This has been good feedback (even if a bit rough) and will definitely try to refine it a bit more.

One of the things I've found that I struggle with is trying to explain what I'm building as most things are obvious to me since I'm the one building it.

Our users have done a GREAT job helping me out with that and pointing out the flaws with Polar regarding usability that I can't see.

I wonder if this is related to inattentional blindness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness

One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one.

Focus on a real pain point that people are having, and organize everything in your messaging around that.

Why do people need a document manager in the first place?

What is this going to do for them that their existing solutions don’t do?

How is it going to be better than the existing document managers that they have?

(If you find yourself going down the ‘its Decentralized’ route, don’t, people simply do not care)

It doesn’t have to even be much better than what people have, as long as it knocks it out the park for that use case. Hell, GMail started as conversational email plus a load of storage.

It may make your messaging seem kind of sparse - that’s a good thing. People are time poor, and have time to dig into the features later.

But without it you’re going to end up building something that is kind of a lot of things, but not really good at anything.

I shelved a bunch of my "bright" ideas for time a time when I'm better at pitching when I realized "this will work if everyone just does it my way" wasn't a great plan :)

> One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one.

macOS, GNOME, iOS all seem to -successfully- have the less is more paradigm.

i have been going down exactly that path. i found a platform for collaboration and document management that i thought was awesome. i didn't create it, but it was GPL licensed and i tried to get people to use it. no luck. i eventually added a REST API and use it myself as a development platform for building websites.

so now i solve peoples problems using the tool that solves my problem.

Tell a good story.

A strong narrative is much more engaging and memorable than a list of features.

Your front page at http://getpolarized.io mostly consists of a huge screenshot. When I look at the screenshot, all I see is a PDF viewer with some highlighting. Everybody already has a PDF viewer included with their OS that supports highlighting; there's nothing interesting about that screenshot that shows me what is useful about Polar.

Good point!!! I'm going to revamp the home page to improve upon this.. part of the issue I have is that some of the features aren't really obviously cool once you don't have the whole.

For example web page archival is kind of cool but it becomes a LOT more exciting when you add document management, highlighting, document sharing, etc.

So, write a short pitch story where Anna has been using web archival for a month or so, while on the bus remembers this discussion on a topic she had with Jamie and having seen a relevant web article some time back. She then uses the search feature in the app on her phone to find it, highlights the important quote, and shares it to Jamie.

BTW can Jamie receive this highlighted document if she doesn't use Polar? Say as a PDF? That would be cool, and really help spreading the word about Polar, simply by usage.

Exactly! :)

Narratives are a huge turn off for me. They always just feel like marketing gimmicks, and some my understanding and interest in a product. I'm perfectly capable of seeing a list of features, and imagining how well they apply to my situation. So, if you use a story, you will lose customers like me (n=1). That being said, I love the idea of Polar, and I'm going to be researching more about it.

> Narratives are a huge turn off for me.

Yes, I get very suspicious of them as well. But in this case, the site is heavier on the "what" than on the "why". A little more "why" would be welcome.

Get someone else who is familiar with the project to help you out with writing public facing material. Another perspective always help.

And even if I knew what I was supporting...I guess the plan is to raise $27/current user (which seems completely unrealistic) which will allow them to limp along until they definitely raise $150,000 from the "Internet as a whole", which will allow them to limp along until they definitely get approved for a whole bunch of grants?

Nothing about that inspires any confidence and left me pretty convinced that I would be flushing money down the drain on a project that'll be dead in 3 weeks.

I can definitely see they are passionate about it, but the messaging needs a ton of work.

To quote from the article,

> We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars, and of course we have thousands of users

Which is based on the illusion that you get an unbiased sample when you ask users to respond to a poll. You don't - the people most likely to sacrifice a moment of their time are also those more likely to come forward with money, conversely those who didn't fill out the questionnaire probably have a majority of people who won't give any money.

How would you fix this kind of bias?

The only way I've seen this addressed is using the idea that late responders are more similar to non-responders than early responders - so in a study where you suspect that non-responders have a different bias to responders you'd use late responses to get an idea about what non-responding people would have answered.

Right?

Not to be a dick, but it sounds like this is roughly something not unlike a search engine. Google was built in a garage and available for free for its whole existence.

So as much as I believe in the abstract idea of making knowledge more accessible online, I'm not gonna pay before I see a working example of something better, and I might never pay.

I'd pay for a google that wasn't run by google.

Also the premium parts, are those open source? What is the premium stuff? He promises a breakdown and doesn't show anything on this page, and the donate page is broken.

Maybe a better submission would've been the homepage itself, which has the app's purpose in a single lead graf:

https://getpolarized.io/

> A powerful document manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux for managing web content, books, and notes - supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and keeps track of your reading progress.

I suppose the author's assumption is that a normal user/visitor to the site would have seen the homepage before seeing the crowdfund pitch.

Had exactly the same feeling. Non-responsive, want to raise money, did RSS. Didn't get more info after a 10sec skim.

non-responsive is fixed.. bug with the CSS I didn't catch. mea culpa.

Agreed! This is exactly what I thought when watching it. He mentions "changing the internet" and that was it. Then started asking for money and outlining his plans to launch and indiegogo and I still had no clue what Polar even was.

I had the same issue. I have a rough idea (I think) of what Polar is trying to do -- but I'm not entirely sure. I'm also not sure how this would be "rebooting the internet", or what the overall benefit to the internet actually is. I may have missed it (that's likely), but I didn't see where that was explained.

It may be that the video explained it, but I'm not be in a situation where I can watch it right now.

EDIT: After reading the bulk of the other comments here, I am relieved that I'm not the only confused one. I thought I was just being stupid. I often am.

Thanks. I went back and forth on this and it was a tough call.. the plan was to get an initial crowdfunding video out and try to raise from people already passionate about Polar.

I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on.

If this was successful I was going to invest more time in a kickstarter/indiegogo style campaign.

This took a week of work already so was a bug chunk of time.

The positioning isn’t a fluff piece exercise - it’s how you define what you are building, who it is for, and who it is not for. As a product guy, it’s your North Star.

Without it you end up doing one or both of going down a tech rabbit hole of ‘it’s a decentralized, federated blah’ and losing people’s interest entirely.

Ideally you should have a quick this is what we do, why we do it, and why we’re different ready at all times - even if your current audience is only true believers.

EDIT: Clicked through to your features page. Confused. Polar allows me to "manage my reading"... oookay. What does that mean? What pain point is that solving for me? Does my reading need managing?

What are the benefits to me as a user? You need to tell this story before you get to the fact that it's based on Electron (perhaps very much not a selling point) and uses PDF.JS. How is this better than Evernote for me, which, based on sheer longevity is probably going to be my first port of call?

Who's your audience? Answer: not 'everyone' - you mention Pre Med students, but then your screenshot has a load of growth hackery stuff. If I'm a med student is there latex support?

Getting out a notepad and making yourself clarify what this is, who you are building it for, and what benefit you see it giving them is going to be a big help for you.

This goes double for you, as you're effectively creating a double sided marketplace of consumers for your product, and sites willing to integrate with your metadata.

I found that the process of making a pitch deck really helped me to flesh out my last product attempt, it was very educational for me. Next time I try to make something, I will make such a deck at the ideation phase.

You're too wrapped up in the grand vision to invite us for the ride. Don't do that. Give us a quick and concise summary without jargon or marketing flair. If you can't express it in a few sentences, it's not ready.

As someone who has never heard about your product before I agree with the op. I read your text about how you wanted to raise money and “reboot the internet” but it’s meaningless to me because I don’t know what Polar is.

I know there’s a video but I’m not gonna watch it just to learn what the product is.

I've never heard of Polar before. Tell me, in as few words as necessary, why I should care about it and what it is? (In that order.)

I don't think you did discuss what you were working on though, it's a noble vision for sure - I'm wondering if this is meant to be a page for people who already know what polar is or is it meant to reach a larger audience? Maybe if I already knew what the company was I'd have understood what was going on but I without already being a user already I was totally lost and had no idea what I was being asked to support.

'I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on.'

The comment reminded me of something: in startup school, they cautioned us against pursuing a grand vision and encouraged us to talk to our users to find out what problems they needed to solve. In this case I think there is a lot of overlap but just wanted to say it since I remember the video so vividly.

I'd like to add that you lack confidence in what you have to offer (can smell my own). My guess is you don't believe people will value what you're offering.

Also this is a open source https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf . By the way its really awesome project. I am very glad i found it.