

Ask YC: Review my startup, Atombox - extantproject

http://atombox.net<p>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.<p>I'm chatting at http://tinychat.com/atombox as well as on Twitter as @contextlines. Any thoughts are appreciated.<p>Thanks!
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mahmud
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.

~~~
extantproject
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...

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _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.

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

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JangoSteve
_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.

~~~
extantproject
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."

~~~
JangoSteve
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.

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

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

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mootothemax
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 :)

~~~
nfriedly
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.

~~~
extantproject
I like that idea. Thanks!

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goodwinb
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.

~~~
extantproject
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, ...

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gilbertl
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.

~~~
extantproject
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!

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sandipagr
Clickable:

<http://atombox.net>

~~~
extantproject
Thanks for submitting that.

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jamesbritt
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.

~~~
extantproject
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!

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weego
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?

~~~
gchucky
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.

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

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richtofen
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.

~~~
mahmud
$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.

~~~
richtofen
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.

~~~
mahmud
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.

~~~
richtofen
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?

~~~
extantproject
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! ;)

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Jobzle
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!

~~~
extantproject
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.

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dotcoma
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
:)

~~~
extantproject
... and thanks for the comment!

~~~
richtofen
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'?

~~~
extantproject
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.

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

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

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

~~~
phoenix24
and deployed at heroku ?

~~~
extantproject
No, it's running on Slicehost.

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zackattack
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?

~~~
extantproject
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.

