Write Better with Draft
draftin.com
draftin.com
In other words, it's possible to have a lower signup percentage, but more total signups.
I totally hear you that it sucks when you know people try your product but leave without signing up, and worse still you have no channel to ask them why. Users exploring a public demo have shown real interest in your solution to problems they have, and while they're exploring (especially if the demo is somewhat guided) there's a very natural opportunity to begin a conversation without requiring a signup. Ask for feedback (via survey, olark chat, quick submit comment form, your contact info...), offer to email product updates or tease future enhancements, show you twitter feed, etc. Moving registration downstream doesn't have to mean you can't learn about potential customers.
But there's NO reason to make people create a new account. Everyone hates making new accounts, and there are a zillion identity providers out there, from google to facebook to twitter to linkedin to github to yahoo (ad nauseum).
And even if it's too much work right now to configure your application to accept third party identities, you can still "sign-up" users by requesting an email address, letting them straight into the application, and then email them a URL with an embedded identity token that allows them to pick up where they left off.
Not to say this will never work, but it's definitely not a panacea.
just started typing as soon as it opened which felt like a good change from adjusting fonts
We all have Google accounts. Just use those, devs. You even get two-factor for free.
I rarely sign in with Google for any app.
Design the user's first required action to relate to sharing; capture the author's email after they click Draft/Save, and their friend(s) emails when they want to share. The interface could use a little work to encourage sharing as well.
This product is designed to spread itself inherently, so play to that strength!
And in the early stages, more exposure through more users is a good thing, helps spread the word.
For us it was the way we'd started out though, so easy to implement :-)
Others might not be so patient!
>You don't need writing software; you need someones feedback on your writing.
It should be "someone's" or, ideally "you need feedback on your writing." I don't usually do this, but in the spirit of the page...
You know. I actually had written "someone's" in the original draft of that page. But I thought to myself "someone's at the door" and convinced myself "someones" must be the right word.
I think my wife even corrected this, and I didn't accept the change in Draft :) thinking I knew better. (Facepalm)
One problem: My current text is set to word-wrap at 80 characters. But Draft has word wrap at about 50 characters, resulting in ugly lines. How do I un-wrap my current text?
One difference that's immediately obvious using Draft is the home icon and mark draft button in the top right. Compared to IA writer it feels like unnecessary noise. It would be great if these faded out when you started typing and only came into view when you move the mouse.
Also, I don't know why the title defaults to all caps; some people may want to make decisions about the capitalization of their titles.
Great work though!
You are right, people really do like to make decisions about this stuff. I'll see what I can do.
But do I like Future Bold in caps. Just love it :) The underdog font as Aaron Draplin would say.
If people could send Microsoft Word documents for suggestions, possibly from Office 365 and/or SkyDrive, that might appeal to the pro/business audience that would pay for the service. However, they probably wouldn't use it because of the problems with privacy, confidentiality and copyright protection.
(I have no financial connection to the company - just wish I'd found it sooner.)
I'm not a heavy-duty writer, but Draft fixes some deficiencies in other tools well enough that I'll definitely try it for collaborative writing work.
As far as the Draft site, I'd like to see an easier route to the value prop on the features page from the homepage. Perhaps locating that info "almost below the fold" on the homepage, so that simple scrolling leads readers through a tour? I suspect (anyone have data?) that there's a lot of propsective users who drop off before they'll click on a "Features" link.
I would recommend integrating with publishing services, so I can edit my, er, drafts in Draft and then hit a single button and publish to WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, et al. once I'm happy with it.
I agree on figuring out something about publishing. I've got something really neat coming out this week or next. It's very simple, but it'll be one of the most useful things to my current writing workflow. Stay tuned...
My need for such a service stemmed from working at a full-service agency, where website copy would be written in docx, sent to the client for review by email attachment with track changes enabled, then eventually on to the coders to flow in to the site.
It would be so refreshing to receive copy in markdown format instead of poorly utilized docx files! (It drives me nuts seeing headings done by bolding and increasing size...). In the meantime I wrote a decent XSLT to transform docx to markdown... But ideally everyone in the chain would be using markdown.
If Draft could make this type of workflow more appealing than passing around docx files by email, I'm sure you'd get many agencies jumping on this service. Good money to be made there.
Who is providing the feedback? How is that paid for? (Hint: I'm a teacher...)
PS: very slick
They have staff from all over the world. I know I'm not a credible review of this service (since I made Draft), but it's really been awesome. :) I sent my last blog post through Draft, and was thrilled to have the results.
You pay for it, when you click the Ask a Pro button. A credit card form powered by Stripe pops up.
Email: cheese@cheese.com
Password: 123456
It would be a good idea to make such corrections considering you are targeting writers! ;)
EDIT: you could spin this by asking for collaboration, using your own tool, for the copy on your About page
Should be a relatively easy fix with some background-fu applied to the footer.
What's unusual about Draft is that the founder has gave out his cell phone number and email address, and if you have an issue with the service, he's happy to help. I actually found a stored XSS vulnerability with the service, and sent him an email. Within 30 minutes it was solved.
So... Yeah. I'm a big fan of Draft.
A little feature request -- I am not very familiar with markdown, so I find myself wanting to switch back and forth between "edit" and "view" quite often. A shortcut for this (and perhaps other actions) could be useful. Or even a side-by-side comparison, where the right side would be the rendered version of what the user types in the left side (most screens today are wide enough to accommodate two columns of text).
Things to note:
Rendering of bottom right elements looks weird / overlaps in FF and IE for me on Windows 7. See: http://i.imgur.com/6RGKJta.jpg.
I have writer friends who are non-technical (don't program) that would probably be interested in the service but wouldn't understand what version control is (or what would be so great about it for writing). Maybe consider a short explanation / pain point callout on the homepage?
Cheers,
Nate
The only niggle that immediately stood out to me was that the buttons on the "Import" modal are using the default Bootstrap styles instead of the flatter ones used throughout the rest of the interface. I doubt it would've stood out to me had everything else not seemed so carefully considered.
I don't want someone writing on top of what I'm writing. I just want me there, and then you can work on your own copy of my work, and I'll choose what wins.
That being said, I definitely need some more real time experience here alerting you when someone is editing your doc and when it's ready.
I'll get those styled soon.
Thank you very much for this feedback.
Some feedback:
An export to Word/OpenOffice/PDF feature would be nice (any of those options, especially Word, would be helpful). It would also be very nice if Draft made an attempt to preserve formatting when copying in text from the programs mentioned above.
It works fine with no issues in Google's Chrome Browser though.
In fact, I was thinking about writing something a bit like this that used github as a backend, since it's working so well.
"whatever password" has to have at least six characters - maybe you might want to clarify this
Are you using git under the hood? If so, it would just be a named branch....
And congrats for launching this!