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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.
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 :-)
you can try the experience on this random doc.
https://draftin.com/documents/5606?token=SWh7LSoED_pnCwLtgJR...
just started typing as soon as it opened which felt like a good change from adjusting fonts
Simple, do something like jsfiddle. Let me play around with it, then if I want to save the doc I'll register.
you can use something like abc@example.com - apparently there is no verification step.
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.
Others might not be so patient!
Yup. Agreed. I use 10MinuteMail for these situations: http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html
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.
From https://draftin.com/about :
>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...
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?
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.
This looks amazing - I could totally see this being the go-to word processor for bloggers, especially with the editing service!
The interface seems inspired by iA Writer[1] and Ulysses[2].
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.
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.)
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.
Ah I love this. Tarantino was right, this is gonna be the writer's year
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...)
PS: very slick
Been using and enjoying this for the past few days. Looking forward to the future of the product!
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.
Use it with:
Email: cheese@cheese.com
Password: 123456
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 don't get it, is there any way to format text? Is there any way to spellcheck?
A minor note: the landing page, on smaller viewports, has some unfortunate overlap issues:
Should be a relatively easy fix with some background-fu applied to the footer.
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.
So... Yeah. I'm a big fan of Draft.
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).
I think this is a very cool idea.
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
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.
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.
Looks great! Bit of feedback: In edit mode, I don't like having to wait for the pop-out when I hover on the home icon.
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'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.
Hmm I can seem to test it, but does it do anything LaTeX + svn/git/hg + emacs don't?
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.
1. Clicked "try draft"
2. Got taken to login screen.
3. Abandoned.
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!)
This is almost exactly what I've been designing in my head.
Use your email and whatever password you'd like to begin using Draft.
"whatever password" has to have at least six characters - maybe you might want to clarify this
Beautiful work. One easy-to-implement suggestion: Add the ability to name major drafts.
Are you using git under the hood? If so, it would just be a named branch....
Please add import and export to/from docx and latex. Also, please add export to pdf. This could be a great product.