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Point — Awesome link sharing/commenting with friends.
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This is slick. Being able to share content so quickly is awesome. Been using it with co-workers... "Point it to me" has replaced "email it to me". Also love the highlight text feature... hopefully this can reduce the strain on my email inbox!
@jtriest wow. An actually awesome product that hits one of my best use cases for the internet.
Great product @Shwinnabego. Great hunt @jtriest.
@Shwinnabego Awesome product! This feels like the replacement for old school Google reader that I've been looking for. Can't wait to get a few friends using it.
Been looking for something like this! Good job!
The @ shortcut doesn't work on German keyboard (alt+L triggers the @ sign)
@lalleclausen Thanks Lasse! We've been hearing a lot of that today (FYI you are able to trigger a point from the extension as well!)
Looking forward to trying this out. For those of us with non-US keyboards, and therefore, don't use Shift+2 for the @ sign - I can't seem to get the Point box to trigger. Product looks nice though.
Is this something you're working on full-time or is just a side project?
@jamesepember Thanks james! We're hearing a lot of those issues with the foreign keyboard, which we'll be thinking about. FYI in the meantime you're able to start a point by right clicking on the page and finding "point this" in that menu, or by clicking on our extension icon!
And full-time!
I love this product! It's one of the few products out there that has the product down pat, just not the market fit... yet.
@ashbhoopathy Nope, not exactly. In the same way that not everyone who owns a car would be in the market for baby seats, not everyone using Chrome would want to use an extension like this. Think of your market as a group of people who share a similar need that your product then helps to fill.
@alirtariq I'd venture to say that most PH readers know the definition of product market fit but a baby seat analogy works :)
The product has clearly struck a chord on PH. Give it time and I'm sure it will find a loyal audience.
I definitely agree that Chrome Extensions narrow your audience but that certainly didn't stop Pinterest.
@ashbhoopathy Yep as others have said, just because a market exists doesn't mean the product has a fit, meaning people don't want it... yet.
This is awesome. Great onboarding flow too. I watched the video first so I had a sense for how to use it, but the product itself does a great job teaching. Now time to rope some more friends into it!
@AlokVasudev awesome! Thanks! Yup, just a couple of friends / coworkers and that's all you need :)
Me and my friends have been using Point for the last 2 days and I've come to the conclusion that Point is actually making me send less emails (ow yeahh!). Instead of e-mailing my friends stuff I find, I just point it to them and we all get in the conversation instead of an annoying e-mail thread. Thanks you @Shwinnabego & co (awesome Twitter name btw) :)
This is great. Nice onboarding flow and the experience for sharing content just feels natural. Looking forward to Pointing with others.
Hey PH! I'm one of the guys working on Point.
For the curious, we started building Point to solve one of our personal frustrations -- we were constantly sharing links throughout the day with our friends (mostly via email + group threads), and wanted a simpler, more effective way to do this.
What we've designed (so far) is a plugin for your browser that gives you a quick way to privately share & discuss directly from the page you're on.
We're still in our early stages and in beta, but would love to hear what you all think about it!
@Shwinnabego what lessons are you guys taking from how Delicious did?
agree with @jtriest that it's pretty ;)
@eriktorenberg haha thanks Erik!
Without mentioning Delicious specifically (I think it was an awesome platform) -- one thing we've been careful to do is keep the product core to a single use case: here, privately sharing & talking about links with your friends. It's a behavior that we already do with pretty heavy frequency (think of how often you might email or chat links to a close group of friends), and we're just trying to deliver a bit more speed and simplicity here.
There's a danger in overcomplicating a platform or service, so we're constantly working to keep our marketing, messaging and core product interactions simple and focused.
@Shwinnabego This is great, we've started using Point today for link sharing and will continue to use it - easier than pasting links into a Slack room and the in context discussion and highlighting brings a lot of value. Thanks!
@Shwinnabego Hey Ashwinn, our last product was something VERY close to Point ;) www.discobeta.com if you want to see. If you ever want to chat, feel free to reach out.
Our trigger is press and hold of the mouse, we still use it internally as the pain is real for close friends/teams!
This is one of the slickest designed Chrome extension I've seen. My only letdown was the requirement for my friends to also have it installed in order for me to share links. I feel like this will be a point of friction, but I suppose all early stage startups face that chicken-and-egg problem.
@alirtariq thanks Ali! All the fine work there goes to @abhoopathy and @philly__d. Definitely a point of friction, but the upside is that you only need 1 or 2 friends you share with a lot to find the app useful :)
@Shwinnabego totally agree it doesn't take much to make this useful I have been using it with my girlfriend and one co-worker and that has been enough to lock me in.
@Shwinnabego That's a good point. I have a mail list with some close friends where we like to share links together. I'll point them to Point (ugh) and see how that goes! I think it would be a much needed upgrade for us :)
I've been playing with this for a few weeks. You've made the web social, embedding (almost) unavoidable social triggers with on-site annotations and one-to-one/group messaging. Point hasn't become an everyday habit yet but it has a compelling hook that bypasses saturated methods of re-engagement (email, push notifications, etc.). Well done, @Shwinnabego and team.
Also, quick thought: what do you think about this interface trend, using the browser's "new tab" to engage users? Are you exploring this for Point?
@rrhoover Thanks Ryan! Although I'm not sure if that was intentional, or just a function of wanting to make sharing & discussing simpler :)
I've definitely seen that new-tab trend with extensions like Momentum, and it's something we've thought and are thinking about. I think there's a lot of power extensions have over the browsing experience, so we have to be careful that users want to see and interact with us as much as they do!
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