
How We Built and Launched Mod For $22,450 - j0ncc
http://needwant.com/p/how-we-built-launched-mod-for-22450/
======
noir_lord
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/](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.

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gkoberger
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.

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

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mangeletti
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/](http://shop.moleskine.com/en-us/notebooks-
journals/evernote/)

~~~
j0ncc
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](http://app.modnotebooks.com/demo))

~~~
kaplejon
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.

~~~
j0ncc
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).

~~~
kaplejon
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.

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ahlatimer
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.

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fatbat
I never knew Mod was Draft until I read this linked article.
[http://needwant.com/p/cancelled-kickstarter-campaign-
funded-...](http://needwant.com/p/cancelled-kickstarter-campaign-funded-
project-ourselves/)

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?

~~~
jonathanjaeger
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.

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frade33
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.

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

~~~
Already__Taken
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.

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gajomi
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?

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ljf
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...

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integraton
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).

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

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

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th0br0
I'd love to have this in Europe/Germany...

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marshallhaas
It's coming ;-)

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ljf
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.

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thruflo
Not counting the salaries of the operational team.

