If you can figure out a way for people to try Draft without forcing them to register, do so. I wanted to play around with it, but I don't want to make yet another account. The more people who play with it, the more people who will sign up.
Came here to say this too. I hate making new accounts. I was really hoping I'd click try and be greeted by a blank word processor with a blinking cursor. Instead I got yet another login screen and I bailed (for now).
It seems to me Draft's key growth action is getting users to share a draft with a friend.
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!
Thanks Scott. To be honest, I really debated that. I have a blog post or two on this topic specifically. I've gotten a lot of advice from smart people that goes both ways on this. I personally like a guest user experience and no sign up. But from a lot of a/b testing with previous products, I've seen requiring registers to have a great effect on being able to increase signups, but more importantly create valuable conversations. Namely to discuss problems and feedback, which helps me make something much more valuable for people.
I assume that by "increase signups," you mean that when people view the landing page, a higher percentage of them signup. But what would worry me is the stat that such testing does not capture: the number of people who did not share the site with others because it's not easy to play with. And that kind of sharing is advertising.
In other words, it's possible to have a lower signup percentage, but more total signups.
Keep in mind that requiring users to sign up before trying the product contaminates user count as a meaningful metric, and devalues it as a marketing channel because it's filled with unqualified non-users.
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.
The wisdom I've heard is that you can either lose people on the "what is this -> signup" phase or the "signup -> pay" phase. Your leads are better qualified if you lose them on the former. You get better gauge of the potential market on the latter (guessing on this one).
I've worked in two completely different companies where we tried some notion of using the product without signing up. Both times we just got more people with less overall engagement at the cost of complicating the backend infrastructure.
Not to say this will never work, but it's definitely not a panacea.
I can see your reasoning behing making people sign up, even if that will significantly retard your growth rate multiplier.
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.
My advice would be to give people something for signing up. For example, let them start playing without email, let the save, and then ask for their email address to send them a unique url to their new account. This has the added advantages that (1) more people will play with the app and hopefully talk about it! and (2) those that sign up are more qualified leads as they know what they're signing up for.
Just to add my twopenneth from running https://www.writelatex.com - allowing users create documents and start trying out the editor without signing up has been a big plus for us in terms of users, and is generally popular according to feedback.
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 :-)
Come to think of it, I felt the same way. Left the registration page up in the background while I worked on other stuff. Eventually came back and made an account.
I don't get it. It's just a page with markdown that lets you hire a pro for some editing help. I don't think the export feature is that exciting either, even though it's 'good', for example it lacks the option to export as pdf or any other popular file format that people might want the document in. When I tried to download my document to my computer I got a .txt-file... Now that's helpful.
The main benefit doesn't seem to be in the editing of Your Document, but in your collaboration with others and version control of the document. There are specific pain points of using Google Docs or git which this seems to deliberately address.
Dammit! I was joking on Twitter with a few people that this went unnoticed for so long in this discussion. :)
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)
I just pasted in a 4500 draft that I'm currently working on, and plunged right in. It's going great. I particularly like the side-by-side revision capabilities.
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?
Yuck, sorry about that wrapping problem. I'd like to fix that. Could you send me that document (or something similar) that I could use to test with? I'm at nate@cityposh.com
I'm a huge fan of IA Writer, there's a couple of areas where I think it could be improved though. Being online is one of them, the other being an option to show bold/italic/underline formatting (as opposed to just markdown syntax).
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.
I want to second this. It's already quite nice but I'd recommend being as extreme as possible with optimizing for focus. I don't need all the corner information, so let me have the option of turning it off or having it fade out.
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.
An interesting dilemma. You're targeting a market that either isn't very sophisticated (uses Google Docs for text editing) or can't afford/won't pay for the tools for the job.
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.
It would be nice to see this built out like a service that desktop apps could tap into like Simplenote. I'd like to be able to use this with Byword for OS X. Dedicated desktop apps provide a nicer writing environment, but the ability to work in a versioned editing environment from any computer with a modern Web browser is a pretty big deal. I'd pay $1.99 a month for Draft if desktop apps could integrate with it or if Drafts could integrate with Dropbox.
Draft is integrated with Dropbox :) Through Filepicker.io you can import text/markdown from Dropbox, Evernote, etc. Any changes you make in Draft sync back to their location in those cloud service. The sync doesn't go back though from Dropbox to Draft, yet...
I'm can't tell what the benefit of Draft is supposed to be, but for folks looking for a great tool for writing longer works, check out Scrivener. Bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hand of it you'll really appreciate the ability to work at a paragraph, chapter, or document level, and to pre-determine formatting for different outputs (p-book, e-book, etc.).
(I have no financial connection to the company - just wish I'd found it sooner.)
FWIW, I thought the features page[1] laid out Draft's value proposition fairly well, primarily around a collaborative and versioned writing environment that doesn't suck. I really like the idea of integration around other cloud tools, as it provides paths for Draft to work with my existing workflows instead of being Yet Another Cloud Island.
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.
Thanks, I have some plans to experiment with the homepage for sure. I have a neat ab testing tool I made for a previous project that will get a workout. I'll open source that tool soon.
I used Scrivener for a book recently. The basic format was short chapters within sections (non-fiction). Scrivener did a great job as it let me easily rearrange things, easily track the state of chapters, etc. As for formatting though, once I got to the 80 percent or so point, I dumped the entire thing to a conventional word processor and finished it up that way. I don't use it for shorter pieces but I really liked it for pulling a book together.
Nate, you might want to consider giving the pages a more descriptive <title> than 'Draft'. Makes for a pretty unmemorable bookmark ;) Along those lines, it would be nice if bookmarking a document gave it a title related to the document (first header or something)? Also, I'll throw in my vote for Google/Oath and some sort of register-free experience. Great job!
The idea of marking major drafts is genius. It's a happy medium between the show-you-every-change-you've-ever-made approach of Word and the latest-version-is-everything approach.
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.
Aww. Thank you. I'm incredibly flattered by this feedback.
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...
I've been waiting for someone to build this... I occasionally googled "markdown track changes" in the hopes that something turned up.
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.
"Draft has a magic "Ask a Professional" button. One click, and you can send whatever you're working on (Christmas letter, cold email to a potential customer, blog post, etc.) to a staff of reviewers to get suggested edits."
Who is providing the feedback? How is that paid for? (Hint: I'm a teacher...)
It's a staff of college educated folks who sign an NDA. For this, I use a service called Premier by my friends at MobileWorks. https://premier.mobileworks.com
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.
Thank you! I've got some pretty cool ideas - at least they sound cool in my head :) - on what can come next. I'm insanely excited for a feature I'll probably put out later this week or next.
Any larger text I write in ms-word I usually start in outline mode. This lets me easily set up an outline for the complete text, and reorder draft text until the structure of the text works.
For me any tool focused on drafting text should have an outline mode.
I sent this to some writers at an agency and their immediate feedback was pointing out grammatical errors in your website copy (they pointed out the about page specifically). They are looking at the service in greater depth, but nonetheless this was an immediate turn off for them. It's a classic case of judging a book by its cover, but I admit to doing the same when reading over code or even visiting a site with terrible design...
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
I agree. It does a good job of flagging misspellings, but it's lousy at offering suggestions. The weird part is that you can put the the same misspelling into google search and 99% of the time the "Showing results for..." is the correct spelling.
Google Search and Google Chrome are totally separate products within a massive company. (The same situation is why Gmail had terrible search for so long.)
I like the look of this, and the draft-marking is a great feature. I'd worry about using it in earnest, though, because it of its limited export options, which require the formatting to be done outside Draft. It's great to be able to collaborate on creating content, but a lot can go wrong in that final formatting, and Draft doesn't have a way to make that stage collaborative and version-controlled. Everything I write could be written in Draft, but none of it could be finished in Draft, and I see that as a problem.
I've been using Draft for a while now, and it's completely replaced LibreOffice and Google Docs for me. Honestly, there's no way in which I can fault it. I find that I work faster, and with more focus.
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.
That's very nice, I can see myself using this quite often.
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).
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?
Thanks! Yuck on that screenshot. What kind of browser size are you using. Is this on a netbook, or decent size screen. Draft is sucking right now on small screens.
I was one of the beta users and it's great to see this keep improving. I'm glad Nate upgraded the prices for editing. That's the feature that attracts me the most.
Login flow and initial writing experience all seemed excellent, and I'll be recommending this to some friends over GDocs for their next collaborative project.
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.
It doesn't currently support collaborative editing, if you have the doc open in multiple windows it's last save wins. I'd love to see this added a la google docs but I imagine it's a big step on from where they are now.
That's true. But the flow I use to write doesn't require any kind of real time collaborative writing.
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.
This looks really interesting. I'm working on a lengthy fiction project right now, so maybe I'll give it a shot.
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 looks weird because the text wrapping is changing while it's animating the grow out. I think it's stands out because the rest of the product actually looks very polished.
With all the news about the always on internet connection of SimCity I can't help but think moving from a local word document to this service is a bad idea.
If I had just a text document and git/svn installed on my machine I basically have this service yet with no reliance upon their servers being online.
Did anyone have trouble running this in Firefox ? I'm on Firefox 20, Windows 8 x64 and the site is non-functional after logging in. I cannot create any new documents and clicking on any UI element does nothing.
It works fine with no issues in Google's Chrome Browser though.
I'll look into this. I've been making apps for so many years, and I'm always humbled by how much browser testing I have to do, and what is still broken after testing in like 8 browsers already. :)
I'd love to be able to use this an en embedded or API based thing. (For money, obviously...) It would work really well inside something I've been working on - it's basically a supercharged version of what I'd planned on building in-house. Love it.
This looks really cool. I'd definitely be interested if I had the option of hosting my own instance. My line of work requires collaboration but borders matter in regards to where things are stored geographically.
Is there functionality for importing docx? I use this feature all the time in Google Drive, and I think it definitely gives it an edge over Draft (although I love the idea!)
I and a friend have been doing something I think is a little better for a while. We just have the document in github, and use a jekyll task to render it, so you can edit it in your markdown compatible ide and sync to github, you can edit it online on github, you can add notes to specific line numbers in commits, you can submit pull requests, get notifications, etc., etc.
In fact, I was thinking about writing something a bit like this that used github as a backend, since it's working so well.
