5 ms·

Show HN: Lightweight Productivity Tool

53 points by ke_ga 3y ago

Hi HN! I’m the founder of Zlinky (http://Zlinky.com http://Zlinky.com). Zlinky is an app that helps you save and organize your links and screenshots. We have worked hard to keep the app very simple. We also have a web version and a Chrome Extension. I was inspired to build this app as I was struggling to find an easy way save / organize / revisit / connect ideas. I couldn't find an existing tool that was lightweight and purpose built. I spend a LOT of time consuming content, and I felt that I wasn't being effective revisiting the highest quality content for work or personal purposes. My screenshots were also in a mess and that one important screenshot often got lost. I learnt about building prosumer apps as the Co-Founder of ManageFlitter (RIP). We scaled ManageFlitter to over 4 million users. Eventually Twitter refused most of our most valuable features. The ManageFlitter story captures the crazy rollercoaster that was building on top of the public Twitter API. Zlinky has a very generous free account that should be sufficient most users for a long period of time. Would love to get your feedback, questions, and ideas. Thanks! :) Kevin

wscourge 3y ago
Your free plan is really generous, are you planning on keeping it once the premium plans are released?
- ke_ga 3y ago
  Thanks for the question. We feel a generous free account is important: 1- Our product becomes increasingly useful once you get in the habit of using it to stay organised, this usefulness takes time to evolve, so we need to have an open ended free account to provide our users with an opportunity to experience its full benefit. 2- Since the ManageFlitter days, I like having a large cohort of free users. We get great user feedback from a critical mass of free users, and it pushes us to always work on a high quality upgrade path, not to mention having to solve some nice technical scaling challenges! Overall it pushes us to build a better product. We have a proposed full pricing structure up on our website. We hope to leave our pricing structure as the website reflects (including the free plan), and we will continue to build out the feature set of the Premium Accounts as to make Premium accounts increasingly useful over time. For example in future, we would like to offer some extra note taking features, home district widget configuration, collaboration features etc to Premium Accounts. Importantly we will always offer free and easy data portability, so users can export their data at any stage if our product no longer is fit for use. Feel free to let me know any other product feedback. Thanks. Kevin
jsf01 3y ago
One of my biggest concerns when saving lots of things to an app like this and spending time curating bookmarks and other content is what happens if the app one day disappears. Is there a data export mechanism built in or other considerations for these sorts of events?
- ke_ga 3y ago
  Thanks for the important question. We plan to always offer data portability for free. Currently you can easily export your links to a CSV file. The CSV file contains details of your links, the folder it is saved in, and any notes attached to that link. Over time we will update this export to include any images that you saved into your Zlinky account. Currently you can download a CSV of your saved links once a day. We also hope to offer import link, image etc options over time. Thanks. Kevin
danpalmer 3y ago
Some feedback about the pitch – I see bookmarking as one relatively small slice of "productivity" as a software category. I wasn't sure what to expect when I clicked on the link titled "Lightweight Productivity Tool", but expected something closer to, I guess Notion, or a few other similar tools I've seen around here recently – i.e. an integrated, straightforward tool, that covers much of what "productivity" could mean. As for the product, I'll admit I've not actually installed or tried it, but based on the page... I've tried many "organise X into folders" sorts of products in the past to try to get my life in order, and none of them ever stick. Even when I take the time to organise a whole aspect of my life, I either come back and realise I organised it in the wrong way for how I need to access it, or I just search and skip the organised hierarchy. How does Zlinky change this? From looking at the page, I'm not sure it does. A folder-based bookmarking service is handy, but all the major browsers can sync this sort of stuff I think. Can Zlinky cause a step-change in how much value I get out of my bookmarks? If so, how? I'm not bookmarking a whole lot because I find search more effective than bookmarks, do I need to be bookmarking more? Screenshots as an addition is an interesting take on this. The two are not something I'd inherently put together, and I'm interested in the motivation for this. I do use a screenshot sharing tool, taking multiple screenshots a day, and I do use the history on this (a few times a year), but again, organising them isn't something I've needed except in the rare cases of, say, creating marketing images for a product, in which case I've been using a shared workflow with other team members involved. I'm interested to hear more about the problems this is solving. It sounds like you're quite evangelical about it which suggests I'm either missing some sort of realisation, or that I'm not the target user – either way I'm sure there's something I could learn here.
- ke_ga 3y ago
  Dan thanks for the thought provoking perspective and questions. Today, important units of productivity and organisation are: - Urls - Screenshots (and images) - & notes Our goal is to create a simple purpose built tool to assist people stay organised with respect to all 3 of the above. Hence us considering Zlinky a productivity tool. We feel we have made a good start, but we still have a long way to go along our planned roadmap. Perhaps it is premature and presumptuous to call Zlinky a productivity tool at this stage, but that is the ultimate goal. As for how is Zlinky different from those tools that you tried that didn't "stick": I can't speak for the other tools, but we have focussed on optimising for mobile "native share" into folders, as well as overall simplicity. We see Zlinky more as Url management than bookmarking web links per se. Eg, TikTok videos and Instagram posts don't index particularly well in Google. When I watch a TikTok video by a marketing genius that I want to hang on to, with Zlinky it is a quick "share into" Zlinky and I am done. Without Zlinky, perhaps I can copy the Url into Google Keep? Or a paste into a Google Doc? What about when I want to review these links - they probably won't have previews in Google Docs, furthermore the unstructured nature of these general note taking / documents introduces organisation friction and overhead. Importantly if I want to find that TikTok video again, it would be difficult via Google, possible via TikTok search, but I would have to remember that it was TikTok I saw the video on, and not YouTube, Insta etc. People also generally try to save interesting/useful Instagram posts, YouTube vids, TikTok videos etc, but then often give up, as they can't remember where they saved what - a lost opportunity to build out a collection of resources in one place as you consume content. Interesting point re bypassing the organised hierarchy. We will also be implementing a search feature. In Zlinky's case, the goal of the folder structure plus preview images, is to allow for easy "scannability" of the saved url/screenshot/image and attached note. Screenshots: As noted above we consider screenshots an important unit of productivity. Hence us providing capability to save and organize screenshots. In particular, we feel that people have an intuitive sense of when a screenshot is important, vs a general screenshot unlikely to be needed again. For example over Christmas I had a few overseas friends send me their address via Whatsapp as requested so I could send them Christmas gifts. I screenshotted the address and added it to a Zlinky folder. Super easy when I was at the post office to find these addresses. I also screenshot Instagram stories when I want to save the content into Zlinky, as the Instagram stories generally disappear. Perhaps the target market is someone like me, someone that consumes content and resources intensely and from a wide range of platforms? And has multiple mini projects on the go, and has bits and pieces to reference regularly or semi regularly. It is still early days, but the Zlinky use cases we are seeing are very eclectic and diverse, which is encouraging. This could be an indicator that my hunch could be correct, that many people could do with a set of simple tools to help get organised to help them achieve tasks. Furthermore, we hope to continue to make the product more useful, eg we want to provide the ability for people to follow a specific folder of a user (friend/colleague). For example a business owner could create a folder called "Customer Service", allow team members to follow this folder, and populate the folder with YouTube videos, Instagram Posts, articles, screenshots etc. The business owner could add and prune as necessary. Sure you could do this in Google Drive, but Google Drive is really not purpose built for this. I hope you will try the product and send me further questions and feedback. Thanks again. Kevin
dartharva 3y ago
Is a Firefox extension in the pipeline?
- ke_ga 3y ago
  Not at this stage. Although at some stage we may provide an API so people can build their own extension. Chrome has the largest browser market share - 60% plus - so with such a small team we have to focus for now.
nsonha 3y ago
what makes a bookmark manager a "productivity" tool? I thought the important thing in productivity is to produce, instead of merely (managing) consumption.
- ke_ga 3y ago
  "I thought the important thing in productivity is to produce" spot on! As an example, I have a folder in my Zlinky account named "Zlinky Marketing" - on my travels around X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Web etc etc, as soon as I encounter useful marketing inspiration, I "native share" the content into the Zlinky Marketing folder and sometimes attach a note to the saved item for context. In addition when at a talk or conference, if I see a useful slide I take a photo of the slide and add it to my Zlinky Marketing folder. When I sit down to work on marketing for Zlinky, I open the Zlinky marketing folder, and work through the different bits and pieces that I have saved. Eg today, I contacted an Australian specialist copywriter (I had saved one of his TikToks into Zlinky), reviewed an article on "How to get the best out of your Product Hunt launch" I had saved, and submitted our listing on HN as I took a screenshot of HN and saved it into the folder! So Zlinky certainly helped me produce output today!
  - hobo_mark 3y ago
    I think I suddenly understand those "fake email job" memes.
  - octopoc 3y ago
    This is exactly how I'm using Raindrop. Basically my bookmarking system is like a TODO list. These are highly valuable finds that are really, really relevant to me. How do you guys compare to Raindrop?
    - utsuro 3y ago
      Dark Mode is behind a paywall also they have storage restrictions while Raindrop is free. I can see why space limitations for a new company (saving expenses) but as a power user I save a lot of links so thus bottlenecks me unless I pay.
esafak 3y ago
You have to explain on the landing page how this is better than something like Notion. One challenge for you is that Notion's free plan is adequate for personal use.
- ke_ga 3y ago
  Thanks, good point. Notion is actually quite complicated for non technical people. Zlinky's Free Plan is also adequate for personal use.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Being as good as the competition is not enough. If your differentiated value proposition is simplicity, emphasize it. I see a mention of its "power" which usually comes at the expense of simplicity.
    - ke_ga 3y ago
      appreciate this point thanks. Kevin
Lemontology 3y ago
ke_ga I downloaded and like the simplicity. I think that there is a way to give the user far more utility here. At least in on large phones liked Z-Flip, or tablets, or computers. Anything touchscreen is best too. • outline (like Workflowy) • Wiki The wiki will be collaborative between users or across a company in paid version of app. The wiki will be basically a scrollable web page that has images and text. The usage pattern should be to save web pages while making optional voice transcripted records of your thoughts...and then when you do a daily or weekly review, you're actually able to do some research based organizing of the new material and place within the context of the other days' and weeks' research and saved links. Yeah, that would be epic.
- Lemontology 3y ago
  Also, would it be possible to save literally the links in text on a web page (with partial web page showing in our notes) from the HTML, and then the rest of the page that you don't make viewable can emerge in search within baked into a web browser. Think of making a Chrome extension for this. If you do a follow-up search (or previous, then it will update you) the tool will pull up search within your saved web page.
  - ke_ga 3y ago
    You seem to have some interesting and specific use cases. I will drop you an email. I would be interested in hearing more about them.
    - Lemontology 3y ago
      Just context embedded text captured with webpage "scrape" so you could research knowledge from disparate websites and keep growing or journaling a process you're going through rather than just separate links or stuffing in folders.
lspin000 3y ago
Love this! Above all else - I find that my mind wonders with concerning ease and so having something that is a Chrome extension means I'm not having to go back and forth between other tools (in other tabs!). This keeps me on task and allows me to time-block periods in my day where I can just focus on a 'themed folder' from which to go through stuff I've bookmarked and written up simple reminder context notes, for that very purpose. Much needed - in my busy-mind life. Thanks
- ke_ga 3y ago
  Thanks, the Chrome Extension really brings the product to life.

53 points by ke_ga 3y ago

wscourge 3y ago

Your free plan is really generous, are you planning on keeping it once the premium plans are released?

ke_ga 3y ago
Thanks for the question. We feel a generous free account is important: 1- Our product becomes increasingly useful once you get in the habit of using it to stay organised, this usefulness takes time to evolve, so we need to have an open ended free account to provide our users with an opportunity to experience its full benefit. 2- Since the ManageFlitter days, I like having a large cohort of free users. We get great user feedback from a critical mass of free users, and it pushes us to always work on a high quality upgrade path, not to mention having to solve some nice technical scaling challenges! Overall it pushes us to build a better product. We have a proposed full pricing structure up on our website. We hope to leave our pricing structure as the website reflects (including the free plan), and we will continue to build out the feature set of the Premium Accounts as to make Premium accounts increasingly useful over time. For example in future, we would like to offer some extra note taking features, home district widget configuration, collaboration features etc to Premium Accounts. Importantly we will always offer free and easy data portability, so users can export their data at any stage if our product no longer is fit for use. Feel free to let me know any other product feedback. Thanks. Kevin

jsf01 3y ago

One of my biggest concerns when saving lots of things to an app like this and spending time curating bookmarks and other content is what happens if the app one day disappears. Is there a data export mechanism built in or other considerations for these sorts of events?

ke_ga 3y ago
Thanks for the important question. We plan to always offer data portability for free. Currently you can easily export your links to a CSV file. The CSV file contains details of your links, the folder it is saved in, and any notes attached to that link. Over time we will update this export to include any images that you saved into your Zlinky account. Currently you can download a CSV of your saved links once a day. We also hope to offer import link, image etc options over time. Thanks. Kevin

danpalmer 3y ago

Some feedback about the pitch – I see bookmarking as one relatively small slice of "productivity" as a software category. I wasn't sure what to expect when I clicked on the link titled "Lightweight Productivity Tool", but expected something closer to, I guess Notion, or a few other similar tools I've seen around here recently – i.e. an integrated, straightforward tool, that covers much of what "productivity" could mean. As for the product, I'll admit I've not actually installed or tried it, but based on the page... I've tried many "organise X into folders" sorts of products in the past to try to get my life in order, and none of them ever stick. Even when I take the time to organise a whole aspect of my life, I either come back and realise I organised it in the wrong way for how I need to access it, or I just search and skip the organised hierarchy. How does Zlinky change this? From looking at the page, I'm not sure it does. A folder-based bookmarking service is handy, but all the major browsers can sync this sort of stuff I think. Can Zlinky cause a step-change in how much value I get out of my bookmarks? If so, how? I'm not bookmarking a whole lot because I find search more effective than bookmarks, do I need to be bookmarking more? Screenshots as an addition is an interesting take on this. The two are not something I'd inherently put together, and I'm interested in the motivation for this. I do use a screenshot sharing tool, taking multiple screenshots a day, and I do use the history on this (a few times a year), but again, organising them isn't something I've needed except in the rare cases of, say, creating marketing images for a product, in which case I've been using a shared workflow with other team members involved. I'm interested to hear more about the problems this is solving. It sounds like you're quite evangelical about it which suggests I'm either missing some sort of realisation, or that I'm not the target user – either way I'm sure there's something I could learn here.

ke_ga 3y ago
Dan thanks for the thought provoking perspective and questions. Today, important units of productivity and organisation are: - Urls - Screenshots (and images) - & notes Our goal is to create a simple purpose built tool to assist people stay organised with respect to all 3 of the above. Hence us considering Zlinky a productivity tool. We feel we have made a good start, but we still have a long way to go along our planned roadmap. Perhaps it is premature and presumptuous to call Zlinky a productivity tool at this stage, but that is the ultimate goal. As for how is Zlinky different from those tools that you tried that didn't "stick": I can't speak for the other tools, but we have focussed on optimising for mobile "native share" into folders, as well as overall simplicity. We see Zlinky more as Url management than bookmarking web links per se. Eg, TikTok videos and Instagram posts don't index particularly well in Google. When I watch a TikTok video by a marketing genius that I want to hang on to, with Zlinky it is a quick "share into" Zlinky and I am done. Without Zlinky, perhaps I can copy the Url into Google Keep? Or a paste into a Google Doc? What about when I want to review these links - they probably won't have previews in Google Docs, furthermore the unstructured nature of these general note taking / documents introduces organisation friction and overhead. Importantly if I want to find that TikTok video again, it would be difficult via Google, possible via TikTok search, but I would have to remember that it was TikTok I saw the video on, and not YouTube, Insta etc. People also generally try to save interesting/useful Instagram posts, YouTube vids, TikTok videos etc, but then often give up, as they can't remember where they saved what - a lost opportunity to build out a collection of resources in one place as you consume content. Interesting point re bypassing the organised hierarchy. We will also be implementing a search feature. In Zlinky's case, the goal of the folder structure plus preview images, is to allow for easy "scannability" of the saved url/screenshot/image and attached note. Screenshots: As noted above we consider screenshots an important unit of productivity. Hence us providing capability to save and organize screenshots. In particular, we feel that people have an intuitive sense of when a screenshot is important, vs a general screenshot unlikely to be needed again. For example over Christmas I had a few overseas friends send me their address via Whatsapp as requested so I could send them Christmas gifts. I screenshotted the address and added it to a Zlinky folder. Super easy when I was at the post office to find these addresses. I also screenshot Instagram stories when I want to save the content into Zlinky, as the Instagram stories generally disappear. Perhaps the target market is someone like me, someone that consumes content and resources intensely and from a wide range of platforms? And has multiple mini projects on the go, and has bits and pieces to reference regularly or semi regularly. It is still early days, but the Zlinky use cases we are seeing are very eclectic and diverse, which is encouraging. This could be an indicator that my hunch could be correct, that many people could do with a set of simple tools to help get organised to help them achieve tasks. Furthermore, we hope to continue to make the product more useful, eg we want to provide the ability for people to follow a specific folder of a user (friend/colleague). For example a business owner could create a folder called "Customer Service", allow team members to follow this folder, and populate the folder with YouTube videos, Instagram Posts, articles, screenshots etc. The business owner could add and prune as necessary. Sure you could do this in Google Drive, but Google Drive is really not purpose built for this. I hope you will try the product and send me further questions and feedback. Thanks again. Kevin

dartharva 3y ago

Is a Firefox extension in the pipeline?

ke_ga 3y ago
Not at this stage. Although at some stage we may provide an API so people can build their own extension. Chrome has the largest browser market share - 60% plus - so with such a small team we have to focus for now.

nsonha 3y ago

what makes a bookmark manager a "productivity" tool? I thought the important thing in productivity is to produce, instead of merely (managing) consumption.

ke_ga 3y ago
"I thought the important thing in productivity is to produce" spot on! As an example, I have a folder in my Zlinky account named "Zlinky Marketing" - on my travels around X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Web etc etc, as soon as I encounter useful marketing inspiration, I "native share" the content into the Zlinky Marketing folder and sometimes attach a note to the saved item for context. In addition when at a talk or conference, if I see a useful slide I take a photo of the slide and add it to my Zlinky Marketing folder. When I sit down to work on marketing for Zlinky, I open the Zlinky marketing folder, and work through the different bits and pieces that I have saved. Eg today, I contacted an Australian specialist copywriter (I had saved one of his TikToks into Zlinky), reviewed an article on "How to get the best out of your Product Hunt launch" I had saved, and submitted our listing on HN as I took a screenshot of HN and saved it into the folder! So Zlinky certainly helped me produce output today!
- hobo_mark 3y ago
  I think I suddenly understand those "fake email job" memes.
- octopoc 3y ago
  This is exactly how I'm using Raindrop. Basically my bookmarking system is like a TODO list. These are highly valuable finds that are really, really relevant to me. How do you guys compare to Raindrop?
  - utsuro 3y ago
    Dark Mode is behind a paywall also they have storage restrictions while Raindrop is free. I can see why space limitations for a new company (saving expenses) but as a power user I save a lot of links so thus bottlenecks me unless I pay.

esafak 3y ago

You have to explain on the landing page how this is better than something like Notion. One challenge for you is that Notion's free plan is adequate for personal use.

ke_ga 3y ago
Thanks, good point. Notion is actually quite complicated for non technical people. Zlinky's Free Plan is also adequate for personal use.
- esafak 3y ago
  Being as good as the competition is not enough. If your differentiated value proposition is simplicity, emphasize it. I see a mention of its "power" which usually comes at the expense of simplicity.
  - ke_ga 3y ago
    appreciate this point thanks. Kevin

Lemontology 3y ago

ke_ga I downloaded and like the simplicity. I think that there is a way to give the user far more utility here. At least in on large phones liked Z-Flip, or tablets, or computers. Anything touchscreen is best too. • outline (like Workflowy) • Wiki The wiki will be collaborative between users or across a company in paid version of app. The wiki will be basically a scrollable web page that has images and text. The usage pattern should be to save web pages while making optional voice transcripted records of your thoughts...and then when you do a daily or weekly review, you're actually able to do some research based organizing of the new material and place within the context of the other days' and weeks' research and saved links. Yeah, that would be epic.

Lemontology 3y ago
Also, would it be possible to save literally the links in text on a web page (with partial web page showing in our notes) from the HTML, and then the rest of the page that you don't make viewable can emerge in search within baked into a web browser. Think of making a Chrome extension for this. If you do a follow-up search (or previous, then it will update you) the tool will pull up search within your saved web page.
- ke_ga 3y ago
  You seem to have some interesting and specific use cases. I will drop you an email. I would be interested in hearing more about them.
  - Lemontology 3y ago
    Just context embedded text captured with webpage "scrape" so you could research knowledge from disparate websites and keep growing or journaling a process you're going through rather than just separate links or stuffing in folders.

lspin000 3y ago

Love this! Above all else - I find that my mind wonders with concerning ease and so having something that is a Chrome extension means I'm not having to go back and forth between other tools (in other tabs!). This keeps me on task and allows me to time-block periods in my day where I can just focus on a 'themed folder' from which to go through stuff I've bookmarked and written up simple reminder context notes, for that very purpose. Much needed - in my busy-mind life. Thanks

ke_ga 3y ago
Thanks, the Chrome Extension really brings the product to life.