drupeek

A team and I built something like this (www.pilot.me). It's written in Ruby and we're looking to hand it off to new owners. Unfortunately, there is a government stakeholder who put some money into it and they'll probably need a small amount of money to release it completely. andrew dot peek at gmail if you'd like to know more.

I wish I could upvote this post a dozen times.

Access to information would also mean that employees lobbying for an increase, would have to justify their performance against their peers. That's a lot more personal and objective than simply stating, "I think I'm doing great."

Essentially what I'm saying is that I'm not sure I agree that open salary information would result in all salaries moving upward.

I have to say that this comment thread is far beyond what we expected when publishing our post.

Our original intention was to start a discussion around honing your pitch, telling your story - and to demonstrate how costly it can be when you don't do that well. By no means do we feel that we are "there" yet, but at the time of the post, we felt there was some progress from when we had interviewed.

Interestingly, this thread has now provided us with a tremendous amount of additional value (for much less of a cost) which we intend on putting to use in the coming weeks.

Thanks to all those who took the time to read the post, sit with it for a moment, and then carefully and compassionately construct their feedback in an honest and direct way.

We genuinely appreciate it.

I think you might be right.

There is only a minute of deliberation between interviews which isn't enough time to pull out the next application and refresh on it before the next interview is scheduled to begin.

This is a very good point and probably one that I undervalued going in.

In my preparation between the accepted application and the interview, I was cautioned that the interviewers will not remember your application when you walk in the room.

Is there truth to this?

This speaks to the problem we're trying to solve. Siasto is in the space. Wunderkit too. In a lot of ways, Posterous (YC company) tried pivoting into this space from a truly social angle as well.

You're right. My mistake.

Let me look into that.

I have no idea what compels you to "hate" so easily. There must be a great deal of things in your hate list.

There are several that exist from our first version of the app (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuCXE2aOQSY).

We've re-built the product recently and as such, don't have demos of the new application yet.

I am still searching for the additional insight I am supposed to gleam from your blog post, relative to the comment thread attached to the original.

Despite my best efforts, all I see is a deliberate attempt to be malicious for the purpose of increasing your HN cred.

You've asked 7 rhetorical questions. Assuming your post (and this is a generous assumption) was to ask these questions in earnest, here is my best attempt at answering them:

1. What are you solving?

>> We are trying to create a "better than email" environment for ideas and insights, shared within teams. Email is great at task management, but orders content by recency, which means that important thoughts (that aren't time-sensitive) get lost in archives.

2. What are the tools that are currently being used?

>> Email. Google Docs. And sometimes teams use the writeboard within their project management application.

3. Why are they so horrible?

>> I've explained email above. Google Docs doesn't give you attribution and ownership over your ideas. It's also very poor at allowing you to organize your docs. Finally, it's also incredibly hard to add to a doc quickly from a mobile device.

4. Do people wake agonize over these treacherous solutions, ripping their hair out and wishing there was something better?

>> This doesn't need an answer. You're mostly just interested in hearing yourself speak here.

5. So who actually needs what you’re building?

>> Creative teams (web design/dev shops, agencies, startups), Freelancers (part of many teams), Students & Educators (project groups and classrooms), Networked organizations (like YC who manage a portfolio of companies).

6. Have you talked to potential customers?

>> We're approaching 300 user interviews.

7. Have you reached out and gathered honest opinions?

>> Again. No answer required here.

The interesting thing about this experience (aside from the tremendously helpful feedback provided by some HN users), is that there seems to be this widely held assumption that branding and positioning a product are the "easy" parts.

People look at the fact that we've been at this for a year and a bit, and judge our progress, yet there is an endless amount of literature that's been created about how to do it well. If it was such a simple task, would you expect there to be such a large body of work around it?

We actually have two of the best in Toronto. :)

Will do. Appreciate the interest.

If that is the thing you'd like to collaborate around, then yes, you could use it for that purpose. ;)

We had someone plan a wedding with it during the pilot.

I'm going to print out the thread and cut it into workable chunks of feedback in order to organize and understand it.

Much of the time, your definition will prevail. But what we found in our first version, is that in a significant percentage of occasions, people do tend to put a little more effort into a note knowing that they intend to share it.

It's like when you type out a quick email to your team linking to a competitor and giving a little context. That's essentially what a shared note looks like. The reason we believe it should live outside the inbox, is because the inbox is designed around time-sensitive content - not content that needs time to gestate or be talked about.

Yes. It is just like a shared notebook.

I think you've effectively captured the essence of my post.

Should Steve Jobs have said:

a) It's a tablet b) It's an iPad, or c) It's for consuming content in a relaxed and portable way?

Honest question. I'm curious what your approach would have been.

Have you tried a shared task management app like Asana or Flow? Same premise... applied to note-taking.

Who gets attribution for every thought embodied in that doc?

I definitely agree with this:

"Walk into the room with a predetermined pitch that they're determined to stick to, things usually end badly."

In my experience, you need to be nimble. But I also think you need to start the conversation somewhere.

It is. But it's widely assumed that they won't remember the application at all by the time of the interview.

How so? We just learned a ton by way of this thread. I would say that's a huge win for Rocketr.

"We want random access to your thoughts, not to listen to a single path through them, prepared in advance."

You can have both.

Without having true insight into exactly what information you hope to take away in 10 minutes, I would think that a cohesiveness to the order of the information, the pain felt by the potential customer, and a picture of that customer - are all valuable inputs.

My suggestion is that startups put that information in order themselves.

It takes the same approach to productivity, that news.yc takes to news.

They are, in fact, very similar in that regard.

My thoughts...

- What does a builder sound like? Aren't we all just trying to speak to customers? Are builders naturally better at that?

- "Co-authored notebooks" and "one author per note" are not contradictions at all. They speak to entirely different units (notes and notebooks).

- While you are correct that you and the startup may have different systems for categorizing, that's exactly the problem we're trying to point to. The siloed nature of how we capture and categorize information.

In closing, I am trying to speak to customers... not engineers.

Thank you for the feedback. I know it took time to write.