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

Ask YC: Review my startup, Atombox

21 pointsextantproject56 comments

http://atombox.net

Atombox stores small bits of text -- those things that you might write on sticky notes, index cards, or scraps of paper. We use it for Getting Things Done (GTD) (http://amzn.to/bxm1G3). It is full-featured (SSL, backups, keyboard shortcuts) up to 128 atoms and costs $5.00 per month for unlimited atoms.

I'm chatting at http://tinychat.com/atombox as well as on Twitter as @contextlines. Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks!

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Cut the free atoms to 60. Charge $1 more for Calendar or Google apps integration. Charge $3 more for SMS notification/forwarding, allow them to post from their phones. Add atom sharing and give it away for free. Add a mechanism to allow people to make their atoms public, or invite others into edit/ownership roles.

Anything that adds convenience for 1 user you should charge for. Anything that invites others to use/consume the service, you should give away for free.

Don't forget the footer in atoms to say "Created with Atombox; make your own atoms aye href equals quote http://atombox.com quote AtomBox end-aye.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Yeah, we weren't sure about how many atoms to allow for free, so we just picked 128. I have over 1200 atoms that I've accumulated over the years, and so I thought something like 10% of that would be a good "tipping point", so to speak. It's an experiment.

We're also not married to this approach for making revenue. We'll have to see...

>Yeah, we weren't sure about how many atoms to allow for free, so we just picked 128.

Dropbox's model is good on this. Give away 60, say, but let anyone get 12 more who successfully invites a friend (you could pyramid scheme it!) but have an upper limit for number of free snippets.

We are * really * liking the idea of the Dropbox referral model. Definitely.

Oh: and we're definitely interested in creating shared lists, it's just a matter of prioritizing features we want to implement with the limited time we have.

Security: The connection between you and Atombox is always secure (SSL).

Backups: All of your data is backed up every hour.

So the actual connection is encrypted, but then everything is backed up every hour. How secure are the backups. Are they encrypted as well? How are they stored? Who has access?

EDIT: Also I didn't realize that GTD and "Getting Things Done" were registered trademarks. That's crazy. You can't say your site helps with GTD without attributing the trademark? It seems like that would almost fall under the ubiquitous vocabulary clause that would invalidate trademark at this point.

We attribute the "GTD" and "Getting Things Done" trademark at the bottom of the page:

"'GTD' and 'Getting Things Done' are registered trademarks of the David Allen Corporation."

Right, that's exactly what I was referring to. I didn't realize you had to attribute the acronym GTD. Your attribution is what surprised me.

Oh. Maybe we don't? I thought both "GTD" and "Getting Things Done" are trademarks...

I didn't mean to imply that you don't need to, you very well may. I was just surprised nonetheless.

It comes down to confusion, the attribution is an insurance policy, there's no fear that consumers believe that the origin of this service is the RTM holder as it's disclaimed hence no trademark infringement.

That's why, I believe, you get attributions for mere mentions of mega-corp names in some advertising copy.

In this instance I think that GTD should probably be avoided without a disclaimer as it's not a common usage that I've heard whilst "getting things done" (no capitals) is just a generic phrase used in all fields. I'd be surprised if a RTM was granted for this text, perhaps the specific form of the logo is RTM-ed?

IANA-TM-L but I worked in IP for a while.

The connection between your box and the Atombox server is SSL. Hourly backups are made using Tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com), which is built and designed by Colin Percival, the FreeBSD security officer. They are encrypted and stored off-site in Amazon Web Services S3.

Looks like a good service! I only have one piece of advice: the CAPTCHA you use on signup is only going to cost you users at this stage. Set up something like Munin to keep an eye on trends in the meantime, and only reintroduce it once - and if - abuse starts :)

About the CAPTCHA: a point well-taken. We'll change that.

Thanks for taking a look!

Here's a fairly good CAPTCHA alternate that doesn't annoy users:

* Add an extra input name="botcheck" type="text" to your form and label it "Leave this field blank". * Use CSS to hide both the field and it's label. * Then, when the form is submitted, if anything is in that box, trash it. There's almost 100% chance that it came from a bot and not a real person.

Caveat: This only works as long as you're small enough to not be target specifically.

I like that idea. Thanks!

My eye first went to the screen cap (which could have the white space at the bottom of it cropped off). Then I read the "Sign up for Atombox for Free" link. At this point I am still wondering what is going on. Finally I find the first sentence "Atombox keeps your GTD...". I suggest the first time you mention it, spell out 'Getting Things Done'. I would also like to see more use examples.

Good luck.

Yes, we're going to change "GTD" to "Getting Things Done" based on several mentions of that very confusion. It'll be a link to the book, too.

Things I keep in Atombox: wine and beers I like, places I'd like to go, the size of my dress shirts, restaurants I want to try in cities different than my own, affirmations and reminders (quotes), the continual grocery list, ideas for gifts for other people, replacement part numbers, ...

Your biggest problem, as someone pointed out, is that nobody understands what AtomBox does.

I land on your page, and the first thing I see is a screenshot of "categories" and "atoms." Most people will leave at this point. Some will read further and see that "AtomBox keeps your GTD lists in one place." Okay, so it's [another] GTD app.

If you're targeting the GTD audience, then realize that they most certainly already have a GTD app. This means you have to convince them to switch over. Unfortunately, none of the 6 bolded features you listed are "killer features." The "full-featured, for free" part is a little enticing, until I read on to see that I have to pay anyways.

Go google "best GTD apps" and figure out what makes your app different. Make a short video or draw a diagram signifying those key points.

Good luck.

That makes a lot of sense. We are focusing on the GTD crowd and you're right that we need to differentiate with respect to other GTD apps because anyone that does GTD will have some sort of system already.

Thanks, that's very helpful!

Clickable:

http://atombox.net

Thanks for submitting that.

I'm lost. I've read maybe half of GTD, and spoken with a number of people who , so they say, follow the dictums.

Still, I have on idea why they, or I, would want or need this.

I uses assorted to-d-like things, in particular todoist.com. Stupid easy to store stuf there, pull it out, etc. Mostly I do it from the CLI, or form an Android app I wrote for myself.

Point being, I don't see what problem this solves isn't already solved by several existing apps or services that are set up for easy interaction.

I do GTD because keeping the things I have to do external to myself relieves my mind of having to track it all. This extremely enhances my focus and energy. YMMV.

We are focusing on people that do GTD as potential customers because they need an extremely fast (keyboard shortcuts), secure, easy-to-look-at way to track everything they have to do. So it may not solve a problem you have, but it definitely solves a problem I had: all the other list apps are too complicated and slow for my taste -- and there has got to be more people like me.

Thanks for the comment!

What is an atom? Right now I don't even know if that is a stupid question because your site shows and tells me nothing. Is it GTD lingo? Is this for me if I don't know anything about GTD?

An atom is < 256 characters of text.

Doing GTD helps, since that's primarily what Atombox is designed for, but I think having a "augmented memory" service helps any information/knowledge worker.

edited to clarify: an "atom" is our lingo, not something in the "Getting Things Done" book.

Real Men don't use atoms to get things done; they post them on twitter and have their friends hassle them to do it?

With apologies to Linus

Sounds like atom = snippet

If I was an average user and saw GTD in the first line like that and didn't know what it meant, I'd probably lose interest in the site. The definition is in the copyright text at the bottom, but some people may not make it down there.

You're right, and so we're going to change "GTD" to "Getting Things Done" as well as make it a link. Thanks!

1. The price is a barrier of entry for me. But that could just be my scrappy upbringing of trying to hunt up free stuff, before spending a dime.

2. Is there a deeper plan to this? Any potential revenue models besides monthly subscriptions? Any future feature upgrades that would make this a unique value-proposition for users? If not, it would not take much for someone to build a similar service, have it available for free, and kll your product.

I thoroughly understand scouring the Internet for free stuff before even contemplating paying; I tried on the order of 50 free and paid list apps before deciding to build Atombox. I didn't find one I liked, so I built one that I do -- one that I would pay for.

We are not dead-set on any one way to make revenue. We have some other ideas, but we decided to try the subscription bit.

There are countless free and paid list apps out there already. Many of them overdo it on the features, don't use SSL, don't have keyboard shortcuts, and so on. We've tried to take out everything that isn't absolutely necessary and we will give you one-on-one support.

I don't mind if all the others make money too -- all I need is enough revenue to pay myself and my co-founder salary and pay for the servers.

$5/mo is not a barrier for entry into anything.

Their alternative to make any dime would be to feed your text to a contextual targeting engine and serve you ads. You know how long it takes to make anything from that? No less than 100k users; for that many users, at 10 posts each user, and each post about 100bytes, they're looking at just 1GB of text a month.

A whole text mining engine, developed/integrated by 1-2 developers over 1-6 months, just to handle 1GB/mo :-( How many of those posts are read more than once? How many are shared? How many are publicly visible?

Even if you categorized the posts by a targetable "vertical", you will have about ~50 posts per vertical, and those 50 are viewed by no more than 50 people, a few times.

In other words, not fucking worth it.

For this to be sustainable by advertising they will have to make the posts public, interlinked (i.e. structured in some manner, via a social-graph maybe?) and most importantly viral content that others will seek, share and return to.

I have never seen a TODO list or a shopping list that was either viral, applicable to more than one person, or for that matter publicly shared.

So let them charge $5/mo, and let those who can afford it use the service. Developers don't need to go cheap and price themselves down to homelessness.

Right: we are not interested in trying to make money using advertising; we intend to make money by charging for a service that we would pay.

... that we would pay for ourselves.

I understand the impeccable logic behind not building an advertising driven model. I just wonder about the magnitude of the 'problem'[recording ThingsToDo], and the cost of the 'solution'[$5/mo]. I would be very curious to see if this sustains the business [founder salaries and server costs]. Regardless, one wishes success to the project.

Thanks!

I am GTD practitioner and use Emacs' org-mode for it. If you can write an Emacs Lisp library that allows me to sync my Orgs with Redmine, I will happily pay $5/mo for it.

If these guys can make a web-based Org-mode, I would pay for it too. Five bucks is nothing, it costs more per month configuring Emacs and org-mode across disparate machines.

"it costs more per month configuring Emacs and org-mode across disparate machines"

This was one of my core frustrations when I started searching for a list system. I wanted all of my "augmented memory" in one place so that I didn't have to deal with multiple copies of the same thing and having to keep it all in sync. I also wanted to be able to access everything from any box.

Thanks for your comment!

Oh: and I hear 'ya about org-mode + redmine syncing. ;)

Hm. So if there are say - 5000 customers like you, the business is sitting on a potential annual revenue of $300k. Sounds good! Are there 5000 such customers?

Right!

Given that the Internet is about 2 billion people large I'm banking on the idea that we can find a few thousand people that Atombox will be very useful for and that they will pay for it straight-up.

Sounds good to us too! ;)

I feel like you need to better define the purpose of the website, I like the interface but I find myself thinking "why do I need this?" and your website does very little to convince me that this is going to make my life easier.

Best of luck!

Think of it as a personal notebook with as many pages as you need, that takes up no physical space, that you can search, and that you can have with you everywhere. You need it so that you can keep things you need to remember outside of your head so that you can use your brain to think rather than remember a million little tidbits of information.

So, is it the first 128 atoms are free, and then I pay? (I'll give it a try) or do I pay if I want more than 128 atoms at the same time? (I'm not that busy :)

You pay only if you need more than 128 atoms.

... and thanks for the comment!

You are welcome. I am seeing a potential use for this as a personal to-do list. Can I delete an atom after it is 'done'?

Yes, we use it as a to-do list.

To delete an atom: click on the text of the atom to delete and then press E. There's a delete button in the dialog that comes up.

Sorry - I think I mistook your reply as addressed to myself.

Get someone who can do some decent Copy, and Web design; the layout makes my eyes bleed. But looks cool.

I am just a bit curious is this made in rails?

The server runs Rails, and the interface is jQuery and custom JavaScript (have a look!).

and deployed at heroku ?

No, it's running on Slicehost.

i guess you're marketing it to GTD fans, because you officially alienated me because i've never read GTD. have you posted it on GTD forums? how is your GTD adwords campaign doing, what's your CoCa? what kind of a dashboard do you have assembled for keeping track of your metrics?

Yes, we are focusing on fairly technically adept people that do GTD and tend to use web apps already. We think Atombox is useful even if you don't do GTD, but we're focusing on GTD users.

I'm on the http://www.davidco.com forums and we are running a limited AdWords campaign.

We don't track metrics closely yet because we're trying to talk to people directly rather than trying to spark a mass influx.

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