Show HN: We've just announced our 2nd product (Papyrs) of our small SaaS startup | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We've just announced our 2nd product (Papyrs) of our small SaaS startup

3 pointsjd4 comments

Part of the whole HN philosophy is to launch early and iterate often, so in that spirit we'd like to present www.papyrs.com - our new SaaS product. Some feedback on the concept (or on the way we present it) would be invaluable.

Is it clear what our product does? Any other first thoughts?

PS: Inspired by HN (and guided by the common sense advice) our first product turned into a full time job. That was a big milestone for us!

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Clickable: http://www.papyrs.com

Overall I like it. It immediately made me think of whichever 37signals product that does the exact same thing.

Initially I thought the page was just the left paragraph and the 3 image slider. I was about to leave until I noticed it scrolled down -- If I didnt find this on HN I would have closed it anyway).

So I'd like to see you add more pictures on the right slider or replace it with a video. If you keep the slider, increase the speed! You're using 1 picture with a few bullet points, it doesn't take 30 seconds to digest that.

Thanks for the feedback!

The guys at 37signals make great products, but they tend to be on the minimalistic side. We have features such as permissions (it turns out people really care about that), a widget system, and with Papyrs you can create forms.

Of course there is a lot of cool stuff we really want to add, but for our first version we have to limit ourselves to the core functionality and that's almost by definition going to overlap with the competition.

I increased the slider speed and I changed the layout slightly to avoid the scroll down problem you described.

Again. thanks for the feedback!

Looks like a great website. I just have a few comments.

- It took me a while to understand the purpose of the website. At first glance it seemed to be some kind of a wiki tool, but then I understood that you could also create forms and generate reports. So it's like Google Docs + Wiki.

- The slideshow is really nice. It does take a while to read it because the text and arrows seem to have equal graphical 'importance' as the rest of the image, so they are not easy to find. I would suggest making the explanatory text a bit more prominent (either using more standout colors/fonts, or by lightening up the graphic under them)

- Even after I understand the concept of the website, I'm not sure how I would use it in my company. I know I can 'collect information' and 'collaborate with clients', but I'm still trying to think of some good real use cases. Maybe it would help if you had some example use cases up there so that your users get that 'aha' feeling right away.

Thymer looks great too!

- Google Docs + Wiki is a pretty good description. The wiki part speaks for itself, but there are also many cases where people (ab)use excel as ad hoc database. We want to get Papyrs to the point where it can be used for that kind of informal/ad-hoc database and form use.

- Good point about the slideshow. We're thinking we should replace it with a screencast.

- I suppose it depends on the way your company is organized. We're only a 2 man company and we already need something like Papyrs to keep track of different documents (tax regulation info, receipts, brainstorming sketches, etc). With some documents we want to know when they're updated (email notification) with some we don't. Full text search. Versioning. The ability to add notes and ideas to the side of a document. Checklists are huge (when you suddenly have to fix an email or mysql server in the middle of the night it a checklist is absolutely necessary). We've haven't found any product that would solve these problems for us, hence Papyrs.

Feedback appreciated!

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