Hello Product Hunt, and thanks @rrhover from PH for helping us out!
We started Shelf with the vision of helping distributed teams to instantly find the exact information they need so they can save time and prevent costly mistakes. We currently offer integrations for Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive that enables files and folders to be synced to a centralized place. We also built a really cool web clipper for Chrome and Firefox that enables people to capture youtube videos, articles, LinkedIn profiles, online images, and more.
But Shelf’s true power is in it’s search. We designed our platform to go beyond keywords, making findability our greatest value add. Some highlights include;
- Search inside of documents, PDF’s and presentations
- Search inside images, graphs (OCR)
- Tagging & Tag Library
- Badges & Customized Badges
- Meta Data layer + auto-categorization
- 8 search filters, including; added by, date, content type, location, group, etc.
- Content connections
- Content Dashboard with most popular, most recent and favorites
- We will soon launch a suggestion engine and additional integrations.
One of the things we struggle with is being able to hunt down information because our team is spread out across the world and do different roles. Great to see a better solution for that!
@ligaze thanks so much for the comment. This is something that we struggled with for years! For us, it's about making sure that information can be easily organized across different groups of people, so the ones who need it can easily find it, and the ones who don't, don't have to see it and be bothered by it. Decluttering someone's information view is just as important as helping people find what they need - so we tried to implement something thoughtful that would consider each perspective.
@ligaze@ng_colinkennedy My whole professional life as a senior international development professional is all about cohering distributed teams and knowledge management. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the program during beta. I’d used a variety of different platforms before and found them all to be either too complicated or unstable. I’ve been using Shelf for about a year now. I’ve found it to be a practical, no nonsense tool that is brilliant for cohering teams, improving knowledge management and supporting team based workgroups as they come and go. Its fast, stable and efficient. A big bonus is that it also comes with an awesome web clipper for capturing information from a whole host of sources. It's proved a pretty game changing piece of kit for me and the teams I lead. I especially appreciate its ease of use and functionalities; especially its findability functions and ability to capture, store and disseminate information on the go.
It seems there has been a glut of curation/boomarking tools making their way to the web this year. I am a curation addict so I have tried most if not all. Shelf is definitely one of the best. It is becoming my first choice when collecting anything from the web and I have started dropping in other offline content as well. I really love the intuitive design and speed, but the search is what has me jazzed the most. I hated when Google bought and killed Kifi and Shelf is the first tool I have found that is as good and maybe better than Kifi. I can't wait to see where Shelf goes next.
UPDATE: One wishlist item would be a freelancer level subscription. Something between the Free tier and the Team tier for those of us who work solo or with a partner and still want some of the advanced options such as view-only users, OCR and more storage. The $49/mo is steep for freelancers and provides more than I need, but the free tier is also limiting. Just some food for thought.
@just_s I'm glad to hear that your experience with our product has been a good one thus far! I agree that there have been a bunch of bookmarking tools recently...given the amount of important content that appears on the web, I'm not surprised.
But I'm really glad to hear that you've started to use Shelf to combine your web content with your offline content. I'm my opinion, that's where you really start to see what makes us different. Web content and traditional documents in living together in perfect harmony :)
@just_s thanks for the update! When we started building Shelf, we really set out to focus on the knowledge sharing issues that are cropping up more and more as distributed teams become more prevalent. So we're really built for a group of people, as opposed to the individual. Hence the pricing.
With that said, we're trying to include as much as we can in the free tier to accommodate for your particular use case, because you're certainly not alone. I'd love to know what you think the most limiting aspect of the free tier is, so we can take that into consideration.
@ng_colinkennedy thank you for the followup question. I would say without a doubt the storage capacity would be the limiting factor. I collect a great deal of information (8000 notes in Evernote, 400 items in Milanote for example) so I imagine that it won't take long to fill 5GB. If I migrate all of my collections from various services today I'd be well over the 5GB already. I'd love OCR too, but in fairness, it makes sense as a point of differentiation and paid feature.
If there were an option to use my own storage (cloud or local) in conjunction with my Shelf account that would be ideal and perhaps limit the costs/burden on Shelf. I understand that this is likely beyond your core strategy. It would be a great addition to an already stellar product.
When I look at your pricing model, it is the features that stand out in terms of choosing a paid plan. The storage is more of a commodity than a differentiating factor otherwise I'd be driven to upgrade based on storage. Not sure if good PR and evangelism are enough to cover the time investment for developing a BYOS feature but I know I'd be a grateful and active evangelist.
@just_s thanks so much for breaking this down. We've had plenty of discussions over here about how the interplay between storage and pricing should work. I agree with your perspective that storage is more of a commodity and it certainly isn't a differentiating factor (in a good way) for Shelf.
We ARE thinking about how we might be able to better leverage our integrations with some of the big storage solutions to allow us to make storage a non-issue in the future. If/when we make headway on this, I'll do my best to make sure you know about it.
@ng_colinkennedy that would be great. BYOS might even be a great add-on for a small fee at all tiers. Maybe a way to get some free users to contribute something to the cause ☺
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