

Yet Another Review/Rate My Startup Request - witten
http://luminotes.com/
I've been working on this product (with some unrelated consulting on the side) for nearly a year. Just to head off some obvious comments, here are a few things to keep in mind:<p>Web browser support for the web-based product itself is fairly restricted. So no Safari, and no Opera. Yet.<p>I realize the product is a little general-purpose, and that makes a unique selling proposition more difficult to craft. I also realize that you kind folks on HN are not the target market.<p>I'm trying to build a sustainable business, so I'm not interested in tips for attracting investors/buyers.<p>If you must say a comment along the lines of, "I don't see how this is any different than all the other wiki / notebook / word processor software out there," then please at least read some of the tour or try the demo first. If it's still not clear, then obviously I need to improve my explanation of the product.<p>So, what do you think? My main goal at this point is to improve traffic and build a larger customer base. I have a handful of paying customers now, but not nearly "enough". Part of the problem might be that convincing consumers (rather than businesses) to pay a recurring fee is a tough sell.<p>Anyway, thanks in advance.
======
witten
I've been working on this product (with some unrelated consulting on the side)
for nearly a year. Just to head off some obvious comments, here are a few
things to keep in mind:

Web browser support for the web-based product itself is fairly restricted. So
no Safari, and no Opera. Yet.

I realize the product is a little general-purpose, and that makes a unique
selling proposition more difficult to craft. I also realize that you kind
folks on HN are not the target market.

Tags are in the works.

I'm trying to build a sustainable business, so I'm not interested in tips for
attracting investors/buyers.

If you must post a comment along the lines of, "I don't see how this is any
different than all the other wiki / notebook / word processor software out
there," then please at least read some of the tour or try the demo first. If
it's still not clear, then obviously I need to improve my explanation of the
product.

So, what do you think? My main goal at this point is to improve traffic and
build a larger customer base. I have a handful of paying customers now, but
not nearly "enough". Part of the problem might be that convincing consumers
(rather than businesses) to pay a recurring fee is a tough sell.

Anyway, thanks in advance.

~~~
tx
I've been looking for something like this for a while: currently I use Tomboy
on Linux but the UI is too basic. I love your attention to detail: Ctrl+B
makes my selection bold - fantastic.

Are you going to open the code? I'm sure you've used tons of other people's
work: come on, contribute some back!

I'd love to run it on my laptop: since the software is truly personal, without
any sharing/collaboration benefits, why would I want to keep it in the
"cloud", which often is unavailable?

So... where is the code? I saw "download" feature, but it gives me HTML, not
the software.

~~~
witten
The download page has the whole codebase in its entirety, GPL licensed:
<http://luminotes.com/download>

The link to this page is at the bottom of the front page. It used to be more
prominent, but I found people got confused about whether they had to download
the software in order to just make a wiki.

You can browse the Mercurial repository online as well.

And as for your question about keeping the software in the "cloud".. The
software actually does have some sharing/collaboration features. (Whether
they're useful for your specific needs is another matter.)

I'd like to make a desktop version of Luminotes at some point, but I have no
concrete plans for it now.

~~~
tx
HUGE thanks! BTW, I've been experimenting with web-based software running on a
desktop with XUL/WebKit-based clients that run their own in-process HTTP
server (I've used CherryPy) and I like this approach: HTML-based UIs are way
easier to create than typical UI widgets.

~~~
witten
I'm using CherryPy, and I'd be very interested in hearing more about this.
Feel free to send me an email.

I think the biggest hurdle in a Luminotes desktop port such as this would be
replacing PostgreSQL with something like sqlite.

Another option would be to throw out the existing server entirely for the
desktop version and use something like Google Gears.

------
auston
I would make it clearer WHY I SHOULD USE LUMINOTES?

My first thoughts for a use case would be for a company to keep training docs.
In which case, I would make the fact that it costs money more prominent.

~~~
witten
Okay, sounds like my unique selling proposition isn't obvious enough. I'll
work on that.

------
Maro
I use tadalists all the time for making one-line notes and putting down ideas.
Like, I have a tada list called "Ideas" for startup ideas and another one
"Articles" for stuff to write about. 99% of the stuff I want to write down
fits this idiom well.

Very rarely I want to take multi-line notes, in these cases I use Google Docs,
since I use all the G apps anyways.

Where does your stuff fit in? The ability to link to other entries seems
pretty useless, or at least rarely useful.

After trying out the demo, it's better than G Docs because the interface is
simpler. G Docs opens docs in new tabs/windows which is pretty annoying for
smaller docs. If you add some kind of check-off bullet point capability to
your lists (e.g. gray them out), then I could ditch tadalist and G docs and
unite my stuff here. That would make sense.

You call it a "personal wiki" which seems like marketing speak for _nothing_ ,
since the idea of a wiki is that everybody can edit it, but if it's personal,
then it's really just a specialized HTML editor (?). Maybe you should just
call it a "Notebook that just works".

UI bug report: when I click an entry on the left side, you flash it (in
yellow) and then you scroll to it. But if it takes long to scroll there then
the flash in unseen by the user. Scrolling then flashing may work better.

~~~
witten
The ability to link to other notes may indeed be useless for your particular
needs. But it's hugely useful for a large class of notebooks. For instance, if
you're writing a novel and you need to keep track of your characters and their
relationships, being able to link from one note to another is incredibly
handy.

So I see that as where Luminotes fits in. It's really a notebook of
interlinked notes, which you can't really do with Google Docs or Tadalist. You
can do it with a full-fledged wiki like Mediawiki, but for many people that's
overkill, and besides doesn't come with the nice UI.

As for bullet point check-off capability, you can quite easily use the
strikethrough for that purpose. I know several people who use that for
crossing things off lists as they're completed. It's perhaps not as convenient
as a single checkbox, but it does work.

"Personal wiki" isn't marketing speak, as I'm going for the "interlinked
collection of notes/pages" aspect of the word "wiki" rather than the
collaboration sense of the word. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear
that regardless of all that, "personal wiki" isn't a great way to describe the
product.

Thanks for the UI bug report. I think I should be able to make the scroll and
flash work serially rather than in parallel.

~~~
witten
Okay, the scrolling and flashing is now serial instead of parallel. And I sped
up the scrolling speed as well. Thanks again.

------
phoenixy
Looks similar to this service. <http://www.springnote.com/en>

It's a product of a korean company called OpenMaru.

------
vaksel
I'd remove "Pricing & signup" and change it to "Sign up for your free account
today"...THEN during the sale process, upsell them "Your free account comes
with ______, upgrade to one of our premium plans today and receive a ___%
discount"

This way you won't drive people away w/o them at least trying your product to
see if its for them

~~~
witten
I was sort of going by standard practice among other startups.. They all seem
to be very up-front about their pricing and rate plans. Do you think that this
is in general a bad idea, or do you think with my product in particular, it
would be better to go with the "Sign up for your free account today" approach?
If so, why?

Also, by the way, my conversion rate to free accounts is around 26% according
to Analytics. (This is not for AdWords clicks.) I think a bigger concern for
me is my conversion rate (or lack thereof) for free accounts to paid accounts.

~~~
vaksel
Well you will still be upfront about your fees, I'm only talking about
changing the actual link text, so that the users will be more likely to click
it, since everyone likes free stuff.

~~~
witten
Link text has been changed now. And I sprinkled "sign up for free" in a few
other places as well.

Thanks again.

------
rickd
I like it a lot, nice job. Definitely reminds me of TiddlyWiki.

My main criticism is that there should be an explicit "save" button or link
for notes. Perhaps it could be similar to the gmail "save draft" button, in
that autosaves would disable or "gray out" the save button (nothing more to
save). I think _not_ having a specific Save button will confuse "average"
users who have been trained to "Save Often!"

Other than that, I think it would also be good to be able to hide or
"minimize" the vertical menu on the left (+,link,<paperclip>...) because I
actually find it quite distracting. I feel like it breaks the flow from menu
item to note- maybe moving it to the right might be good as another option.

Overall, quick to set up and easy to use- so those are winners! Nice work :)

~~~
witten
Thanks for the detailed feedback. I've been avoiding a "save" button because
saves are implicit, but I think for the reasons you point out, I really should
add one anyway.

You can hide all the crap on the left (except the toolbar) by clicking the
"nothing but notes" link on the right side of the page. Maybe I should make
that clearer. And maybe I should have it hide the toolbar as well. Is there
anything I could do to the toolbar to make it less distracting?

~~~
witten
Okay, "nothing but notes" mode now hides the toolbar as well.

------
rdj
Not really feedback, but a matter of attention-to-detail:

Do you have one too many '%' in your document.write(...google analytics) code?
It throws a visible '%' at the very bottom of your page.

~~~
witten
Thanks, I appreciate it. I think I got a little over-zealous in escaping my
%s.

Interestingly, in Python, "%%%s" % "foo" != "%%foo"

~~~
lacker
It works just like \ in standard unix parsing - you escape the escape
character by doubling it. So in "%%%s":

    
    
      "%%" -> "%"
      "%s" -> "foo"
    

for a result of "%foo".

~~~
witten
Right, but the escaping by doubling does not work in Python unless it's in a
format string. So "%%foo" does not count as escaped. That's what threw me off.

------
misuba
Sad but I suspect true: if you really want to appeal to academic markets (as
that one pull quote suggests), you'll need to remove the word "wiki" from your
sell. The anti-Wikipedia prejudices run deep in academia, and they've attached
the word "wiki" to all of those fears. You seem to have discovered one of the
exceptions, which is great, but...

~~~
witten
It's a good point. I have family in academia, so I'm familiar with the anti-
Wikipedia bias.

The question then is what to call the product if not a personal wiki.

------
BenS
This looks quite similar to Google Notebook. Is there a reason to use
luminotes instead?

~~~
witten
Glad you asked. :)

See
[http://luminotes.com/notebooks/74uqe3cecagabucmrvwls33b4?not...](http://luminotes.com/notebooks/74uqe3cecagabucmrvwls33b4?note_id=1bm7kfdhgxljhaab5yzxnf467)

------
maxklein
Dunno man. I won't bother using it because I feel like you may change the
price in the future. There are no guarantees, particularly since I know it's
just a guy with a mac running this thing. I don't want to store stuff in there
and then one day it's gone...

~~~
witten
I don't know where you got the idea about "a guy with a Mac'. I'm on a
ThinkPad running Debian, and the servers are Debian as well. :)

I should point out that while your concern may be legitimate, you can download
your entire wiki as HTML whenever you want. So if for whatever reason you
don't like the service at some point, there's no lock-in.

If there's another download format that would make you feel more comfortable,
please do let me know.

~~~
rw
To stoke the flamefire: you know Debian hasn't had the most stellar security
reputation as of late, right? :)

~~~
witten
Let me just say that if anyone hasn't regenerated their Debian/Ubuntu SSH keys
by now, they don't deserve to remain in business.

But this isn't really relevant to the discussion..

~~~
jrockway
Dude, don't take the flamebait. The person your replying to is just trying to
make you mad. Don't waste your time acknowledging his existence, it just makes
him want to troll more.

------
rw
Needs <noscript> tags.

~~~
witten
It's a JavaScript-based personal wiki. What should the <noscript> tags do? Are
you suggesting that there should be a fallback to JavaScript-less text areas?

Note that you can view the wiki pages without JavaScript. You only need
JavaScript to edit them.

~~~
ars
If javscript is unavoidable I always put in noscript tags that simply say so,
but don't otherwise do anything.

~~~
witten
Oh okay. I have such a <noscript> tag on some pages, but not all of them. For
instance, see <https://luminotes.com/sign_up> with JavaScript turned off.

I guess I should add similar tags to the other pages as well.

UPDATE: Added <noscript> to main wiki page.

~~~
rw
Thanks.

