

Ask HN: Review our startup - www.webnotes.net - peterlai

After a year of work, WebNotes just launched its freemium product at www.webnotes.net. Would you guys mind reviewing our startup? Several significant changes have been made since our private beta launch six months ago:<p>* We are no longer in private beta mode. Anyone can sign up.<p>* We added WebNotes Pro which allows you to upload and annotate PDFs.<p>* We added WebNotes Group Solutions with allows schools and business to mass register for WebNotes<p>* We unveiled partnerships with several existing organizations. Our case studies are located here:
http://www.webnotes.net/Press/CaseStudies.aspx<p>I would love to hear feedback.<p>P.S: We are based in Cambridge, MA. (Shout out to my Cambridge peers.)
======
mkyc
Your site is too crowded. Give me one thing to look at on your main page.
Right now, you have 'webnotes pro', 'sign up now', the play button, and your
'faster/more effective' drawing my attention, in that order. Read this:

<http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/good-call-to-action-buttons/>

Remove the red from wnp. You want the first noticeable thing to be the first
step, and the first step should probably be 'find out what this does' - so
make the 'faster and more effective web research' text stand out more. You
have way too many tabs - give me little next and prev buttons to scroll
features. I like playing with those, I hate tabs - I get the impression that
I'll have to load a new page, so I avoid them. Preload the images on the other
tabs. Your support tab/button doesn't actually link to support, it links to
info. Your video seems to focus on many individual features, rather than on
the problem that you're solving for me. Why do I want to save these notes? Why
do I want to compile a report? (Clicking the blackness outside the modal video
should return me to the page - I don't want to click that little black x)

Summary: very crowded main page, lacks obvious next-steps at all stages of
interaction, presents individual features rather than a solution to my
problems. Looks pretty good otherwise.

~~~
peterlai
We are looking into making the next step more obvious, and we do agree that
the homepage has a lot on it. Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
jcapote
The demo is what sold me. Making that button more prominent would be a good
start. I clicked it before I read anything else.

------
frossie
As it happens, I am "in the market" for such a product ever since the demise
of Google Notebook. Having given it a quick spin, I may consider using your
product. The only immediate irritation is that it isn't obvious how to move an
annotation from one folder to another in the sidebar; it looks like drag and
drop should work but it doesn't. The documentation (ie the FAQ) didn't cover
this either. Oh wait. I managed it somehow but bugger if I know how - I can't
undo it. Ah. I see. You have to grab exactly the right part of the annotation
- the title (Not the URL, Not the Favicon). The design doesn't lead you to
this because all three are in the same grey box, making it look like one drag-
n-drop unit.

This is my opinion only, but I think the price point for your premium service
is too high. There are two reasons I pay for premium service: one, I really
_really_ want the extra feature; two, I have a really good feeling about the
service and want to keep it alive. Ten bucks _a month_ hits neither of those
for me. In comparison, I pay toodledo.com $15 a year for a really important-
to-me feature and awesome customer service. Looking at webnotes I would get by
with the free features, but if I liked it, I would pay you $15/year even
though I am not interested in PDFs. With your price point at $10/month, I'm
just not going to. I mostly use this kind of service to collect and organise
recipes - that is nowhere as big a deal to me as half my Netflix subscription,
which is what $10/month comes to.

The .net address in unfortunate. People do type "webnotes" in their URL bar
then get confused when they don't go where they intended. There is no obvious
reason why this is a .net kind of site.

I get some overwrite issues on Firefox/Linux in the sidebar. Not a biggie.

Hope this was useful to you.

~~~
peterlai
Your critique of the organizer was very useful. We're looking into
improvements for the next iteration. Also, we've added this tutorial:
<http://www.webnotes.net/tutorial/tutorial.aspx>. We hope you find it useful.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Direct links for convenience:

<http://www.webnotes.net>

<http://www.webnotes.net/Press/CaseStudies.aspx>

------
imp
I think it's a great design and really well-laid out site. I understood
immediately what it is you're doing. However, I don't have the problem that
you're solving so I'm not that interested. I'm not a student though, so maybe
that's more your target audience. For me, delicious is enough to organize info
on the web.

------
timdorr
First off, that's a pretty k-rad design. Did you do it in-house or an outside
firm?

I have a few questions/thoughts:

\- What happens if the contents of a page change? Do the notes go away or do
you try and follow the content as it moves around?

\- Have you thought about public sharing of these notes? I don't know if it's
in your business plan, but it could be a fun thing to be able to mark up pages
on the web and see others' notes while browsing. Could get noisy and be a UI
issue, but it _sounds_ neat :)

\- I might change the "Click to try demo" button to be a little bit more clear
what's going to happen when you click it. It's a great demo that shows off
your product perfectly, but I was thinking I would be sent off to some other
page and might have to go into some registration process. Two ways to handle
this: Show the bar dimmed out and a button that says "Activate demo" or
something to that effect. Or have the links say something to the effect of
"Try the demo live on this page" so we understand it's just something quick.
Again, it's really effective, so you should remove any apprehension about
clicking that link.

~~~
peterlai
Wow, great questions, great feedback.

1\. Design: We start with designs from 99designs.com. Then, we have Ryan (CEO
and great with photoshop) heavily refine our selections. Afterwards, we
convert the designs to html using psd2html services. Again, heavy refinement
is needed before the code is actually usable. Here's a link to our previous
design: <http://blog.webnotes.net/image.axd?picture=webnotesnet.jpg>

2\. If the contents of the page change, we first try to relocate your
highlights/notes. If your highlighted texts have disappeared, we add a "page
changed" notification at the bottom of the screen which contains the text you
originally highlighted.

3\. We do think about public sharing of notes, though our primary focus is on
improving research. Several other sites have focused upon social annotations
without great success, and so we hesitate when considering such options. Also,
the UI does seem tricky. If we were to implement more sharing-related features
(you can already share annotated pages through email or permalink), UI would
be of utmost importance to us. Several of our engineers have taken usability
classes (6.831 was awesome!), and we pride ourselves in the simplicity of our
product.

4\. We are looking into implementing your suggestions. Thanks for pointing
this out.

------
ujjwalg
I agree with imp regarding the site design and layout. I am a graduate student
and have been looking for a software/service similar to papers for mac
(<http://mekentosj.com/papers/>) for windows. This looks like a useful
service, not entirely what I want but a decent start. I will definitely try
the free version and will post my opinion.

------
physcab
So right now I'm a PhD student and doing quite a bit of research for my
proposal.

Maybe I'm unique, but if I'm doing reading online, I don't exactly care about
highlighting. If I come across something important, I just bookmark it. If
it's a PDF, I download it.

So I'm not really sure your solution is that important (to me atleast).

In my opinion, there are much bigger hassles, with doing research online
(these may not apply to you, but I'll tell you nonetheless):

\- Where can I go to get FREE PDFs of articles? \- If I make a note of why the
PDF is important, can I download that note...so I'm reminded when I actually
start writing the report? \- How can I easily keep track of certain authors?
\- How can I easily contact the authors in published articles?

So in summary: Not sure if your product is really worth $5/mnth. If you came
up with an option that compiled all the contact information for each PDF, then
it might make this tool more valuable. -

------
anigbrowl
_Webnotes Pro: PDF Annotation - Up to 500 MB (about 2,500 PDFs)_

The typical .pdf I encounter is a lot larger than 200k. What else...ah, the
pins on sticky notes caused instant cognitive dissonance. As did the pins on
highlighting...maybe just lose the damn pins.

I like it. I don't see myself paying for it. But I would encourage others to
use it.

------
raffi
It looks like your marketing/PR guy did good work. I'm impressed by the amount
of press you've garnered.

~~~
peterlai
Shout out to Tracy Wemett and Alex King for the great marketing. Alex has been
with WebNotes since September of last year and has helped with the refining
our our messaging. Our previous tag line was "Annotate, Organize, Share" and
was so generic, it failed to differentiate us within the annotation space.
Alex King lead the PR push six months ago for our private launch. Tracy Wemett
heads our current public launch.

------
sachmanb
so far i like everything about it. key points (1) found all the info about the
service i was looking for real fast, and my patience level is low for the
review my site stuff (2) fast and simple registration (3) encouraged me to try
it out since i didnt even have to pay (4) the privacy policy was easy to find
and understand [first question was if you were watching my browsing beyond
what i want to highlight] and you don't -- i'm going to use this app for a bit
and see how it goes.

i also like how clear you made the advantages of the app, the testimonials,
and just the overall how much information i get easily.

great job.

------
proee
Any plans to support tags? Would be nice to have folder plus tags for
organizing info.

~~~
peterlai
Several people have requested tags and other related improvements to the notes
organizer. These requests are of high priority in the next few iterations.
Thanks for the suggestion!

------
sfphotoarts
I didn't get what the site did, it looked like it was trying to sell me
something. Then I saw the button 'Download' and that turned me off. I don't
want to install any software. I cannot see how this is supposed to save me
time or money as claimed.

The sign up page took 15 seconds to load so I gave up at that point.

Online note taking isn't a problem I have that needs a solution.

Doesn't google do this already and integrated into my goole suite of tools?

------
andreshb
Why oh why did I not hear about you when I was working on my senior thesis. I
have been using Zotero which is pretty good for bibliografies, but keeping
track of my research across all my tabs and browsers, plus pdf's I download
from JSTOR, Google Scholar, has always been a pain. I will use this when
researching for blog posts and sharing with my journalists. Good job!

------
rg
Read the comments here first, went to check it out; typed in
"www.webnotes.com" and ended up at some very strange site. Came back here, and
couldn't believe that you were trying to do something with a "reasonable-
sounding" domain name for which someone else has the .com. I predict this will
be a big problem.

------
Eugene3v
Koodos on the product. I am curious, what tool/utility did u use to create the
demo clip?

Best of Luck ! :)

~~~
peterlai
Thanks for the complements. Unfortunately, I don't know what tool/utility we
used for the screencast. I do enjoy Jing though.

------
coglethorpe
It's extremely simple to use. I could go right in and play with the demo
document. I also don't have this need immediately, but your site will stick in
my mind in case I need it later...

------
quizbiz
Quite a team you have assembled. Looks like a great product, looks like it
will go far. Good luck.

------
cb33
very good design

------
TweedHeads
Great idea, superb execution.

