Ask HN: how do you organize your startup research?

20 points·yid··9 comments

Interesting people, competitors, OSS projects, commercial libraries, third-party services, design and marketing ideas, notes on investors, potential future use cases -- what do you use to organize it all?

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I write my notes in cursive, so none of you Millenial whippersnappers will be able to read them.

this made me lol. thank you.

I am not all that diligent, but I just use Instapaper. Save all the relevant links (the link itself will say to me if it is a competitor that I must keep an eye, an interesting prospect, a tip on sales, copywriting advice, a SaaS i will want to use in the future).

At the most I separate into two generic folders: code and business.

Paper is my first layer of organization. Just about everything that crosses my mind winds up in Moleskine notebooks (large size, unlined). From there, it may land in the cloud somewhere.

I use Evernote and create various 'notes.'

Some notes I have include:

"Websites to absolutely remember" "Competitors" "Potential Advisors/Investors" etc.

I use CHM format, sometimes exported to HTML if need be. I use www.helpndoc.com for the purpose.

I'll start the conversation. The best tool I've found is an open-source tool called Laverna: http://laverna.cc

Self-hosting possible, Dropbox sync, tags+tasks+search, Markdown support, clean UI.

Try http://teamgum.com it allows your entire team to participate and organize.

Give AP4 Project Manager a try: https://www.ap4projectmanagers.com

And then of course there is Basecamp.

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