Editing The Pen Addict 77/transcript (section)

== Notebook Subscription Service ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' I do, too. I do, too. Speaking of Kickstarter, we had a new project that launched this week that has drawn a little bit of interest. It's called Draft. Not to be confused with the Draft's iOS app, which I was like, how does this tie in? That would be a pretty cool tie-in. But no, this one's called Draft. And their title is A Physical Notebook That Syncs to the Cloud.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I find that title quite misleading, in all honesty. Because it doesn't.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So they had a blog post. And I don't have it in front of me. Maybe you can find it on their website. Wherever it was that I read about this project yesterday, when it launched, some site did an article with one of the founders. And he said kind of the exact same thing that you're saying. They did some A-B testing on Facebook, and they had six kind of taglines. I didn't think this was the one that won. I thought there was another one out there that explained it a lot better. I'll have to find that article, or you can probably find it while I'm jabbering. But it was a – I don't know if it was boing boing. It was someone pretty decent-sized. Anyway, they had this interview, and they went through all these steps of how they came up with the tagline. Because, like they said the same thing you did, it's hard to explain what they're trying to accomplish with this. So what it is in layman's terms, it's a notebook, a paper notebook subscription service where they'll send you X amount of months of notebooks. Okay? So $29 gets you three months of notebooks. It's three separate notebooks. $50 for six months. $100 for 12 months of notebooks. All right? So what you do is you take your monthly notebook. You use it at the end of the month. You send it back to them. They scan it in. And then that becomes – all your scans become available for you to search online. Am I describing this right? Because, honestly, I didn't have too much research into it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, that's what it seems like. You send it to them, and they scan it, and you get another one.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. So you don't have to do the scanning or photo taking. Like when the Evernote Moleskine notebook came out, you took a picture of it, and it imported into Evernote. There were certain Evernote-branded notebooks with different things on the page that you could take a picture of and scan it in there. And it would end up in Evernote. This one, you're not doing any of the work except filling up the notebook.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' For me, something like this would never work in a million years for me because I don't fill up a notebook that fast.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, because they send one like every month, right? Yeah. It's a monthly service. I'm sure you could just send it back whenever you're ready.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But that's not what you're paying for.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Don't you pay for the notebooks to be scanned as opposed to paying? It's like if you pay for six months and get six notebooks, if it takes you a year to fill up those notebooks, surely they'll still be scanned if you send them in.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I guess so, yeah. But I would rather, I mean, maybe it's not to their benefit.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, from the FAQ, one question. Can I wait to send the notebook back? Definitely. If you need to hang on to your current notebook for whatever reason, that's totally fine. Just send it in when you're done and we'll scan it for you then. And also, here's another one. What happens if I haven't completely filled my notebook by the end of the month? That's fine. We designed the notebook with enough pages, 60 front and back, so you should never run out of space. Simply send your current notebook anyway and we'll scan the pages you've used. Oh, no, maybe you do then. That doesn't make sense.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because that doesn't make any sense. What happens if I haven't completely filled my notebook by the end of the month? That's fine. We designed the notebooks with enough pages so you should never run out of space. Simply send your current notebook anyway and we'll just scan the pages you've used. So, yeah, you do send it in every month.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That kind of contradicts what they said the other, I thought. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. We'll have to do some more research on that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' The way to do this, in my mind, is instead of saying you get six months, you get six notebooks. Right. That's what it should be. What if I use more than one a month?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I should pay for six notebooks worth of scans, not six months worth of scans.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, I mean, I know they're having to tie in the fees to all the back-end stuff that they're going to have. That's a lot of labor to do the scanning and storage and all that stuff. A lot of labor is tied into that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So, there's obviously a lot of people are asking this in their comments.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Mm-hmm.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And they're saying it's something they're considering for the future. They're planning to do it soon after launch. It will start monthly, but we'll add an option to do buy requests so you're in 100% control of the timing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. See, I don't even know that buy requests is even the best way. I think if you buy one notebook, it comes with the scan. That price is whatever that fee on top of the notebook price. That's what you get.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So, I did want to back this, but I can't.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, US only?

'''Myke Hurley:''' US only.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's just the notebooks themselves are not very expensive.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And then it comes in blank, dot grid and ruled. So, it's got some good choices. They say it's got some thick paper. I haven't read the paper specs, but...

'''Myke Hurley:''' They did say it on the video.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's definitely going to be on their page to say it in the video. So, thick paper. Okay, great. They do say on the video they give the spec. I can't remember what it was, but I remember thinking at the time that's good. Yeah. It did sound like a nice, thick, sort of rhodia-like paper.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I think the pricing of it's really good.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I mean, for what you get for this, I think the pricing is completely fair and actually cheap. So, if that's something you're into, if you're prolific, this looks like a good thing.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Or even if you're happy to just send them in, you know?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, sure. Or even, yeah, if you want your content saved like that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Like, six notebooks, potentially, $50. Like, I think that's pretty good. And then... It's a really good value. I think you have to pay for the shipping, though. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, first month shipping included. Gotcha. And also, just so you know, the draft app, the app that you would be able to view your scans... Yeah. ...is part of this as well. So, we should mention that. Yep. So, yeah. This seems very low-priced.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Seems like a good... And also, the really interesting thing that I think is that it syncs with Dropbox and Evernote. So, therefore, you can have it OCR'd. OCR'd and searchable in Evernote.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's a huge thing.

'''Myke Hurley:''' See? Yeah. That was why I wanted it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, yeah. If I ever do something like this, it's definitely going to have OCR recognition.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I feel like I should just get a scan of myself and just do it myself or any notebook that I choose.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I know. I've threatened to all these years.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Stephen Hackett does that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I know. Every time someone mentions it, I bring it up and link to Stephen's post where he talks about how he sets all that up. So, yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And you two spoke about it on this show. Yep. When he filled in for me one day. I'll find that episode, actually. Okay. And I'll put it in the show notes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yep. Actually, I forgot about that episode. That was a good episode. But, yeah. I refer people to that conversation, to that post of his a lot just because I think it's a good idea. And people ask how you handle your filled notebooks. And for me, I just throw them in a bin. But, you know, I have had to dig things out saying, you know, I'm pretty sure I wrote this down once. And, you know, it would be nice to have some searchability backed up into that. So, cool. So, we'll keep an eye on drafts, too. Kickstarter's jumping again these days. It was kind of a lull there for a while. And now we're seeing some new and interesting stuff. Speaking of new and interesting, God, I'm the segue master today.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You really are.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Speaking of Kickstarter, speaking of new and interesting. Speaking of new and interesting.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Do you want to say that any more times?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I'm practicing my newsman voice.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Oh, it's good. I like it.