Ask YC: Review my startup, Atombox | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Review my startup, Atombox

http://atombox.net

The concept: Atombox is a web app for keeping track of small bits of text. An atom is less than 256 characters and a category is just like a folder (i.e., an atom can belong to only one category). You can view all atoms in a specific category or search for atoms across all categories. It's analogous to physical index cards held in folders, with the advantage of everything being searchable and in one place.

There's a keyboard shortcut for almost everything and we use SSL for all traffic to and from the service. We also have an "RESTful" API.

Currently Atombox costs $5.00 after a 30 day trial.

There are many rough edges, especially on the landing page. Any thoughts, suggestions, ideas are appreciated.

I'll be chatting at http://tinychat.com/atombox and we're @contextlines on Twitter.

Thanks!

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What is the use case? looks from the website as if this is meant to be a GTD tool, but for that to work wouldn't you need notifications etc.?

Yes, we use Atombox for doing GTD, along with Google Calendar. I also keep a lot of small reference and support atoms in there, too (like the size of the tires on my car and wines I like).

We do have some ideas about notifications that we might implement in the future but it's not necessary to have notifications to do GTD. Access to your lists wherever you are is the linchpin for that use case.

Thanks for your comment.

Have you thought about adding a mode in which anonymous users can just start using the service (but their edits are lost when they forget the URL), like Etherpad used to have?

When I read that I had to subscribe just to try it out (just to see if it does anything I can't also have with a personal wiki or rememberthemilk) and that it would be $5/mo anyway, I lost interest.

We had been throwing around the idea of creating a quick demo that doesn't require signing up and doesn't persist your data. Recently we decided that we wouldn't implement that for now because we consider it a feature that your data persists in one place and want the trial to be full-featured. We also didn't want anyone to be confused about whether the data gets saved ("so I put some stuff in Atombox and now it's gone?").

I like your idea of persisting the data and using a URL as an access key, though. I hadn't thought of that.

Do you think a screencast would be sufficient to get people over the initial stand-off of not wanting to sign up?

Thanks!

A screencast is better than nothing, but for me, nothing beats being able to toy around with your user interface to get a first-hand impression of how fun it is to use, especially if the webapp is some wiki-todo-crossover. Perhaps you could offer a read-only view of an example collection?

I understand. I like being able to try things out too. I think you're right: we'll have to make some sort of interactive demo.

You said above that your biggest hesitation to signing up for a trial is that it's $5/month afterwards. Do you think you would have had less hesitation if we were doing something like this?

free: full-featured up to 128 atoms, with sign-up

$5/month: full-featured up to some reasonable limit on atoms (on the order of hundreds of thousands, a practical limit to guard against abuse)

Probably less hesitation, yes.

That's fair enough. Thanks for your help.

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