Good story - shows how you could easily test your business ideas without spending hugh money.

I'm interested to see where this can go, if there's a market of some scale for a paper product for this niche. What do you think?

Paper is not going anywhere - people like it. Probably in the future it will be exclusive product. Niche is good. I like this kind of products. This idea reminds me about http://qqnotes.com/ (unfortunately it's only in polish).

I still use a Moleskine from time to time, but mostly the iPad, to take notes - especially when doing customer interviews. Yeah, I agree. Starting niche is a good thing. The question is if you want to stay niche or if there's growth potential to other niches and out of niche-dom. [edited for typo]

I like to use my iPad more these days, too, especially cause I'm an evernote fan. Still notes don't look as good as on paper and touch-pens are still not on par for easy writing on screens. A good integration with Evernote good get it out of niche-dom I think. For the big masses paper is still the goto tool at least for another 2 years ;)

There's the Evernote "Smart" Moleskine http://evernote.com/moleskine/ though. Anybody had any experiences with it? Speaking of Evernote, they also recently introduced their no-equity accelerator http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2013/04/16/announcing-the-ever.... and stated that they want to get into hardware - so maybe there's an opportunity here for something to happen?

I actually did look into the Evernote Smartbook when I had a look at the market & competition for this product. Looks really nice, but I think there's room for improvement & I have an idea or two. But first gotta get proof that there is a market for this

Haven't tried it yet, it seems to be just normal notebook, but with a special space on each page to specify notebook name and tags. Evernote accelerator would be quite possible, maybe just build a rough app MVP for scanning close to what the moleskine one does?

Which app do you use?

I prefer writing but every app out there is either too buggy and slow or too bad with wrist detection. Penultimate is closest to perfect but lacks a wrist pad that does not respond to touches. Though its auto sync is unmatchable and so is text search.

Mind if I get in touch with you for a little customer interview?

I think the bigger "test" behind this is that maybe some content that you would maybe distribute as an ebook, but that needs hands-on practice for you to really get it, could be effective as this kind of paper handbook/notebook combo

That's what I am trying to find out. Normally it's "Buy the book, get the worksheets for free". What happens if we reverse this: "Buy the practice book, get the eBook for free". Time will tell.

I could also imagine something like those paper organizers from as it seems ages ago. something very flexible.

nice work