaboration benefits, why would I want to keep it in the "cloud", which often is unavailable?

So... where is the code? I saw "download" feature, but it gives me HTML, not the software.

witten22• 18 years ago

The download page has the whole codebase in its entirety, GPL licensed: http://luminotes.com/download

The link to this page is at the bottom of the front page. It used to be more prominent, but I found people got confused about whether they had to download the software in order to just make a wiki.

You can browse the Mercurial repository online as well.

And as for your question about keeping the software in the "cloud".. The software actually does have some sharing/collaboration features. (Whether they're useful for your specific needs is another matter.)

I'd like to make a desktop version of Luminotes at some point, but I have no concrete plans for it now.

witten22• 18 years ago

Update: There's now a downloadable/desktop version of Luminotes for both Linux and Windows.

vaksel2• 18 years ago

I'd remove "Pricing & signup" and change it to "Sign up for your free account today"...THEN during the sale process, upsell them "Your free account comes with ______, upgrade to one of our premium plans today and receive a ___% discount"

This way you won't drive people away w/o them at least trying your product to see if its for them

witten22• 18 years ago

I was sort of going by standard practice among other startups.. They all seem to be very up-front about their pricing and rate plans. Do you think that this is in general a bad idea, or do you think with my product in particular, it would be better to go with the "Sign up for your free account today" approach? If so, why?

Also, by the way, my conversion rate to free accounts is around 26% according to Analytics. (This is not for AdWords clicks.) I think a bigger concern for me is my conversion rate (or lack thereof) for free accounts to paid accounts.

ricree• 18 years ago

The signup page is pretty up front about the pricing and capabilities. The link already takes them to a straightforward and clear summary of the different options, so I don't see any reason not to make the link text into something that is more likely to bring them to that page in the first place.

vaksel2• 18 years ago

Well you will still be upfront about your fees, I'm only talking about changing the actual link text, so that the users will be more likely to click it, since everyone likes free stuff.

auston• 18 years ago

I would make it clearer WHY I SHOULD USE LUMINOTES?

My first thoughts for a use case would be for a company to keep training docs. In which case, I would make the fact that it costs money more prominent.

witten22• 18 years ago

Okay, sounds like my unique selling proposition isn't obvious enough. I'll work on that.

phoenixy• 18 years ago

Looks similar to this service. http://www.springnote.com/en

It's a product of a korean company called OpenMaru.

rdj• 18 years ago

Not really feedback, but a matter of attention-to-detail:

Do you have one too many '%' in your document.write(...google analytics) code? It throws a visible '%' at the very bottom of your page.

witten22• 18 years ago

Thanks, I appreciate it. I think I got a little over-zealous in escaping my %s.

Interestingly, in Python, "%%%s" % "foo" != "%%foo"

lacker• 18 years ago

It works just like \ in standard unix parsing - you escape the escape character by doubling it. So in "%%%s":

  "%%" -> "%"
  "%s" -> "foo"

for a result of "%foo".

maxklein• 18 years ago

Dunno man. I won't bother using it because I feel like you may change the price in the future. There are no guarantees, particularly since I know it's just a guy with a mac running this thing. I don't want to store stuff in there and then one day it's gone...

witten22• 18 years ago

I don't know where you got the idea about "a guy with a Mac'. I'm on a ThinkPad running Debian, and the servers are Debian as well. :)

I should point out that while your concern may be legitimate, you can download your entire wiki as HTML whenever you want. So if for whatever reason you don't like the service at some point, there's no lock-in.

If there's another download format that would make you feel more comfortable, please do let me know.

rw3• 18 years ago

To stoke the flamefire: you know Debian hasn't had the most stellar security reputation as of late, right? :)

rickd• 18 years ago

I like it a lot, nice job. Definitely reminds me of TiddlyWiki.

My main criticism is that there should be an explicit "save" button or link for notes. Perhaps it could be similar to the gmail "save draft" button, in that autosaves would disable or "gray out" the save button (nothing more to save). I think not having a specific Save button will confuse "average" users who have been trained to "Save Often!"

Other than that, I think it would also be good to be able to hide or "minimize" the vertical menu on the left (+,link,<paperclip>...) because I actually find it quite distracting. I feel like it breaks the flow from menu item to note- maybe moving it to the right might be good as another option.

Overall, quick to set up and easy to use- so those are winners! Nice work :)

witten22• 18 years ago

Thanks for the detailed feedback. I've been avoiding a "save" button because saves are implicit, but I think for the reasons you point out, I really should add one anyway.

You can hide all the crap on the left (except the toolbar) by clicking the "nothing but notes" link on the right side of the page. Maybe I should make that clearer. And maybe I should have it hide the toolbar as well. Is there anything I could do to the toolbar to make it less distracting?

witten22• 18 years ago

Okay, "nothing but notes" mode now hides the toolbar as well.

witten22• 18 years ago

> My main criticism is that there should be an explicit "save" button or link for notes.

Done. :)

rw3• 18 years ago

Needs <noscript> tags.

witten22• 18 years ago

It's a JavaScript-based personal wiki. What should the <noscript> tags do? Are you suggesting that there should be a fallback to JavaScript-less text areas?

Note that you can view the wiki pages without JavaScript. You only need JavaScript to edit them.

ars• 18 years ago

If javscript is unavoidable I always put in noscript tags that simply say so, but don't otherwise do anything.

BenS• 18 years ago

This looks quite similar to Google Notebook. Is there a reason to use luminotes instead?

witten22• 18 years ago

Glad you asked. :)

See http://luminotes.com/notebooks/74uqe3cecagabucmrvwls33b4?not...

misuba• 18 years ago

Sad but I suspect true: if you really want to appeal to academic markets (as that one pull quote suggests), you'll need to remove the word "wiki" from your sell. The anti-Wikipedia prejudices run deep in academia, and they've attached the word "wiki" to all of those fears. You seem to have discovered one of the exceptions, which is great, but...

witten22• 18 years ago

It's a good point. I have family in academia, so I'm familiar with the anti-Wikipedia bias.

The question then is what to call the product if not a personal wiki.

Maro• 18 years ago

I use tadalists all the time for making one-line notes and putting down ideas. Like, I have a tada list called "Ideas" for startup ideas and another one "Articles" for stuff to write about. 99% of the stuff I want to write down fits this idiom well.

Very rarely I want to take multi-line notes, in these cases I use Google Docs, since I use all the G apps anyways.

Where does your stuff fit in? The ability to link to other entries seems pretty useless, or at least rarely useful.

After trying out the demo, it's better than G Docs because the interface is simpler. G Docs opens docs in new tabs/windows which is pretty annoying for smaller docs. If you add some kind of check-off bullet point capability to your lists (e.g. gray them out), then I could ditch tadalist and G docs and unite my stuff here. That would make sense.

You call it a "personal wiki" which seems like marketing speak for nothing, since the idea of a wiki is that everybody can edit it, but if it's personal, then it's really just a specialized HTML editor (?). Maybe you should just call it a "Notebook that just works".

UI bug report: when I click an entry on the left side, you flash it (in yellow) and then you scroll to it. But if it takes long to scroll there then the flash in unseen by the user. Scrolling then flashing may work better.

witten22• 18 years ago

The ability to link to other notes may indeed be useless for your particular needs. But it's hugely useful for a large class of notebooks. For instance, if you're writing a novel and you need to keep track of your characters and their relationships, being able to link from one note to another is incredibly handy.

So I see that as where Luminotes fits in. It's really a notebook of interlinked notes, which you can't really do with Google Docs or Tadalist. You can do it with a full-fledged wiki like Mediawiki, but for many people that's overkill, and besides doesn't come with the nice UI.

As for bullet point check-off capability, you can quite easily use the strikethrough for that purpose. I know several people who use that for crossing things off lists as they're completed. It's perhaps not as convenient as a single checkbox, but it does work.

"Personal wiki" isn't marketing speak, as I'm going for the "interlinked collection of notes/pages" aspect of the word "wiki" rather than the collaboration sense of the word. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear that regardless of all that, "personal wiki" isn't a great way to describe the product.

Thanks for the UI bug report. I think I should be able to make the scroll and flash work serially rather than in parallel.

witten22• 18 years ago

Okay, the scrolling and flashing is now serial instead of parallel. And I sped up the scrolling speed as well. Thanks again.

Yet Another Review/Rate My Startup Request

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