Memonic Blog

For once: A worthwhile headhunting experience

Dorian Selz — 2010-09-01T22:00:00Z

I am reluctant to work together with headhunters or personnel service agencies. Why?

In the first case it is simply extremely expensive for a startup to mandate a headhunter. In our stage of company development the need for discretion is a little less than may be in the case of a high-profile CEO search for a large publicly traded company. Plus cash is scarce. No way you are going to a pay up to 30% success fee (of the total compensation).

As for the personnel service agencies my experience so far was say "inconsistent". You receive a ton of applications from some unknown agency all still with the claim of up to 20% of the first year's salary for basically sending you an email with an (CV) attachment. Most of the CVs I normally receive through such channels are surely of likable and hard working folks. Yet their skills and our required skill seldom match. It ends to be a huge clear-my-email-box-from-unwanted-applications exercise.

Then I got approached in early summer by Sara Moss of Pleinert & Partner. At first I was reluctant to agree to a meeting for reasons just outlined. But still, the approach was nice, and one of our ground rules here at Memonic says "Be nice". So we set up a meeting with low expectations on my side.

But now and again you can be wrong. Sara - thoroughly prepared - understood the specifics of our startup situation also in terms of conditions, payment terms and recruitment process. I agreed for a search mandate for once easily.

Over the next weeks we received each week a number of quality applications from Switzerland and around Europe. (We were actually looking for an additional Python expert, and are still looking for great people wanting to join Memonic).

And indeed just a few weeks later we found our new colleague through Sara: Welcome Aengus!

Learning: Thorough selection of your external partners pays.

Future of Web Apps Conference in London: Win two tickets

Dorian Selz — 2010-08-31T10:00:30Z

The Future of Web Apps Conference - or short FOWA - is simply a cornerstone of the yearly European Web conference schedule. Two years ago I joined together with Cédric for three days of a packed program with workshops, brilliant keynotes, and great presentations.

This year I'll be returning. This time as speaker, I'll be giving a presentation about lean startups. Memonic being (combined across the team) our fifth or sixth startup and as same team our second startup, we learned (sometimes the hard way) a trick or two about how to build a startup on a shoestring. The talk will focus on hands on experience and hints applicable immediately to your own startup.

Now the best thing comes: The folks over at Carsonified (The organizers of the conference) throw in two full conference passes (for Oct 5th & 6th) for you to grab!

How to win one of these two passes? Simply leave a comment on this post, mail us at <comment at memonic.com> and you will be entered into the prize draw. No strings attached. We will draw the two lucky winners on Friday September 17th, early enough to get your flight and accommodation in London. Great, right?!

News Release: Hunting and gathering (of information) with Memonic Groups

Dorian Selz — 2010-08-31T07:35:58Z

For ages human have been working in groups: In ancient times to hunt mamuts, today to research a term paper, information on a new client assignment, legal stuff or for a weekend with friends. With the Memonic Groups feature you can easily to joint online research and collaborate and share your findings with colleagues and friends alike. Read more in today's news release (in German).

How we got a million francs for Memonic

Dorian Selz — 2010-08-28T13:25:30Z

Back in June we could announce that we raised one million Swiss Francs for Memonic in a frist round financing. On September 7 I will give a talk explaining the background story to this financing round and share our experiences gained in the process. The talk is part of the Startup Conference organized by the Internet Briefing Club here in Zurich.

Indicate "Guest of Dorian" in your registration and attend for CHF 60 instead of 180.

Conference language: German.

What's the difference between us and...

Dorian Selz — 2010-08-25T15:41:28Z

Prompted by these Tweets ...

"@matthiasdaues Memonic (@mymemonic) looks interesting, but they haven't explained to me why I should switch from evernote…" jted.

"@jted This is true. But it's certainly not bad to know an alternative. Perhaps @mymemonic reacts to your mention. How would be interesting." matthiasdaues

... I thought a quick post about some advantages of our product could be worthwhile - and may be start a Internet Meme on online note taking applications?!

Basically any note taking application may be split into three steps: Capture, Organize, Use & Share.

The first step is capturing any digital content. A tricky and difficult part, as any website or source (office documents, research databases) etc. require special attention to produce a good snippet. Thereafter: a little organization of your snippets might be useful. And, your snippets are no end to themselves: You want to use them and/or share them.

In our case:

On Capture: Our web clipper and browser extensions allow you a versatile selection process of any type of digital content. Some consider our web clipper best in class.
On Organization: No need to learn how yet another application interface works. A snippets may be considered an "email". Hence our simple and straight forward user interface modeled on ease of use.
On Use & Share: I guess here we make a real difference (already).
- Access your items anywhere on any mobile or the iPhone, iPad and iPod
- Create groups to do collaborative research.
- Share your (private) sets with friends & family or working colleagues.
- Simple click and integrate your items in a word document (blog integration to come) - no more tedious copy & paste!
- Re-publish your items easily on blogs or in Intranets with our badge or subscribe to a (Atom) feed (works with OAuth and signed feeds, too)!

These are just a few benefits of using Memonic.

Sure we're only 10 months live. There is a long way to go to make this a comprehensive solution for all your note taking needs. A few things are on our list: A desktop edition, more dedicated mobile editions (e.g. Android), export functionality, ability that 3rd parties may integrate Memonic easily, and much more.

To end I guess it's best to let our users say what they think:

"Memonic is my choice of Google Notebook replacement! A gem!" RogerDis

"playing around with the new app @mymemonic just did some tests and I must say this is just right! Love the app...keep up the good wrk!" ntm23

"Techie Buzz verdict: 5/5 - Brilliant. Memonic has all the tools you need for clipping content from blogs or editorials." TechieBuzz

"Memonic lets users to select and collect snippets of websites, documents, and pictures on the web and any offline content for later use". TechCrunch

Or read on here on what other news sources and blogs think about us.

The occasional thought: Jobs at startups are less risky than most people think

Dorian Selz — 2010-08-15T22:00:00Z

To quote Chris Dixon: “Joining a startup is far less risky than most people seem to think. In fact, I don’t know if anyone has ever studied this systematically, but I would bet that people who join startups have greater job security than people who join large companies, and certainly have better risk-adjusted returns.”

Update: All Systems back to normal

Dorian Selz — 2010-08-14T05:31:56Z

The error we reported earlier (errors when accessing items) has been resolved. Our sincere appologies. Get in contact with us in case you still experience issues.

Errors on saving and accessing an item

Dorian Selz — 2010-08-13T23:16:18Z

We are currently experiencing errors on accessing and saving items in your Memonic collection. We are working hard to fix the issue asap. We post updates here. Please note: There is no data loss involved.

Share Sets with other people

Christoph Hauzenberger — 2010-08-06T10:06:14Z

If you're a regular Memonic user then you will know that Memonic is not only a great tool for capturing information but as well for sharing your interesting bits and pieces with your friends or the public.

Sharing of single Items has always been easy. You can set the permissions to "public" or "friends", grab a short url or generate a guestpass, which you then can send to other people or share on Facebook or Twitter.

Often however you want to share whole Sets instead of single Items in order to keep other people updated about all information you are collecting about a certain topic. And maybe, some of these Items shall be visible for the target audience only.

With last week's release, we added the possibility that you can share whole Sets in the same way as you would do that with single Items.

If you're browsing one of your Sets, you will find a "Link to this Set" link in the upper right corner. Not much of a surprise that clicking on this link will allow you to create a link to that Set.

A small popup window will show and present you a short URL. This is a tiny link to all the public Items in your Set and you can use it for sending all around the world. Your friends on Memonic will as well see those Items where you set the permissions to "friends".

If you have a Set of nice recipes and want to share that with your mom or other people that don't have a Memonic account, and you don't want to have the whole world having access to them, then you can now generate a guestpass.

A guestpass is a link that gives a person special access on a resource.

Just send the guestpass to people you know and they will be able to see all the Items in that Set - private as well as public.

We hope that this makes it easier for you to let other people participate on the knowledge you have and want to share.

Happy sharing!

The occasional thought: “Department of Human Wealth”

Dorian Selz — 2010-08-03T22:00:00Z

Customarily the department responsible for all things employee related is referred to as “Department of Human Resources”.

I know of natural resources. Copper say, or ore, gold or oil. It’s a matter of digging them out of the ground. Well, to my limited knowledge you can’t dig out of mother earth a fully trained and ready to go software engineer.

Rather you have to invest years to excel at something. Some say to really excel at something you have to invest 10’000 hours at least. Your wealth of experience is what matters. So refer to this on similar terms as a piece of ore is in my view inappropriate. Why not change the name and simply call it “Department of Human Wealth”