Danish Startup Papyrs Lets You Drag And Drop To Create Intranets

Unless you’re a technology startup, most small businesses don’t have the luxury of having a designer on staff. This can become a real pain for business owners when they need their own internal websites, or intranets, created.

Business owners could try and find a developer but that can prove to be a costly process. There are also plenty of do it yourself web building tools. Papyrs takes the ease of creation one step further by allowing the creator to simply drag and drop widges for files, discussions, social media,forms and more.

“Papyrs is in between a wiki and a database. And users don’t have to know anything about (markup) languages or technology. It’s all really pretty intuitive.” co-founder Diederik van Houten told nibletz.com in an interview.

We tried a lot of products to help us collect, organize, and search through all our business information (the standard mix of Word and Excel documents, and email becomes painful quickly) but none of the existing products out there hit the sweet spot.  We understand that an intranet should be built (mostly) by the people who use it daily: different companies have different needs, and the users know what they need for their job. So Papyrs allows people to easily drag&drop the widgets they need onto a page to solve the problems they have during their day. And with Papyrs you can find everything back instantly because we have great search and intuitive navigation between pages.” van Houten said.

Papyrs,Danish startup,Netherlands startup,startup interviewThere are plenty of quick website building platforms out there but most deal in templates. Papyrs allows the creator to get a little more creative and utilize more resources that may already exist in the company, like forms, and other creative elements.

Automation and measurement are what really set Papyrs apart from similar platforms. van Houten added “The trick is to automate the right things. It’s easy to waste a day automating a task that cost 5 minutes a week. It’s also easy to postpone automating something that doesn’t feel like a big drain on your time or attention, but is.”

Measurement is critical because our intuitions are often wrong and sometimes *really* wrong. It’s easy to spend a week or more working on a feature nobody cares about. So nowadays we collect anonymous statistics This makes it much easier to make decisions. In the absence of good data we tend to debate the pros and cons of the different approaches in front of us. With enough data we can skip the debate and make the right decision immediately.” 

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

With Papyrs we reached a bunch of big milestones. The first major milestone was when the alpha version was barely good enough to be used by ourselves and we started putting all our company data into it. That’s when Papyrs got the its first users: us. The second milestone was the private Beta. That’s when we invited a few thousand people to try our product, kick the tires and tell us which parts make sense and which don’t. The third milestone was when we got our first paying customer. Even though the first customers pay only a symbolic amount of money, there’s still no other feeling quite like it. Another milestone was when Papyrs revenue exceeded that of our first product Thymer.

What’s your next milestone?

We just integrated Papyrs with Zapier, launched the Papyrs API, created functionality for Importing data from Backpack, made user activity graphs available to our larger customers and more.

There are a number of things on the road map, but we’re not giving out the specifics just yet. We’re working on improvements Papyrs Forms, we’re going to add a few frequently requested widgets and we’re working on an Affiliate program. This way our users can make some money by recommending Papyrs to friends and colleagues in other organizations.

Where can people find out more 

You can read more about Papyrs on the website www.papyrs.com, and we have a company blog www.stunf.com. Finally, we tweet @stunf. We love to talk to people from the startup community and aspiring entrepreneurs. So if you just want to say hello or grab a coffee with one of us, just let us know at team@stunf.com.

 

Dutch Startup: MeeChannel One Dashboard For All Your Media, INTERVIEW

The Netherlands apparently has a much bigger startup scene than we had first imagined. On Friday we brought you an interview with the Dutch startup “ShowDates” today we’re talking with the founder of MeeChannel.

MeeChannel is a new aggregator that brings all of your photos,videos, rss feeds and other online content into one simple, easy to navigate dashboard.  Once you have all of your “channels” in one place you can share your favorite content from any channel, be it vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa or any one of hundreds of other sources that you subscribe to, and share them with your friends.

MeeChannel is currently in Beta and still entirely in Dutch, however the user interface makes it such that you may have no problem navigating it even in a foreign language. Pieter Havermans, MeeChannel’s founder and managing director is looking forward to expanding the service globally, after the initial beta version is released to the public and they start building scale.

They’ve actually done a really great job with the ux on the site. The concept has been done before but as with a lot of startups it’s now all about the execution.

We got a chance to talk to Havermans, check out our interview below:

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Netherlands Startup: ShowDates To Take On SideReel INTERVIEW

If you’re a tv-a-holic or just too busy to keep up with the ever changing prime time schedule for your favorite shows you are probably well aware of sidereel. The site keeps up with the episodes of each popular TV show and can deliver customized email alerts to tell you what’s going on and when you’re favorite shows are back from break.

ShowDates, a startup based in the Netherlands says that they can do this better with their cleaner more appealing UI. Everything on ShowDates is focused around their dashboard which they call “the couch”.

Now we’re well aware that SideReel isn’t as popular as say Facebook but for the past few years it’s been the standard among those that want to keep up with TV shows, so we asked ShowDates co-founder Rick Pastoor how they’re different than SideReel:

“We really try to keep the amount of functionality to the absolute minimum to just do what users want: track their progress on shows. Our focus is on designing a beautiful interface which tells you directly which way to go. We don’t want to craft just another web application, but a friend that helps you what show to pick next and reminds you where you left off last time. Next to this, we are just two guys that love programming. We have experience in both “normal” web development and iOS / Android applications.” Pastoor replied.

He had time for a few more questions, check out the interview below:

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