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Looking for advice: a new big feature for our startup (YC S21) - "if Notion and Google Forms had a baby. A beautiful baby!"

We are working on an online tool, Beau (https://beau.to). It's a no-code tool for businesses to onboard and automate interactions with their clients. Customers use our software to collect submissions, payments, send messages and more.

Our startup has been funded recently by Y Combinator and we are participating in the S21 batch.

During our internal brainstorm sessions, we came up with a concept of a big feature for our product. We started working on it already but I would love to get some fresh eyes on it before we dive deeper into coding!

Beau Docs

The concept: Beau Docs

Beau Docs are simple and clean Notion-like documents with online forms across the doc. Users will be able to create docs with our visual builder. Picture worth a thousand words, so feel free to check out our rough mockup of a Beau Doc: https://invis.io/2C11I78BBK9W

The whole concept is pretty straightforward: "if Notion and Google Forms had a baby". In short:

  • Create and add forms within beautiful documents: anyone can explain their business process and onboard users within the same document/page.

  • Get sharable links like Google Docs, Notion, Dropbox Paper, etc.

  • Submit data and scroll a doc without a hassle: no reloading or forwarding somewhere during filling forms.

  • Use Beau Docs as an alternative to a traditional blog post or /services section on corporate websites: users fill forms during reading about processes.

From a coding point of view, this feature can be done relatively quickly in Beau. We have our backend and client portals ready for this. In other words, Beau Docs are just a different view of our portals.

The Ask

As I mentioned, we have started working on Beau Docs already. I would love to hear your thoughts, notes, ideas, feedback on the concept. I believe that it will help us to release something very special soon!

Feel free to share your thoughts/ideas in comments or fill a very short survey here: https://airtable.com/shraJOlAONft45uug

on August 6, 2021
  1. 2

    First off, congratulations on the acceptance into YC. That is no small feat.

    I really like the idea. I think this has a lot of potential and would really help makers like me with content marketing. The mockup is beautiful and I actually enjoyed reading a CTA about filing my taxes. Some takeaways so that I'm not completely useless:

    • I would want this implementable as a subdomain of my website. Similar to Shopify. I would want "blog.peer.haus" to point to my hosted beau docs.
    • As an engineer, I am much less interested in the "no code" value prop and much more interested in the idea that this content creation tool produces a UX that has been vetted by professionals.
    • The idea of payment right in the content almost felt like putting the wagon before the horse in terms of what you're offering. I really like the idea of onboarding users within the content, but payment felt...odd. I wish I were more helpful here but wanted to document this for you.

    I hope this helps. Good luck!

  2. 1

    Wow, my product is the same idea, but different target customers. Another similar product is https://www.process.st/

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