Show HN: TubePen – My attempt to get more out of YouTube learning

www.tubepen.com

74 points · n0vella · 9 days ago

Hi HN! I made this because I always forget what I'm trying to learn from YouTube.

Test yourself: Can you remember the main concepts from the last (educational) video you watched?

So, why not highlight and take notes on YouTube videos, just like in books? That's TubePen.

I’d love your feedback! What do you think of my landing page? Use the 10-day free trial and see if it’s useful for you.

Thanks!

25 comments

Leftium · 9 days ago

I tried signing up for the free trial subscription, and am starting to regret it.

I successfully entered my credit card details (4 times), yet it still says I don't have an active subscription. So besides not being able to try this app, there is also no way to cancel my automatic payments, which starts on Jan 18.

After fixing this onboarding problem, I suggest making it possible to try without giving any personal information. (I expected the video player on the landing page to be functional, but I guess just the note section is.)

Also there are many typos on the site. Like "loged in as"

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rgbrgb · 6 days ago

Looks cool, love work in this direction. I wonder how learning rates w this would compare to taking notes on paper like in a traditional lecture, which some studies show improves learning [0].

[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

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maalber · 9 days ago

Really neat idea actually! I love the landing page, both the interactive part and particularly the visual style. One thing that I would note though, is that scrolling down, I expected the images to be interactive since they blend in with the rest of the page and look like interactive elements. I would either try to make it more obvious that they are example images, or actually make them interactive

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registeredcorn · 6 days ago

1. It would be nice if there was a short video, gif, or webm showing TubePen working. I see the image examples and they are nice, but seeing it "in motion" would be a nice reassurance before signing up.

2. I use brave browser on mobile to watch youtube, so videos automatically set to m.youtube.com/whatever. In order for me to try TubePem on mobile I had to drop the leading "m" subdomain and switch youtube to TubePen. Not sure if you could get things working with the subdomain m.tubepen.com, but it might be nice.

Anyway, cool idea. I hope it does well. :)

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luigipederzani · 3 days ago

Love the concept—TubePen is super cool! A couple of quick thoughts:

1. Make it so we can just paste the video URL instead of editing it ourselves. Way easier. 2. Let people try it without logging in first. Login walls are hurt conversions!

Seriously, though, this has so much potential. Can’t wait to see where it goes!