I currently take all my notes on cheap A4 squared pads, once it's full I tear of each page into a pile and feed them through my scanner and output as a PDF, it takes about 5 minutes to convert an 80 page A4 pad to PDF.
Then I recycle the pad.
Apropos of nothing your video on your home page at video http://modnotebooks.com/ doesn't display on FF27/Linux though the audio plays, while I was noseying as to why (amazing what you learn by wondering why stuff is broken) I noticed you have an unclosed span tag in your dev.l-footer-copyright.
tl;dr
The exact same thing exists by Moleskine at http://shop.moleskine.com/en-us/notebooks-journals/evernote/
- It takes FOREVER.
- Pictures are blurry / out of focus / misaligned
- There's a limit to the number of pictures you can attached to a note in evernote so each notebook ends up needing to be spread between a few different evernote "notes".
- Evernote really isn't designed to consume this kind of content. (We have an app designed specifically for this: http://app.modnotebooks.com/demo)
My workflow usually takes me through a few pages of a notebook, which I then scan immediately afterwards into an Evernote note, specific to whatever I was just working on. I often recap with dictation, and possibly add some new thoughts, but I'm never adding more than a few scanned pages at a time. So for me, it never feels like it takes "forever", nor do I have issues with image limits.
I guess, for me, and probably for many other people, we have felt like the real-time nature and benefit is lost. Maybe I don't fill notebooks as quickly as the next guy, but by the time I do, I usually don't have any need to search through most of my earliest pages. By sending the notebook away once it is full, the scanning seems to add limited additional value to me. And barring physical destruction of the notebooks, the archival value of being able to ship the whole notebook for scanning feels a bit forced to me.
Plus, I write primarily in script, and the OCR works just fine, so I don't feel the images are necessarily blurry/out of focus either.
I understand you have many users already on-board with the idea. And that's great. I'm not trying to say your product or concept is invaluable. You're a project I want to support, I just can't personally get behind you with my current perspective. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why someone with my perspective might want to switch to your notebooks.
Thank you.
From the Moleskine webpage: "Write, sketch, or draw in the specially designed Evernote Notebook by Moleskine. Take a photo of any page in this Moleskine notebook with the Evernote Page Camera and it instantly becomes digital so that you can save it, search it and share it with the world."
In other words, painful as hell. Mod is an elegant and well-designed solution to this issue.
That said, love the idea and execution otherwise. It's great to get some insight into the beginnings of a product/startup. Even for those of us with experience in earlier-stage companies, unless you've founded it yourself, you don't usually see the beginnings like you've been presenting on your blog.
While reading that I was wondering, and not accusing Mod team here but just a thought, what is stopping people from using Kickstarter this way (to gauge demand) deliberately? Launch a campaign and yank when it is successful to pursue larger profits?
For a documentary film or artist recording an album, it wouldn't make sense to yank your project and try to crowdfund on your own. In the case of Mod/Draft it was an MVP and they're shaping the offering differently -- notice that they were thinking of relaunching the Kickstarter.
Are the notebooks branded? I'm curious about that process but don't see anything mentioned in the post (maybe I'm missing it).
I'm in Australia and my girlfriend is in Turkey + Russia and I think we'd both love to use this (at least try it).
