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Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

shelf.io

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Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#21

Post by vvanders »

michaelmcdonald wrote: post #4

I don't see any mention of the ability to self-host. That's a deal breaker for many people. I trust that my internal network is going to stay up; however external connections can be severed and I'm dependent upon you as a company to keep your resources online. If you're down, my knowledge access is down. That destroys productivity. I appreciate the idea and the execution looks good; however for the product itself I w…

Yup, if you're looking to target enterprise this is going to be a non-starter for many organizations.

Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#24

Post by tfjaeckel »

calebm wrote: post #16

Looks like "Evernote for teams"? Evernote does have some of those features, but I think a team-focused app like this makes sense.

You're right, Shelf does have some of the Evernote functionality, I guess most notably the web clipper. What we focussed on is more of where Evernote falls short. Which in my opinion is good and easy collaboration across teams.

An advantage of Evernote for now is that Shelf doesn't have offline note-taking. What do you think, is this something hugely important to have?

Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#25

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

beeskneecaps wrote: post #22

Interested? ENDURE WAVES OF POPUPS BEFORE UNDERSTANDING THE PRODUCT!

Want to know what it does? A picture is worth a thousand words, so try squinting at these tiny screenshots on your mobile phone.

Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#27

Post by leon_sbt »

The site looks great and good job on shipping it out!

I probably don't fit as your target customer, so please take my feedback with a grain of salt.

After digging around your site for a bit, it seems like your "special sauce" is to bring incredibly powerful search features for multiple data types/sources all from a single authoritative place (Shelf.io)

Based on your YouTube videos, I really like the ability to parse rich data on the internet and input it for my team to see. Seems like a great product marketing/engineering folks during the high level brainstorming phase.

Use case: 1.Software Engineer: Reads a cool article on Medium about some software technique and wants their team to consider it for their their new beta project.

2.Marketing person: Gets inspired by a video/image for a new ad campaign that they are designing and wants to share it with their team.

Also as an end user, I really like being able to see your actual product and how it works without needing to signup or give out my information. If the product seems like it can solve my pain point within 45 seconds of an intro video and 5 mins of playing with a demo site, then I'll commit to a email signup. Basecamp's "How it works" tab does a great job of this.

On the flip side, I feel that Salesforce doesn't need to do this, since they already have market share and a great reputation for their products.

I would take your "Intro to Shelf" YouTube video, cut the first 25 seconds out and embed it somewhere convenient on your website.

Highlight an example use case through a short video. I think Grammarly does a great job with this in their "new social media manager video" FWD TO :15 seconds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak-Y56SfkS0

Also for your voiceovers in the Youtube videos, I would invest in a good audio recording mic. The audio seems a little distant,and hollow. I use a Zoom H5 recorder, it is a decent product for what I need/require.As a lay audio person, This is my reference point for good voice audio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw&t=15s.

I know you guys are in start up mode, and need to ship. But as random end user, this is what I'm perceiving. Hope this helps! Good Luck!

Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#29

Post by tfjaeckel »

leon_sbt wrote: post #27

The site looks great and good job on shipping it out! I probably don't fit as your target customer, so please take my feedback with a grain of salt. After digging around your site for a bit, it seems like your "special sauce" is to bring incredibly powerful search features for multiple data types/sources all from a single authoritative place (Shelf.io) Based on your YouTube videos, I really like the ability to parse…

Thank you, great detailed feedback on what we can do to make it easier and more pleasant to get the gist of Shelf right away. It's really appreciated.

Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#30

Post by Jedd »

tfjaeckel wrote: post #13
michaelmcdonald wrote: post #4

I don't see any mention of the ability to self-host. That's a deal breaker for many people. I trust that my internal network is going to stay up; however external connections can be severed and I'm dependent upon you as a company to keep your resources online. If you're down, my knowledge access is down. That destroys productivity. I appreciate the idea and the execution looks good; however for the product itself I w…

Totally understand this perspective. I guess it depends on the type of organization and what you're willing to put in the cloud vs. what you want to manage yourself. Our architecture is generally built in a way with self-hosted in mind but it's somewhere down the road and not something we'll have in the short to mid-term.

Hi Tobias -- looks like your team has put an incredible amount of work into this, and it looks wonderful.

For my own part I struggle to find data that's strewn across frequently deprecated PDF's, salesforce, one-drive / sharepoint, mailing list archives, a home-spun knowledge base, yammer, an aging twiki instance, and possibly a few more information repositories. And I work in a relatively small and tech-savvy organisation. So I definitely feel the pain you're trying to cure. :)

'Cloud' is tricky. No two people agree what that word means for starters. In terms of a knowledge repository / index / retrieval system -- for many enterprises, when talking about core institutional knowledge, 'manage yourself' is not the opposite of 'in the cloud'.

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