App Feedback

2 points by trubalca 152 days ago | 2 comments

trubalca 152 days ago |

Hi all, I've been working on this collaborative text editor with a buddy for a few days now and we are having a difficult time getting in contact with writers. The primary differentiator is a simple UI for GIT-like functionality including branching, merging, diffs, and pull requests. We feel semi-confident that there is some industry that needs this functionality enough to pay for it but we aren't sure who exactly. Some people we have thought of so far include:

- screenwriters - lawyers - editors / writers - academics - students potentially - anyone who has important documents and cares about version history

We are struggling to figure out how to reach out to these people and subsequently interview them. We are looking for design partners who will guide the creation of the product and hopefully ultimately pay for it. Would love to hear your guys' thoughts on how to find and reach out to these people

kazinator 152 days ago | |

Out of those people, the only ones with money to blow on software are lawyers.

Most of your target audience does not grok branching, merging, diffs and pull requests.

Google Docs allows for collaborative editing and is free to use. Collaborative as in, as you edit, your collaborators' cursors appear, labeled by their names, and you see their edits in real time in the same document.

Users who know about this are not going to go to diffs, pull requests and merges; they simply don't know the computer science behind why those things would be advantageous.

Texts which are not code are very difficult to branch and merge because you can't just test them to see whether they work. E.g. if two authors take a partially written novel, and continue it in different ways, good luck merging it into one cohesive whole whose plot makes sense. Maybe with the help of AI it could be pulled off; it could tell you things like why has the chsaracter of Dwight re-appeared in chapter 7, after being killed in chapter 5.