Not being snarky - from taking a quick glance I genuinely couldn’t tell what the thing is and I’m unlikely to sit through a video without at least some high level intro of what I’m going to get.
One of the things I've found that I struggle with is trying to explain what I'm building as most things are obvious to me since I'm the one building it.
Our users have done a GREAT job helping me out with that and pointing out the flaws with Polar regarding usability that I can't see.
I wonder if this is related to inattentional blindness:
Focus on a real pain point that people are having, and organize everything in your messaging around that.
Why do people need a document manager in the first place?
What is this going to do for them that their existing solutions don’t do?
How is it going to be better than the existing document managers that they have?
(If you find yourself going down the ‘its Decentralized’ route, don’t, people simply do not care)
It doesn’t have to even be much better than what people have, as long as it knocks it out the park for that use case. Hell, GMail started as conversational email plus a load of storage.
It may make your messaging seem kind of sparse - that’s a good thing. People are time poor, and have time to dig into the features later.
But without it you’re going to end up building something that is kind of a lot of things, but not really good at anything.
macOS, GNOME, iOS all seem to -successfully- have the less is more paradigm.
so now i solve peoples problems using the tool that solves my problem.
A strong narrative is much more engaging and memorable than a list of features.
Your front page at http://getpolarized.io mostly consists of a huge screenshot. When I look at the screenshot, all I see is a PDF viewer with some highlighting. Everybody already has a PDF viewer included with their OS that supports highlighting; there's nothing interesting about that screenshot that shows me what is useful about Polar.
For example web page archival is kind of cool but it becomes a LOT more exciting when you add document management, highlighting, document sharing, etc.
BTW can Jamie receive this highlighted document if she doesn't use Polar? Say as a PDF? That would be cool, and really help spreading the word about Polar, simply by usage.
Yes, I get very suspicious of them as well. But in this case, the site is heavier on the "what" than on the "why". A little more "why" would be welcome.
Nothing about that inspires any confidence and left me pretty convinced that I would be flushing money down the drain on a project that'll be dead in 3 weeks.
I can definitely see they are passionate about it, but the messaging needs a ton of work.
> We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars, and of course we have thousands of users
Which is based on the illusion that you get an unbiased sample when you ask users to respond to a poll. You don't - the people most likely to sacrifice a moment of their time are also those more likely to come forward with money, conversely those who didn't fill out the questionnaire probably have a majority of people who won't give any money.
Not to be a dick, but it sounds like this is roughly something not unlike a search engine. Google was built in a garage and available for free for its whole existence.
So as much as I believe in the abstract idea of making knowledge more accessible online, I'm not gonna pay before I see a working example of something better, and I might never pay.
> A powerful document manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux for managing web content, books, and notes - supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and keeps track of your reading progress.
I suppose the author's assumption is that a normal user/visitor to the site would have seen the homepage before seeing the crowdfund pitch.
It may be that the video explained it, but I'm not be in a situation where I can watch it right now.
EDIT: After reading the bulk of the other comments here, I am relieved that I'm not the only confused one. I thought I was just being stupid. I often am.
I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on.
If this was successful I was going to invest more time in a kickstarter/indiegogo style campaign.
This took a week of work already so was a bug chunk of time.
Without it you end up doing one or both of going down a tech rabbit hole of ‘it’s a decentralized, federated blah’ and losing people’s interest entirely.
Ideally you should have a quick this is what we do, why we do it, and why we’re different ready at all times - even if your current audience is only true believers.
EDIT: Clicked through to your features page. Confused. Polar allows me to "manage my reading"... oookay. What does that mean? What pain point is that solving for me? Does my reading need managing?
What are the benefits to me as a user? You need to tell this story before you get to the fact that it's based on Electron (perhaps very much not a selling point) and uses PDF.JS. How is this better than Evernote for me, which, based on sheer longevity is probably going to be my first port of call?
Who's your audience? Answer: not 'everyone' - you mention Pre Med students, but then your screenshot has a load of growth hackery stuff. If I'm a med student is there latex support?
Getting out a notepad and making yourself clarify what this is, who you are building it for, and what benefit you see it giving them is going to be a big help for you.
This goes double for you, as you're effectively creating a double sided marketplace of consumers for your product, and sites willing to integrate with your metadata.
I know there’s a video but I’m not gonna watch it just to learn what the product is.
The comment reminded me of something: in startup school, they cautioned us against pursuing a grand vision and encouraged us to talk to our users to find out what problems they needed to solve. In this case I think there is a lot of overlap but just wanted to say it since I remember the video so vividly.