How We Built and Launched Mod For $22,450 | Hacker News Reader

How We Built and Launched Mod For $22,450

needwant.com

71 pointsj0ncc31 comments

I love the idea of this.

I currently take all my notes on cheap A4 squared pads, once it's full I tear of each page into a pile and feed them through my scanner and output as a PDF, it takes about 5 minutes to convert an 80 page A4 pad to PDF.

Then I recycle the pad.

Apropos of nothing your video on your home page at video http://modnotebooks.com/ doesn't display on FF27/Linux though the audio plays, while I was noseying as to why (amazing what you learn by wondering why stuff is broken) I noticed you have an unclosed span tag in your dev.l-footer-copyright.

I love Need/Want's products (SmartBedding, Mod Notebooks, etc), but I really love how open their blog posts are. The AirBnb ones and product ones that list all costs are incredibly informative, since nobody likes to talk about stuff like that.

I haven't seen the AirBnb ones can I get a link?

You can already do this with the Moleskine Smart Notebook, except you don't have to mail your private notebook to a 3rd party company for scanning - you can scan them directly into Evernote with the free Evernote app.

tl;dr

The exact same thing exists by Moleskine at http://shop.moleskine.com/en-us/notebooks-journals/evernote/

This is actually the pain point we were trying to solve with mod. Each time we'd fill up a notebook we'd manually take pictures of every page and save it to evernote. If you've ever done this you'll know...

- It takes FOREVER.

- Pictures are blurry / out of focus / misaligned

- There's a limit to the number of pictures you can attached to a note in evernote so each notebook ends up needing to be spread between a few different evernote "notes".

- Evernote really isn't designed to consume this kind of content. (We have an app designed specifically for this: http://app.modnotebooks.com/demo)

Nice job guys. Really well thought out and well designed. You guys are top notch.

Hey Jon, really appreciate you posting about these pain points. I have been trying to get behind your notebooks since the launch last week, but as a user of the Moleskine notebooks I'm just not seeing the value add you guys are promoting. Hopefully you can help me see through my own myopia.

My workflow usually takes me through a few pages of a notebook, which I then scan immediately afterwards into an Evernote note, specific to whatever I was just working on. I often recap with dictation, and possibly add some new thoughts, but I'm never adding more than a few scanned pages at a time. So for me, it never feels like it takes "forever", nor do I have issues with image limits.

I guess, for me, and probably for many other people, we have felt like the real-time nature and benefit is lost. Maybe I don't fill notebooks as quickly as the next guy, but by the time I do, I usually don't have any need to search through most of my earliest pages. By sending the notebook away once it is full, the scanning seems to add limited additional value to me. And barring physical destruction of the notebooks, the archival value of being able to ship the whole notebook for scanning feels a bit forced to me.

Plus, I write primarily in script, and the OCR works just fine, so I don't feel the images are necessarily blurry/out of focus either.

I understand you have many users already on-board with the idea. And that's great. I'm not trying to say your product or concept is invaluable. You're a project I want to support, I just can't personally get behind you with my current perspective. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why someone with my perspective might want to switch to your notebooks.

Thank you.

Hey!

Really appreciate the feedback.

For me the value is in knowing everything is backed up and saved. I very rarely actually need access to my old notes and sketches from previous notebooks but there’s a lot of sentimental value there for me.

If a note I take is actually time sensitive or needs to be referenced soon, I still have the physical notebook to reference.

I have (low quality photos of) sketches of old ideas that later become companies. The notebooks themselves are long gone but I love that I still have some kind of digital backup.

I’d eventually like to get the price of mod notebooks down so they’re on par with other notebooks that don’t have the digitizing bundled in (it’s already pretty close).

Jon, the sentiment makes a lot of sense. And anyone reading HN should know the importance of having a backup/archive system setup before it's needed. I guess that really is the ease of mind that I would consider buying.

Between writing my earlier message and reading your response here, I think the idea of having a strategy less dependent on myself is in fact compelling.

Well, shoot. Now it looks as though I am of the mindset that I will buy one just to give it a fair trial. Thank you again for another quality and personal response.

Not even close. tl;dr: read what you're posting before you post it.

From the Moleskine webpage: "Write, sketch, or draw in the specially designed Evernote Notebook by Moleskine. Take a photo of any page in this Moleskine notebook with the Evernote Page Camera and it instantly becomes digital so that you can save it, search it and share it with the world."

In other words, painful as hell. Mod is an elegant and well-designed solution to this issue.

What is the difference between an ordinary Moleskine and the Evernote Moleskine? I couldn't figure it out from that product page.

Basically nothing aside from the branding. They do however give you stickers to help with tagging.

Does the software automatically recognize the stickers? That would be helpful, I suppose.

Evernote can recognize the stickers. But really it is just branding. I liked how it looked and I liked both companies so I bought it.

One thing I'd say that's missing is the rough amount of time it takes to ship. I was looking at getting one of these for my GF for her birthday (she has a box full of used up notebooks in her garage, so this sounds perfect for her), but without knowing whether or not it would arrive on time, it made me hesitant to get one for her.

That said, love the idea and execution otherwise. It's great to get some insight into the beginnings of a product/startup. Even for those of us with experience in earlier-stage companies, unless you've founded it yourself, you don't usually see the beginnings like you've been presenting on your blog.

I never knew Mod was Draft until I read this linked article. http://needwant.com/p/cancelled-kickstarter-campaign-funded-...

While reading that I was wondering, and not accusing Mod team here but just a thought, what is stopping people from using Kickstarter this way (to gauge demand) deliberately? Launch a campaign and yank when it is successful to pursue larger profits?

I think you're undervaluing everything that Kickstarter adds in terms of a platform (collecting payments, notifications, social sharing, brand awareness for the platform itself that breeds trust, etc.). Kickstarter takes a small 5% percent of the total successfully raised.

For a documentary film or artist recording an album, it wouldn't make sense to yank your project and try to crowdfund on your own. In the case of Mod/Draft it was an MVP and they're shaping the offering differently -- notice that they were thinking of relaunching the Kickstarter.

The only problem i see, the personal paper notebook I have, has 'confidential - do not open' written on its front cover. And on a second thought, is scanning a notebook a technological maneuver in our times? I am sorry for a little harsh review, but I was expecting something modern and exciting when I thought these notebooks can be stored in the cloud, at least not manual scanning of pages.

Looks great - what about privacy/data security? Is the scanned data destroyed once the PDF it's in the hands of the customer?

It's a hosted backup and search service, I'm not even sure you'd want them to destroy the digital version. You probably have to close your account for that.

This looks like an excellent product. I think I might try it out. I say "I think" because I wonder whether or not it might be too small for the things I would use it for. Might there be an option for larger (say A4 or US Letter sized) versions in the future?

Off topic, but on a similar note, can anyone recommend a good feed in scanner? Placing pages/photos on the scanner plate seems to be too fiddly to do hundreds at a time, where as if I could just feed them in, either singly or in a stack...

This is a very useful post.

Are the notebooks branded? I'm curious about that process but don't see anything mentioned in the post (maybe I'm missing it).

Is only the grey color available? Didn't see black on the product page...

I was wondering this too. Is there an ETA on Orange/Black if they are not available now?

I'd love to have this in Europe/Germany...

It's coming ;-)

Awesome, I'd love to order from the UK. Maybe add an "email me when available" field to your site for visitors from outside the US so you can capture them, as I know I'm going to forget in a few days, only to vaguely remember in a year or so.

Where exactly is it coming to? I just sent you guys an email asking about this :)

I'm in Australia and my girlfriend is in Turkey + Russia and I think we'd both love to use this (at least try it).

Not counting the salaries of the operational team.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com