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I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

getpolarized.io

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Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#91

Post by burtonator »

fundamental wrote: post #87
getpolarized wrote: post #4

Here are a few more resources if you're interested: Our roadmap: https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html Here's a discussion of using datastores to support a more distributed web: https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-p... A high level mission statement which is still a work in progress: https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-Statement.h...

The roadmap for a project should provide a marketing opportunity where you can explain the current direction of a project and the high level changes that are expected to be seen over the coming months or years. Right now your roadmap reads like a list of open feature requests on an issue tracker. IMO it is far too much in the weeds, like most of the site. After going through several pages it is still unclear what pro…

"too much in the weeds" is a good way to phrase this actually. I'm going to work on improving it but slammed for time.

Growth is hard man! :)

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#92

Post by ActsJuvenile »

I read through the entire pitch and I still don't understand what is special about Polar. There are a ton of apps that do all this and more in no particular order:

1) Xodo Reader 2) Liquid Text 3) Margin Notes 3 (AWESOME) 4) KOReader (Open source) And several dozen more...

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#93

Post by jammygit »

burtonator wrote: post #13
kristianc wrote: post #10

From a marketing perspective, it’s really advisable to tell people what your thing is before asking for money. Not being snarky - from taking a quick glance I genuinely couldn’t tell what the thing is and I’m unlikely to sit through a video without at least some high level intro of what I’m going to get.

Thanks. I went back and forth on this and it was a tough call.. the plan was to get an initial crowdfunding video out and try to raise from people already passionate about Polar. I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on. If this was successful I was going to invest more time in a kickstarter/indiegogo style campaign. This took a week of work already so was a bug chu…

'I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on.'

The comment reminded me of something: in startup school, they cautioned us against pursuing a grand vision and encouraged us to talk to our users to find out what problems they needed to solve. In this case I think there is a lot of overlap but just wanted to say it since I remember the video so vividly.

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#94

Post by uxamanda »

burtonator wrote: post #25

Here's a better pitch based on your feedback and maybe more tailored to the Hacker News crowd. The Internet is broken as content primary pools behind walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter. These platforms are not open in the sense that the metadata is locked up inside them. Additionally, they're not very respective of the rights and privacy of their user base. Polar tries to reboot this by building out a generic d…

I think there’s a headline in there with the double meaning of “Save the web.” Something like... “Save the web. Polar helps you archive, search, and take notes on what you read online. Whether it’s the web-based documentation you need to keep that one piece of infrastructure running, that PDF for your dissertation research, or anything else online you’d like to keep your own copy of, Polar can help. Plus we think by helping people save their copy of the web, we can fix the web too. Learn more.” But with better examples from how your customers are already using Polar. I’ve been looking for an open source solution to this problem (basically, how can I have my own search engine built from things I’ve read) for a while now. I’m not ready to add a new tool quite yet, but am keeping an eye on this. Good luck!

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#95

Post by jammygit »

kristianc wrote: post #17
burtonator wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I went back and forth on this and it was a tough call.. the plan was to get an initial crowdfunding video out and try to raise from people already passionate about Polar. I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on. If this was successful I was going to invest more time in a kickstarter/indiegogo style campaign. This took a week of work already so was a bug chu…

The positioning isn’t a fluff piece exercise - it’s how you define what you are building, who it is for, and who it is not for. As a product guy, it’s your North Star. Without it you end up doing one or both of going down a tech rabbit hole of ‘it’s a decentralized, federated blah’ and losing people’s interest entirely. Ideally you should have a quick this is what we do, why we do it, and why we’re different ready at…

I found that the process of making a pitch deck really helped me to flesh out my last product attempt, it was very educational for me. Next time I try to make something, I will make such a deck at the ideation phase.

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#96

Post by lurker458 »

burtonator wrote: post #63
chuckgreenman wrote: post #61

I'm not sure if this is an Instapaper clone, an Evernote clone, an rss reader, or a flash card sync system. Not really sure anyone needs this. You talk about walled gardens and privacy concerns and "rebooting" the web but say that you're using Google's firebase as a backend for sync. Personally, I'm just sort of at peace with the fact that Google has a copy of all my email and records of my location for the years I'v…

This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly. Google has no rights to your data. It's just stored there.

Do you feel you're sufficiently qualified to make that call on behalf of all your users ?

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#97

Post by qafy »

burtonator wrote: post #65
kristianc wrote: post #10

From a marketing perspective, it’s really advisable to tell people what your thing is before asking for money. Not being snarky - from taking a quick glance I genuinely couldn’t tell what the thing is and I’m unlikely to sit through a video without at least some high level intro of what I’m going to get.

This has been good feedback (even if a bit rough) and will definitely try to refine it a bit more. One of the things I've found that I struggle with is trying to explain what I'm building as most things are obvious to me since I'm the one building it. Our users have done a GREAT job helping me out with that and pointing out the flaws with Polar regarding usability that I can't see. I wonder if this is related to inat…

Get someone else who is familiar with the project to help you out with writing public facing material. Another perspective always help.

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#98

Post by brodouevencode »

burtonator wrote: post #72
brodouevencode wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the other two questions, especially #2. (It's not just your effort.) Whenever I hear someone attempt to make the case of rebooting the Internet they never identify to what end, how to replace the old internet (because there will be resistance), or (which is annoyingly untrue but I get that you have to market it) come clean in that they're not really rebooting the internet, just how data gets shared across…

We're not going creating more fragmentation. A metaphor would be "how could tearing down fences create more fragmentation"?

If you say so.

Do you really think your competitors are just going to roll over?

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#100

Post by Fnoord »

kristianc wrote: post #69
burtonator wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been good feedback (even if a bit rough) and will definitely try to refine it a bit more. One of the things I've found that I struggle with is trying to explain what I'm building as most things are obvious to me since I'm the one building it. Our users have done a GREAT job helping me out with that and pointing out the flaws with Polar regarding usability that I can't see. I wonder if this is related to inat…

One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one. Focus on a real pain point that people are having, and organize everything in your messaging around that. Why do people need a document manager in the first place? What is this going to do for them that their existing solutions don’t do? How…

> One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one.

macOS, GNOME, iOS all seem to -successfully- have the less is more paradigm.

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