Show HN: Remarq.io – Beautiful documents for consultants
remarq.io
remarq.io
#Edit. Perhaps that I just don't see the value as it's not a "trivial amount" for me, and I'd much rather spend some time going the DIY route with software I already have.
A traditional program would have many advantages for the user:
* No limit on documents per month
* works offline
* Reports (which may contain company secrets) are not uploaded on a third party server
While other SaaS offerings always have some kind if advantage like having integrated support, I'm wondering whether a document converter (this is basically what it is) is the right software for a SaaS.
That said, as a personal user, I find the pricing very steep. I'm going to look for a free alternative.
I spent ~$250 on a pages template to use for my reports. And because I write everything in Markdown, my workflow is:
• Write in Markdown
• Open up report
• Painstakingly hand copy and reformat Markdown to Pages
• Save as PDF
• Send to client
Now? I take that markdown, drop it into Remarq, and — BOOM! — I have a beautiful report that I can send to a client.
It's pretty awesome, you guys.
I didn't want to build something DIY or right to customize something. Pages — and now Remarq — made it easy for me to get a beautiful output.
And, on top of that, there was an ROI consideration. How much time would I spend getting Pandoc working that I could spend growing my business, mapping out a campaign for a client, or relaxing?
To me, the cost of Pandoc was too high.
Based on what?
(This suspicion is primarily based on the average negativity and skepticism by the Hacker News community :)
If you're happy working in Adobe / Word yourself, that's awesome! I built Remarq as a tool to help freelancers and consultants generate high-quality, beautifully designed reports and proposals _without_ needing to invest in a designer for them.
I think my main reservation is the monthly plans, perhaps because I'm not your target market and really don't put reports together that often. (though on another note, I do put bids / proposals together quite often, so maybe that's another angle)
In any case, I think having a plan that is pay-per-use (no monthly, $50 a report) would make me consider this next time I have a document to put together. I'm probably a different class of customer than your demographic though.
In any case, neat product, congrats on the launch!
I think you're exaggerating the difficulty of your competition. :)
This is a tool for people who don't want to be anywhere near a command line.
I've recommended the software to my consultant wife (since her company would be paying), but I'm cheap.
How does the pricing work if I want to do revisions to a document? Say it goes through a lot of editing, does each export count towards the maximum number allowed?
If not, what's to prevent users from doing entirely new documents under the guise of "edits" to an old document?
Nope, edits do not count towards the total. You can make as many revisions as you want to a given document. At this point there's nothing to stop someone from doing exactly what you describe. I'm mainly counting on attracting customers that value their time enough that they'd find it silly to expend time and effort gaming that particular system.
On a separate note... Every so often (once every 3/4 months) I have occasion to use litmus.com to test an email template for a freelance gig. They only do monthly plans too - plans which I'll never be able to justify paying. I'd be happy to pay a one-off fee every time I needed it but they won't offer that pricing model, the end result being I cycle trial accounts through my many email addresses and they miss out on revenue.
It doesn't sit well with me because their sole factor of production (like yours, I imagine) is CPU time which is pretty well commoditised nowadays, so offering anything more complicated than a single unit of the product immediately tells me that artificial barriers have been created with the sole purpose of extracting "extra" money from me. It kinda grinds my gears.
Which flavour of Markdown are you supporting? Do you plan to support _full_ Common Mark?
What are you using under the hood as your typesetting engine and stylesheet syntax? Pandoc, (La)TeX, CSS w/ Prince XML?
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jagthedrummer/213b8a787b3...
Under the hood is Pandoc/LaTeX. Pandoc flavored Markdown is what is supported at the moment.
* SaaS. OK if your documents contain text only data. Maybe it contains a way to include images (I just don't see that from screenshots and description), but really no way to automagically run R/python/whatever scripts to insert actual data on the fly. Probably solvable with an API.
* Subscription pricing. If you have long running projects and publish [a batch of] documents less frequently than every month, pricing will start to really bite. I see that I am not alone that is concerned about pricing :)
* Template limitation. OK if all your documents are your own and not your clients'. Out of luck if you need to prepare documentation for clients. Maybe template customization is that powerful, but again, examples do not suggest that.
Yeah, this caters to the people who don't want to fiddle with pandoc or some other Markdown-to-$format tool, but even the cost (in terms of time spent) doing that would still be probably significantly less - and result in a more valuable end-product (since there would be no arbitrary limits) - than the monetary cost of this particular service.
Yeah, it's cheaper than hiring a designer every single time I want to create a document, but who the hell would do that? I would opt to have the designer create a template once, then use that template repeatedly, which would end up being much more affordable than this in the long run.
Nice idea, but the price is going to strangle this thing in the crib.
But maybe I'm wrong. I wish you success.
EDIT: Ok, I tried it. It does a fantastic job, I'll admit. But much too pricey for me.
It is an awesome idea but the basic product (i.e. non bespoke) needs to be cheaper. Although I know you look at the value you are adding, you also need to consider that another startup can easily copy your idea and outdo you on price.
On the value proposition side. Yes a designer is more expensive but they can design something custom to my brand. This can be done as a word template then I just type my next report into that and it's done for free.
As a comparison think about the autoresponder market. A $19 aweber plan should be sold for $1000 because think of all the envelopes / stamps you are saving? Well it isn't because of Getresponse etc.
I got an "Oh no! We hit a snag processing your report. Markdown help." error without telling me what was wrong with the file. Seems like images break it.
For making these kinds of PDF I currently do this: 1. Write version controlled rst/markdown/creole. 2. Convert to HTML with a small script / command line tool (which also lets me do pre- and post-processing, like adding CSS). 3. Use chrome's print dialog to save the page as a PDF. This works pretty well for me.
The final output is indeed tweakable and there are 4 totally different templates to choose from.
I always encourage people to go with whatever system works best for them. I'm glad you have something that you like. :)
That said, I would recommend not lowering the price to capture low volume customers like myself. You are often better off with fewer customers who can easily justify the price vs. a larger volume of "cheap" customers. The "cheap" customer are often more demanding when it comes to support so in addition to paying less in the first place, the cost you more to support.
Unfortunately, a lot of consulting jobs require all docs to be in MS Word format... Infuriating I know.
I should probably make a gallery page and link it somewhere prominently.