Ask HN: Features you would find useful in an information management application

[ZukmoTeam]

We provide a free cloud based consumer information management app (http://www.zukmo.com/) that we aim to enhance until it can be used as a small/medium business collaborative workspace and also as a useful consumer information management product.

What features could we add to make it useful to you as a consumer or a small and medium business? Our product is still alpha, but what are your thoughts on it so far? (Feature improvements and additions, structure, UI or any other suggestions are greatly appreciated)

[trussi]

This is based on a love of b2b saas products that focus on increasing productivity...

First, ditch consumer. They don't pay and are very fickle. Lots of lookie-loos. And it's really hard to actually solve a problem for them because they don't even know it's a problem.

B2B is way more lucrative. Getting a SMB to pay $100-500/mo for a product that adds value is easy. Try getting that amount from a consumer!

On the site UI: design, colors are good. Make the tabs animated so it scrolls through the features.

On the content: you are stuck where I (and most other techies) get stuck. You are focusing on features. You have to focus on the benefits. Answer the question: what's in it for me.

I see there's a bunch of features. Strip all of it down to 2-3 things. That's it. You have to focus everything into 2-3 key things. And you have to present them as benefits to the customer. For example, 'distribute to social media' is a definitely a feature. 'Share your pictures with all your friends in one click' is a benefit (I think).

Think of it like this: a feature requires the customer to connect the dots to answer the question of 'what's in it for me'. a benefit connects the dots for them. It's like the "because..." of a sentence.

On the product: my goal with all my b2b work is to try to simplify the process until it takes zero clicks to perform it (i.e. fully automated). if something takes 3 clicks, figure out how to get it to 2 clicks. If it takes 2, get it to 1. And if you can get 1 click down to zero clicks, you have reached productivity nirvana! :)

Second, you have to pick a really specific niche in SMB to go after. DO NOT BUILD A ONE-SIZE FITS ALL PRODUCT! You will fail.

Pick Info Management for dog groomers or Info Mgmt for funeral homes. Go very specific and build a product that is custom-tailored to that niche. This reduces competition, decreases customer acquisition cost and will get you delighted customers.

Once you pick your niche, you have to fully understand that customer and their processes. This is impossible for you to do unless you were a dog groomer in a previous life, so you'll have to find some subject matter experts (SMEs) and pick their brains.

Then, pick the part of their process that is the most painful for them, that technology can help fix and that they will pay money for. Solve that problem and you make money.

You might get lucky and your existing product will cover some of what's needed to solve that problem, but it might not. You'll probably want to identify SMB niches that you think might have a problem related to info management as your starting point.

The biggest thing you want to be aware of is that when you are talking to SMEs, keep a wide open mind and ask all sorts of questions. Don't try to force your product or your presumption of what their problems are. You will most certainly be wrong.

Good luck and keep us posted on your progress!

[ZukmoTeam]

>We are actually focused on the SMB side of the product right now. We're using the product development phase to build our brand name and to test our product. Once we have refined the product message, function, look and feel we will start our pitch to the SMB space

>The tabs are currently animated, but they stay for 30 seconds so that all of the information can be read. If you're getting a sense that this is too long, we'll happily shorten it.

>We really appreciate the suggestion for our product positioning and will work on our message to project benefits instead of features. Currently we're trying to communicate benefits as the following, but they may change in time: 1) we let the users save any content or stream into Zukmo, enabling them to search for and share it with their contacts. 2) We enable the users to search in a flexible manner for any text within the title, description, content body and tags to retrieve it. 3) we also simplify the web content to make it more readable 4) We enable the users to access everything from their smart phone devices. Would these messages have more appeal if they were consolidated into, say, simplified messages about collecting, organizing, accessing, and sharing?

>You make a very important point for improving utility. We'll definitely do some legwork to see how far down we can whittle down the amount of user input needed to accomplish tasks, without compromising feature depth.

>You make great points about the ease of market penetration and reduced competition associated with operating in a niche market. Our current goal is to remain broad-based and to provide a bare bones document/information management solution for SMBs where the entry criteria are much less stringent. We will further customize the product to address the client's needs.

>Thanks very much for taking the time to give us your feedback. We really appreciate it! We'll certainly be back once we've passed a few more milestones.

[Dhamu_R]

i tried it out with your firefox button. it is really packed with a lot of features and though i couldn't try my hand at everything, i can see its use as a cloud storage option for my favorite webpages & rss feeds or for my desktop documents or other online apps (like google docs, twitter etc). Notes seemed very basic to me and needs improvement because i could only add text. i like the fact that i can generally search on any word within the web page to find it. i have a couple of questions. how can i use the multimedia service ? you have mentioned sync to devices but i didn't find any mobile app ? overall its nice and good luck with it.

[ZukmoTeam]

>That's a great summary for what our product is and does.

>We agree that the notes feature is somewhat primitive at the moment and are addressing that in our next product update, which includes an advanced notes editor with support for images.

>Our multimedia service is actually a simplified manner in which you can access and view embedded multimedia content (SlideShare, Scribd, Vimeo, YouTube, etc.) that you've bookmarked. If any search in your library turns up a multimedia result, you'll see a miniature version of that content embedded in and viewable directly from your library without the clutter usually present on native multimedia content sites.

>Our mobile applications are amongst our top priorities at the moment. We encountered a bit of a hiccup and were unable to release our Android app as expected during the last product update, though we did still update our front page with the mobile feature announcement. Rest assured that our next release is set to include a full-featured Android application with browser integration. Applications for Apple devices are set to be explored shortly thereafter, with possible apps for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices in discussion.