Even for companies that want to cloud host, there's a concern about if something happens to Shelf itself (eg: the service suffers a major multi-day outage or goes out of business). There needs to be a contingency plan (which is probably some form of self-host).
If usage of a product like this is successful, it both becomes a critical operational system and represents thousands of hours of time invested populating it. There needs to be assurance that investment is not lost and the business is not 'down' in case something happens. I work at an SMB and we use quite a few cloud-hosted services, but whenever we do we discuss the balance of how critical a service it is and what our contingency plan would be. Sometimes it's switching to a competitor (and maybe importing history), sometimes it's pulling the open source version and hosting ourselves.
The product looks great, but all I can see is "Data backup and recovery" as a feature. I don't know what that means or what happens if shelf.io disappears, so that's a huge red flag for me, unfortunately.
Apart from self-host and open source, do you have other suggestions on how to address this on a product level? Would you feel comfortable with structured exports for example?
Like I mentioned somewhere else, I actually like using Confluence depending on the use case. It tends to require much more attention in making sure things stay organized and well structured. Shelf has this built-in by being more opinionated (for better or worse, depending on what you need).
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.
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'.
Frankly, you just have to click the "x". How hard it is ? I do not understand why does it bug you so much.
The nagging and attention-stealing is everywhere. Every time I buy something online that's not Amazon or Apple, I get signed up for an email newsletter. I get spam in the mail, often from, say, furniture companies because they have some kind of sneaky thing that gets leads from pages I visit. I've never bought anything from Flos, Design Within Reach or Bonobos, but in my mailbox the crap goes.
These things add up. It's just a never-ending deluge of materialistic effluent.
Been working on helping solve this this issue for quite a while now keeping things in more of a closed circle of beta users until recently. Why? Because we wanted to build a well rounded product based on customer feedback before opening this thing up.
Anyway, so far we've built Shelf primarily on a NodeJs stack making heavy use of microservices and recently more and more Lambdas with (and sometimes without) the Serverless framework. And we built a web clipper as browser extension for Chrome and Firefox to make it easier to clip and share web content.
Would love to get your feedback on if and how you experience the pain point. Of course feedback on the product itself would be great, too, if you want to give it a spin.
> Enterprise-level security: Single Sign-On (SSO), Data backup and recovery, Role-based permissions, Secure hosting, AES encryption
Ok but that’s “consumer level” for SaaS.
For Enterprise, you need to prove to me that a malicious insider at your organization can not access the enterprise’s data. Dealing with insiders and RBAC models is particularly interesting when offering search.
You need to provide full access and full change audits trails.
You need to provide a business continuity plan, as noted in a sibling comment.
You can make a more trusted claim by getting your solution HIPAA certified. If you are compliant for storing personal medical information, you’re basically there for “enterprise-level security”.
TL;DR - Put them on the list, but don't let them burden you from making money.
Thanks for providing extra technical detail. However, I'm more curious with what's happening on the backend.
As far as I can tell, the your differentiation from something like MS Sharepoint or DropBox is an integrated OCR to extract keywords, and Artificial Intelligence to help filter (or "screen" as your landing pages call it). Is there more to your special sauce that I have overlooked?
Also, where are you storing customers' data? Amazon S3? In house servers? Are you using something like ElasticSearch or did you build your own search engine?
Sharepoint is of course very powerful. And that means you typically need a project to make it work. Shelf works out of the box, is opinionated and let's you get started with minimal to no configuration setup.
Yes, we use Amazon S3 for content uploaded to Shelf (encrypted of course) and we utilize ElasticSearch as well.
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!
When you use the wrong seperation an error is shown _after_ you switch focus to the next input field. Worse: the (appearently badly formatted) tags are wiped instead of giving me the option to replace the bad characters it found.
The number of tags allowed is unclear too.
It turns out that tag-field is completely whacked. At a 30(?) characters it assumes you've meant that set of characters as a tag. Unless your previous tag (delimited by an [enter] as it turns out) has a 10 or so characters too. Then it cuts of your next 30 character tag and deletes it.
Feature request: expiration dates on items.
Tags: delimiters are [comma], [enter] and [tab]. 50 tags are the max. 30 characters are the max. We'll see how we can make tagging a better experience. Including suggested tags based on content/previous behavior.
Can you explain what you mean exactly by: expiration on items?
So that folks coming after them know that the docs are probably no longer valid.
IMHO more companies should do these kinds of posts because they emphasize fast product-market matching, using decently-informed decisions.
'platforms and more.' seems like it was supposed to get edited out or something.
Or Confluence with cards. That's what it looks like on Product page.
Shelf is for curated content, not direct collaboration or Wiki. For that, we integrate with what was built for it, such as Google Docs.
Here is a comparison with Confluence, hope that helps: https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison
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> Compared to Confluence: cannot create editable wiki pages, cannot "Build an Internal Wikipedia of company knowledge" etc.
Erm. How is this tool helping to "Find, organize, and share your distributed team's most valuable content"?
I currently work at an organization with over 2000 programmers and engineers. They would laugh at your face if you told them they cannot write free text in the "Knowledge management tool".
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?
> The average organization uses over 20 different platforms to manage their content and the problem is only getting worse.
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/) ;) From experience, the problem usually isn't with the technology/physical tools, but with people's behaviour. Things like screening content so people have more trust in it is good, but people still need to at least begin to input content.
Though as far as being something that sits between lots of different tools and platforms, the comic still applies, and I've seen a few of those products come and go over the last couple of years.
I found the comparisons on the 'Why Shelf?' page odd. You mention SharePoint, Confluence and Bloomfire at the top, yet don't do any comparisons to them, only to things which are obviously different (e.g. communications platforms).
Of course you're right in a way. Tools are only as helpful as the people using them. So, we want to build a platform that makes it as easy and intuitive as possible, to add and organize things in a way that's accessible to others. And as a next step, build in more intelligence that assists in doing this automatically, including connecting and enriching content.
Content is usually already there, it's just often "locked" in different silos like a Dropbox, Email, CRM systems. We see Shelf connecting with the different content providers and pulling the most important content (not all of it).
There are a couple of comparisons with other platforms, the links are (hidden) in the footer of the homepage, here is one of them: https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison
