8 ms·

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

59 points by tfjaeckel 9y ago

tfjaeckel 9y ago
Hi, I'm one of the founders of Shelf. We think teams and organizations are wasting too much time locating and sharing knowledge. 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.
- jasode 9y ago
  >Anyway, so far we've built Shelf primarily on a NodeJs stack [...] And we built a web clipper as browser extension for Chrome and Firefox [...] 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?
  - tfjaeckel 9y ago
    Dropbox is really great for storing and syncing files across devices. It doesn't have a rich set of pre-built filters, you can only store files, not mixed content including links, contacts, etc. So, Shelf is really a complementary solution for Dropbox and can sit on top of it, combining the Dropbox content with other content from a single interface. 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.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      You needn't be all that specific, but how do you securely search the encrypted data?
      - tfjaeckel 9y ago
        Data is secured at rest and in transmission. We take every measure available in Elastic to secure the search indexes themselves.
        KGIII 9y ago
        Ah, so the indexes are secured - but are they encrypted? You don't need to answer. It's okay. I'm largely asking because I've been thinking about writing an series of essays on the subject of security and one of the topics I have taken some notes about is searching encrypted data. If the index isn't secure, it kind of defeats the idea of encryption - someone need only make off with the index and be able to draw some conclusions. More so if it's relational. There are different ways that some go about this, one is the hash with individual words with a unique salt and search for the hashes, but that has its own set of problems, like the ability to eliminate words like 'the' and 'it' from search queries. Well, at least computationally easy. So, it's purely for my own curiosity that I ask. I imagine it might be doable to load it into RAM, the whole DB - if it's small enough or you have enough RAM, and then do the searches there in an encrypted environment? I am not so concerned with exfiltration by 'hackers' so much as I'm concerned with exfiltration by employees. Should I get to writing the essays, that's going to be a central theme - protecting data from rogue employees with the increased use of cloud services in today's business environment. Again, I'd not want you to feel obligated to release anything proprietary or anything that would compromise your security.
- Terretta 9y ago
  I want what you’re offering, but I do need real security assurances, beyond “secure hosting”. > 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”.
  - tfjaeckel 9y ago
    Thanks for that input. Totally agree that HIPAA certification is a good approach to prove full coverage of what you've mentioned.
    - didgeoridoo 9y ago
      Is "HIPAA certification" an actual thing? As far as I know, the various HIPAA "certificates" offered by private companies are not universally recognized, nor do they have clear legal relevance. See TrueVault's FAQ: https://www.truevault.com/hipaa-compliance.html https://www.truevault.com/hipaa-compliance.html
      - mbesto 9y ago
        It's not. You typically sign whats a called a BAA[0] with an entity that is covered by HIPAA compliance. In other words, if a hospital wants to use the software they would make the SaaS provider sign a BAA. This then subjects both the hospital to HIPAA as well as the BAA. The best you can do is basically get audited by an external firm, not dissimilar to how PCI compliance works (which also doesn't have a certification, but has QSA certifications). [0] - https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities/sample-business-associate-agreement-provisions/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities...
dorian-graph 9y ago
First, before I sound too critical, congratulations on launching your product. > 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/) 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).
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  Off topic, but FYI -- HN doesn't use Markdown. I make this mistake regularly and have to try to ninja edit each time. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
  - dorian-graph 9y ago
    Ah that's right, thanks!
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  Thanks for all your feedback, doesn't sound that critical to me at all and really is straight to the core of the challenge. :) 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 https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison
michaelmcdonald 9y ago
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 wouldn't trust SaaS since I can't control whether it's up or down.
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  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.
  - Jedd 9y ago
    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'.
    - tfjaeckel 9y ago
      Thanks Jedd for your kind words! We have a great Team that made this happen and is working hard to keep making Shelf better every day. And help cure that pain you share. :) My use of 'cloud' wasn't very exact, you're right. I suppose most enterprises have or will have their 'own' infrastructure in the cloud and manage it there themselves. I really meant cloud in the way of a SaaS-model.
dotancohen 9y ago
To be clear: Shelf is a webapp (though at least not Electron-based).
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  Yes, that's right. At the moment it's a web app. Adding an installable version, possibly via Electron is something we've thought about and probably makes sense to unlock some functionality a web app just doesn't have permissions to do (such as file system access). You can also install our web clipper which is a browser extension but that's not needed to use Shelf.
amelius 9y ago
Half of the IT world seems to be trying to solve this problem :)
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  Nice validation that the pain really does exist! :)
calimac 9y ago
I setup a demo. It's beautiful, crisp and well thought out. I think users will find it easy to navigate. It was clearly intuative. the best part is the GUI structure and representation of the tools. It stores files and information related to the collaboration oround those files; that's it. But it does it so well a monkey can work within the interface successfully.
calebm 9y ago
Looks like "Evernote for teams"? Evernote does have some of those features, but I think a team-focused app like this makes sense.
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  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?
  - calebm 9y ago
    I definitely like offline note taking, but I don't know if it's a deal-breaker. I agree that Evernote's collaboration is weak (which is fine, Evernote's focus is personal notes - and I think it makes sense to have a note app that is team focused).
j2bax 9y ago
I think there is a typo on the Why Shelf? page. "Important information is buried in email inboxes, cloud storage platforms, communication tools, project management tools and the list goes on. platforms and more." 'platforms and more.' seems like it was supposed to get edited out or something.
- sedarius7 9y ago
  Great pickup. Will make changes shortly. Thanks!
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  Thanks! Fixed. :)
beeskneecaps 9y ago
Interested? ENDURE WAVES OF POPUPS BEFORE UNDERSTANDING THE PRODUCT!
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  Ouch! Is it really that many?
- bluesnowmonkey 9y ago
  Want to know what it does? A picture is worth a thousand words, so try squinting at these tiny screenshots on your mobile phone.
- wocram 9y ago
  I couldn't tell what it was at all, and 'Everything that matters' isn't enough for me not to click away.
leon_sbt 9y ago
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 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 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!
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  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.
dmitriid 9y ago
So. Confluence. At least that's what it looks like form available tiny screenshots on the landing page. Or Confluence with cards. That's what it looks like on Product page.
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  I see how you could come to that conclusion. At first glance, yes similar. However, Confluence really is a Wiki on steroids. Great to link with Jira, collaborate on Specs or the like. You can use it for document storage but not what it's built for. We use Confluence internally in the Dev Team ourselves and for that it's great. 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 https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    > Find, organize, and share your distributed team's most valuable content ... > 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".
    - tfjaeckel 9y ago
      All good. That's not really the use case for Shelf. You'd publish final versions of deliverables on Shelf, not necessarily your whole work-in-progress. Just to share a different perspective, not even to disagree with your view: Think of a marketing team that wants to publish and share presentations to be used by sales reps. Or a team of researchers that wants to curate different types of information (docs, links, videos) for later perusal. Enrich each of those with meta data. These are different use cases, that's where Shelf shines.
mverwijs 9y ago
When tagging an item during editing it is unclear how to seperate tags. Semi-colon? Colon? Space? 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.
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  Thanks for taking time to try out Shelf! And for providing your feedback as well. 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?
  - mverwijs 9y ago
    Nothing goes stale faster than documentation. What I'd like to see is that when someone adds documentation he/she also adds an 'use before' or 'expires on' date. So that folks coming after them know that the docs are probably no longer valid.
    - tfjaeckel 9y ago
      Got it. I first thought you wanted that content to disappear altogether. Thanks for clarifying.
jph 9y ago
Kudos to the product team that wrote the various "Shelf vs. X" posts. These are well done and very useful for quickly understanding the Shelf product value. IMHO more companies should do these kinds of posts because they emphasize fast product-market matching, using decently-informed decisions.
bigblind 9y ago
After browsing the home page for ~30 seconds, I had a popup pushed in my face asking me to enter my e-mail address. I understand that building an e-mail list is important, but please don't do this. I'm taking the time to check out your product, don't bug me while I'm doing that.
- codegladiator 9y ago
  People don't want ads, don't want crypto-currency mining and not not even "popups" asking for emails, want free trials. Frankly, you just have to click the "x". How hard it is ? I do not understand why does it bug you so much.
  - lobster_johnson 9y ago
    Every damn site does this. I'm in the middle of reading an article and boom, I get a popup in my face asking for something. If it were just one site, that'd be fine. It's not -- it's an epidemic. News sites, shopping sites, blogs, charities, tech articles, they all nag and nag. 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.
    - codegladiator 9y ago
      And probably you dislike - ads - mining inside your browser - paying I dislike all of these too. But complaining about a "modal window asking for email which you can close" seems mean. The nagging and attention stealing is everywhere and you can easily ignore them or at least tell an alternative solution to these guys.
      - lobster_johnson 9y ago
        As I said, if it were only this site, it'd be fine. But it's the entire frickin' Internet at this point. Almost every single browser experience is entering a world of nagging or shameless selling.

59 points by tfjaeckel 9y ago

Hi, I'm one of the founders of Shelf. We think teams and organizations are wasting too much time locating and sharing knowledge. 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.

jasode 9y ago
>Anyway, so far we've built Shelf primarily on a NodeJs stack [...] And we built a web clipper as browser extension for Chrome and Firefox [...] 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?
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  Dropbox is really great for storing and syncing files across devices. It doesn't have a rich set of pre-built filters, you can only store files, not mixed content including links, contacts, etc. So, Shelf is really a complementary solution for Dropbox and can sit on top of it, combining the Dropbox content with other content from a single interface. 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.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    You needn't be all that specific, but how do you securely search the encrypted data?
    - tfjaeckel 9y ago
      Data is secured at rest and in transmission. We take every measure available in Elastic to secure the search indexes themselves.
      - KGIII 9y ago
        Ah, so the indexes are secured - but are they encrypted? You don't need to answer. It's okay. I'm largely asking because I've been thinking about writing an series of essays on the subject of security and one of the topics I have taken some notes about is searching encrypted data. If the index isn't secure, it kind of defeats the idea of encryption - someone need only make off with the index and be able to draw some conclusions. More so if it's relational. There are different ways that some go about this, one is the hash with individual words with a unique salt and search for the hashes, but that has its own set of problems, like the ability to eliminate words like 'the' and 'it' from search queries. Well, at least computationally easy. So, it's purely for my own curiosity that I ask. I imagine it might be doable to load it into RAM, the whole DB - if it's small enough or you have enough RAM, and then do the searches there in an encrypted environment? I am not so concerned with exfiltration by 'hackers' so much as I'm concerned with exfiltration by employees. Should I get to writing the essays, that's going to be a central theme - protecting data from rogue employees with the increased use of cloud services in today's business environment. Again, I'd not want you to feel obligated to release anything proprietary or anything that would compromise your security.
Terretta 9y ago
I want what you’re offering, but I do need real security assurances, beyond “secure hosting”. > 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”.
- tfjaeckel 9y ago
  Thanks for that input. Totally agree that HIPAA certification is a good approach to prove full coverage of what you've mentioned.
  - didgeoridoo 9y ago
    Is "HIPAA certification" an actual thing? As far as I know, the various HIPAA "certificates" offered by private companies are not universally recognized, nor do they have clear legal relevance. See TrueVault's FAQ: https://www.truevault.com/hipaa-compliance.html https://www.truevault.com/hipaa-compliance.html
    - mbesto 9y ago
      It's not. You typically sign whats a called a BAA[0] with an entity that is covered by HIPAA compliance. In other words, if a hospital wants to use the software they would make the SaaS provider sign a BAA. This then subjects both the hospital to HIPAA as well as the BAA. The best you can do is basically get audited by an external firm, not dissimilar to how PCI compliance works (which also doesn't have a certification, but has QSA certifications). [0] - https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities/sample-business-associate-agreement-provisions/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities...

dorian-graph 9y ago

First, before I sound too critical, congratulations on launching your product. > 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/) 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).

52-6F-62 9y ago
Off topic, but FYI -- HN doesn't use Markdown. I make this mistake regularly and have to try to ninja edit each time. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- dorian-graph 9y ago
  Ah that's right, thanks!
tfjaeckel 9y ago
Thanks for all your feedback, doesn't sound that critical to me at all and really is straight to the core of the challenge. :) 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 https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison

michaelmcdonald 9y ago

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 wouldn't trust SaaS since I can't control whether it's up or down.

tfjaeckel 9y ago
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.
- Jedd 9y ago
  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'.
  - tfjaeckel 9y ago
    Thanks Jedd for your kind words! We have a great Team that made this happen and is working hard to keep making Shelf better every day. And help cure that pain you share. :) My use of 'cloud' wasn't very exact, you're right. I suppose most enterprises have or will have their 'own' infrastructure in the cloud and manage it there themselves. I really meant cloud in the way of a SaaS-model.

dotancohen 9y ago

To be clear: Shelf is a webapp (though at least not Electron-based).

tfjaeckel 9y ago
Yes, that's right. At the moment it's a web app. Adding an installable version, possibly via Electron is something we've thought about and probably makes sense to unlock some functionality a web app just doesn't have permissions to do (such as file system access). You can also install our web clipper which is a browser extension but that's not needed to use Shelf.

amelius 9y ago

Half of the IT world seems to be trying to solve this problem :)

tfjaeckel 9y ago
Nice validation that the pain really does exist! :)

calimac 9y ago

I setup a demo. It's beautiful, crisp and well thought out. I think users will find it easy to navigate. It was clearly intuative. the best part is the GUI structure and representation of the tools. It stores files and information related to the collaboration oround those files; that's it. But it does it so well a monkey can work within the interface successfully.

calebm 9y ago

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

tfjaeckel 9y ago
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?
- calebm 9y ago
  I definitely like offline note taking, but I don't know if it's a deal-breaker. I agree that Evernote's collaboration is weak (which is fine, Evernote's focus is personal notes - and I think it makes sense to have a note app that is team focused).

j2bax 9y ago

I think there is a typo on the Why Shelf? page. "Important information is buried in email inboxes, cloud storage platforms, communication tools, project management tools and the list goes on. platforms and more." 'platforms and more.' seems like it was supposed to get edited out or something.

sedarius7 9y ago
Great pickup. Will make changes shortly. Thanks!
tfjaeckel 9y ago
Thanks! Fixed. :)

beeskneecaps 9y ago

Interested? ENDURE WAVES OF POPUPS BEFORE UNDERSTANDING THE PRODUCT!

tfjaeckel 9y ago
Ouch! Is it really that many?
bluesnowmonkey 9y ago
Want to know what it does? A picture is worth a thousand words, so try squinting at these tiny screenshots on your mobile phone.
wocram 9y ago
I couldn't tell what it was at all, and 'Everything that matters' isn't enough for me not to click away.

leon_sbt 9y ago

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 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 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!

tfjaeckel 9y ago
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.

dmitriid 9y ago

So. Confluence. At least that's what it looks like form available tiny screenshots on the landing page. Or Confluence with cards. That's what it looks like on Product page.

tfjaeckel 9y ago
I see how you could come to that conclusion. At first glance, yes similar. However, Confluence really is a Wiki on steroids. Great to link with Jira, collaborate on Specs or the like. You can use it for document storage but not what it's built for. We use Confluence internally in the Dev Team ourselves and for that it's great. 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 https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison
- dmitriid 9y ago
  > Find, organize, and share your distributed team's most valuable content ... > 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".
  - tfjaeckel 9y ago
    All good. That's not really the use case for Shelf. You'd publish final versions of deliverables on Shelf, not necessarily your whole work-in-progress. Just to share a different perspective, not even to disagree with your view: Think of a marketing team that wants to publish and share presentations to be used by sales reps. Or a team of researchers that wants to curate different types of information (docs, links, videos) for later perusal. Enrich each of those with meta data. These are different use cases, that's where Shelf shines.

mverwijs 9y ago

When tagging an item during editing it is unclear how to seperate tags. Semi-colon? Colon? Space? 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.

tfjaeckel 9y ago
Thanks for taking time to try out Shelf! And for providing your feedback as well. 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?
- mverwijs 9y ago
  Nothing goes stale faster than documentation. What I'd like to see is that when someone adds documentation he/she also adds an 'use before' or 'expires on' date. So that folks coming after them know that the docs are probably no longer valid.
  - tfjaeckel 9y ago
    Got it. I first thought you wanted that content to disappear altogether. Thanks for clarifying.

jph 9y ago

Kudos to the product team that wrote the various "Shelf vs. X" posts. These are well done and very useful for quickly understanding the Shelf product value. IMHO more companies should do these kinds of posts because they emphasize fast product-market matching, using decently-informed decisions.

bigblind 9y ago

After browsing the home page for ~30 seconds, I had a popup pushed in my face asking me to enter my e-mail address. I understand that building an e-mail list is important, but please don't do this. I'm taking the time to check out your product, don't bug me while I'm doing that.

codegladiator 9y ago
People don't want ads, don't want crypto-currency mining and not not even "popups" asking for emails, want free trials. Frankly, you just have to click the "x". How hard it is ? I do not understand why does it bug you so much.
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  Every damn site does this. I'm in the middle of reading an article and boom, I get a popup in my face asking for something. If it were just one site, that'd be fine. It's not -- it's an epidemic. News sites, shopping sites, blogs, charities, tech articles, they all nag and nag. 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.
  - codegladiator 9y ago
    And probably you dislike - ads - mining inside your browser - paying I dislike all of these too. But complaining about a "modal window asking for email which you can close" seems mean. The nagging and attention stealing is everywhere and you can easily ignore them or at least tell an alternative solution to these guys.
    - lobster_johnson 9y ago
      As I said, if it were only this site, it'd be fine. But it's the entire frickin' Internet at this point. Almost every single browser experience is entering a world of nagging or shameless selling.