

Ask HN: Rate my mac+web app, Screendocs – Upgrade that wall of text. - freshlog

Hi HackerNews,<p>About a year back, I asked you to review my mac+webapp, called Freshlog Storyteller:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1347513<p>After receiving a good bunch of feedback from you, I have conducted many iterations on the app to something I use myself on a daily basis, and I am deeply grateful for this community :)<p>The app has since been (hopefully more meaningfully) renamed to Screendocs:<p>http://screendocs.com<p>I humbly once again would like to seek your feedback in several areas:<p>1. Is it very difficult to market a native mac + web app bundle that needs each other to work? What's the best channel to do this? Do you know of examples? Does "mac+web app" sound awkward?<p>2. Is it immediately apparent how Screendocs can be beneficial? Would you be disappointed if I pulled Screendocs from the face of this earth?<p>One more thing, one of the posters in the previous HN thread mentioned that he learnt that it was possible to do annotations in Preview.app through one of my examples, so here's a sample screendoc to teach just that:<p>http://screendocs.com/messages/333<p>Looking forward to hearing from you brilliant folks =)
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dmpatierno
It looks nice. I can easily see how useful it is. Seeing the sample page was
much more informative to me than your landing page though. I would try to
integrate the two and show off more of your product on the front page.

Why do you require the Mac app? You should offer both read+write access on the
web, with the client app just being an optional bonus. Eliminating that
requirement would solve a huge chunk of your marketing problems and open the
tool up to many more users.

Nice name change, by the way. :P

~~~
freshlog
Good thoughts on integrating the sample page onto the landing page, I'll see
how I can do that.

The advantage of the Mac app is that it makes the process of snapping and
creation of the screenshot document very very smooth, saving a lot of time.
Your question makes me think that I probably need to emphasize this a little
more.

Thanks for taking the time to look at it dmpatierno, deeply appreciated! =)

------
bradleyland
I really love the idea. I do a lot of instructing, so just as your app is
designed to do, I find myself copying/pasting images in to a document and
numbering the steps. This is cumbersome in document composition apps because
the steps are not treated as distinct units as they are in your app. There's
definitely a lot of utility there.

Where I fall off is the pricing. Even at $15/month, I don't think I could
stomach it. In my mental model of software, this falls under the category of
utility; similar to screencasting software. Tying this to a subscription
model, I believe, will be very difficult.

Utilities like this are used to create information that is useful for a very
long time. By committing to $15/month at a minimum, you're asking for $180 a
year to host a very small set of data, which I can't ever take with me. I
think there are other pricing models that would allow you to capture revenue
in the utility software market, as well as serve customers who are interested
in a bundled solution.

iShowYouHD is a good example. Under their model, I buy their software for a
fixed price ($30-$60 depending on version), which I'm happy to pay, because
it's great software. In general, I think Mac users are happy to pay for good
software, but I digress. Once I've purchased the software, I can record my
screen and share the video by exporting it, or automatically uploading to
social media video sites like YouTube. The key is, they also provide a "One-
click-publishing" option, which I can pay for by purchasing credits. From
their pricing page:

==BEGIN============

Hosting credits

In order to use the service, you must purchase hosting credits. Hosting
credits are consumed in two ways:

1\. Storage – You are charged for the amount of data you store per month (on
average, calculated daily) at a rate of 24 hosting credits per GB of data
stored. e.g: If you store 10GB of data (on average) for one month, you’ll be
charged 240 hosting credits.

2\. Transfer – Hosting credits are consumed at a rate of 24 credits per GB of
transfer. So if use 5GB of data viewing videos, you’ll be charged 12 hosting
credits.

Lets say you upload a video 50MB in length. It turns out to be super popular
and you have 50 views per day for a couple of weeks. That’s a total of ~ 3.5GB
of transfer, or 8.4 hosting credits. In dollar terms that’s just 0.35c (USD).
Pretty cheap eh?

==END============

Storage + transfer. That's pricing that fits the product. Obviously,
Shinywhitebox sees this feature as a value add for their core product, not a
revenue center, but I think you could be a little more aggressive with your
credit pricing, turn a profit, and still satisfy customers' need for value.

I would happily pay $20 (maybe even $30-$50 depending on features) for an app
like yours, but I'd want the ability to use it without a subscription for a
couple of reasons:

* An app like this is frequently used to create a knowledge store; knowledge stores have a tendency to persist for a long time, so marrying my knowledge to a single vendor at what I would consider to be a high price significantly diminishes my perception of value

* Knowledge documents are frequently tied to other products; there is a good chance that I would want to integrate the content created in this app in to an existing website for my own product, rather than having it hosted at a third-party URL

At a very basic level, if the app were able to export HTML and PDF without a
subscription, I'd value it at around $15.

With the ability to publish a "project" to a collection of HTML files with
some preset/customizable fonts & colors, and I'm feeling more comfortable at
the $20 price point.

Create a "Pro" version, that gives me the ability to export single pages or
projects/collections using a documented templating system, as well as "raw
data" export in JSON with an "assets" folder, and I'm on-board for $40.

Tie in your hosting service at every price point so that I can buy credits
similar to iShowU HD, and can "publish" with a single click, and you'll see
money from me on a monthly basis as well; just not $15 month :)

~~~
freshlog
I have a standalone Screendocs client that works with Dropbox, which might be
what you need:

<http://screendocs.com/dropbox>

It works just like the Screendocs client, but generates the HTML in your
Dropbox Public folder where you can immediately share it online.

The credit system is interesting, I'll explore that.

Very detailed and thoughtful, thanks! =)

