Read our story introducing Remembered.io here.
I’m a huge fan of deconstructionist content like Song Exploder that delve into the why and how of what people create (because people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it). In that spirit, in this section I’ve listed the reasoning behind key decisions for Remembered.io. If you’re interested in something not listed here, feel free to tweet at me and I’ll add it to this list! It’ll be interesting to see if any of the positions we list will change based on the response we get.
- We decided to use email to send idea reminders because it’s the most cross platform way to reach people. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on desktop, mobile, iOS, Android, Windows, or Mac. Email works for everyone.
- It’s a paid service ($3/month or $30/year). This was for a number of reasons:
- The majority of the 5+ years I’ve spent developing software products has been on free products supported by advertising. As I get older though, the more I believe people should just pay for products and services they get value out of, including software. It’s funny because the 18 year old me would’ve said “f*ck that” then immediately log onto The Pirate Bay and torrent the latest crappy in theater recording of some inane Michael Bay movie. $1 iPhone app??? 18 year old me would’ve rather camped 6 hours outside Best Buy during Black Friday to save $2.50 on a USB cable I will never use but instead end up with a hospital bill for getting trampled on. #AllForTheD…iscount
- We want to attract a community that really cares about ideas. Money is one of the best filters for doing so. If you’re not willing to shell out $3 for a service that could help improve your life, then you’re not our target market.
- We want to be a service that will always be here as long as people pay us. We don’t want to be the kind of product that is given away for free in the hopes of acquiring 50 million users whose attention can then be monetized. Ad blindness will only get worse. This also gives our customers assurances we won’t just shut down because we ran out of money.
- Since this is currently just a personal project, we don’t have the time nor resources to provide support for free users.
- “A museum for your ideas” was my motto when it came to the design. I wanted to keep it very minimalist so that the focus is on the content.
- I wanted to use a visual metaphor to represent an idea and thought a lightbulb would’ve been the most sensible choice. I had started thinking about how I could use a lightbulb to tell a story about what remembered.io is. Then I watched Inside Out and loved how they thought of visual environments for every single mental concept (please watch it if you have no idea what I’m talking about, amazing movie). That movie really inspired the animations you see on your homepage that help tell a story about what each feature is.
- Normally most marketing landing pages are extremely focused and have just one sign up button in the hero section for optimum conversion. We decided to try something a little different in ours by including an “add idea” form right in the hero. It clutters it up a bit but every product has a key action they want all users to do to become “activated” and in our case that’s having an idea to start remembering (at least that’s our hypothesis). We think having the form before they even sign up will help a potential customer see the value more quickly (and hopefully sign up). This one is a bit risky, so we’ll see how it does. Update 8/12/2015: After some user testing, we decided to remove this form for now. It was taking too long for people to understand the value prop from the hero section so we simplified it.
