Ask YC: Review my startup, Atombox
http://atombox.net
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.
I'm chatting at http://tinychat.com/atombox as well as on Twitter as @contextlines. Any thoughts are appreciated.
Thanks!
59 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread2. 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.
We are not dead-set on any one way to make revenue. We have some other ideas, but we decided to try the subscription bit.
There are countless free and paid list apps out there already. Many of them overdo it on the features, don't use SSL, don't have keyboard shortcuts, and so on. We've tried to take out everything that isn't absolutely necessary and we will give you one-on-one support.
I don't mind if all the others make money too -- all I need is enough revenue to pay myself and my co-founder salary and pay for the servers.
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.
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.
This was one of my core frustrations when I started searching for a list system. I wanted all of my "augmented memory" in one place so that I didn't have to deal with multiple copies of the same thing and having to keep it all in sync. I also wanted to be able to access everything from any box.
Thanks for your comment!
Oh: and I hear 'ya about org-mode + redmine syncing. ;)
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! ;)
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.
Thanks for taking a look!
* 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"'GTD' and 'Getting Things Done' are registered trademarks of the David Allen Corporation."
That's why, I believe, you get attributions for mere mentions of mega-corp names in some advertising copy.
In this instance I think that GTD should probably be avoided without a disclaimer as it's not a common usage that I've heard whilst "getting things done" (no capitals) is just a generic phrase used in all fields. I'd be surprised if a RTM was granted for this text, perhaps the specific form of the logo is RTM-ed?
IANA-TM-L but I worked in IP for a while.
http://atombox.net
Good luck.
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, ...
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.
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!
Doing GTD helps, since that's primarily what Atombox is designed for, but I think having a "augmented memory" service helps any information/knowledge worker.
--
edited to clarify: an "atom" is our lingo, not something in the "Getting Things Done" book.
With apologies to Linus
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.
Thanks, that's very helpful!
Best of luck!