Shelf for marketers
Remember what you've learned about your market.
Marketing produces a constant stream of evidence. Competitor pages. Ads. Customer language. Campaign references. Positioning. Articles. Screenshots.
The insight may matter for ten minutes. Or become important again ten months later. Shelf keeps the evidence close.
- MarchThey quietly removed the free plan
- April“I just need it to stop nagging me”, said three times in interviews
- MayMinimal black layout, one sentence, no product shot
- JulyA teardown of how their pricing page reads
- AugustTheir homepage stopped saying platform
Next quarter
The pricing argument you have to make in October, already evidenced with five dated things you noticed.
The problem
Today's observation can become next quarter's strategy.
The screenshot you took because it was interesting is the evidence you need when someone asks whether the market has moved.
Between then and now it usually disappears: into a chat message to yourself, a deck nobody kept, or a folder named misc.
- Competitor pages that have since been redesigned
- Ads that ran for two weeks and vanished
- Customer phrases you meant to reuse in copy
- A positioning change nobody announced
Find the evidence behind the argument.
Shelf reads the text inside screenshots and saved pages, so competitor copy stays searchable even after their site changes.
What you remember
Three tiers. They'd dropped the free plan. Annual only on the top tier.
Clues Shelf can use
- Text read in the screenshot: “Starter”, “billed annually”
- Visual characteristics: a three-column pricing table
- Time: captured in March
- Text inside the screenshot
- Tier names and billing terms are readable.
- Visual similarity
- A three-column pricing table.
- Saved around this time
- March, before their redesign.
Kept nearby
- Their homepage, same week · Positioning
- Your note on the free-plan gap · Same day
Customer language is a saved thing.
The best line in your next campaign has usually already been said by a customer. It just needs to survive from the call to the copy doc.
- 01 · Heard“I just need it to stop nagging me”Interview, April
- 02 · KeptTwo more people said something similarSame phrase, different words
- 03 · ConnectedGrouped with onboarding frictionBy meaning
- 04 · UsedHeadline, tested in JulyTheir words, not yours
- 05 · RecalledFound again for the October relaunch
Where this earns its place.
Competitor watch
Dated screenshots that outlive the pages they came from. See how
Campaign references
A swipe file you can search by look and by meaning. See how
Positioning work
Track how a market's language changed, with the evidence. See how
Customer research
Keep quotes near the screens and notes they belong to. See how
Research can reveal strategy before it's public.
A launch plan is visible in what you've been collecting: the competitor you keep watching, the price you keep testing, the market you keep reading about.
Shelf's memory is local-first on your Mac, indexed and searched on the machine. Optional external-model features are marked and off unless you enable them.
Markets change. Useful context shouldn't disappear.
Remember the signals.
Keep what you noticed, dated and searchable, for the quarter it finally matters.
Keep exploring
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.