
Show HN: Remarq.io – Beautiful documents for consultants - jagthedrummer
http://www.remarq.io/
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zo1
I don't want to be _that guy_ but can someone explain to me how this is better
than word with templates? Is it the markdown-import feature?

#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.

~~~
blumkvist
Word doesn't export to .pdf very nicely. If you want the ease of use of word
and pixel-perfect documents, you can buy Adobe InDesign. You can import word
documents and fix the issues there, as well as better the layout. Once you
nail down the export/import settings and a few macros, it's pretty easy. MS
Office comes with a similar software called MS Publisher, but it offers a lot
less than InDesign.

~~~
Raphael
Print to PDF.

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dnlrn
What is the reason this is sold as a SaaS instead of a traditional program?

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.

~~~
murbard2
It's sold as SaaS because you make more money selling it as such, you get a
recurring source of revenue without having to sell updates which can be costly
to push.

That said, as a personal user, I find the pricing very steep. I'm going to
look for a free alternative.

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kaisdavis
I've been beta testing this and it's been revolutionary — and saved me a bunch
of money.

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.

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raziel2p
Did you try/consider pandoc?

~~~
kaisdavis
To me, it wasn't an option. I'm not a developer — I'm an SEO and Outreach
Consultant — and so using something off the shelf (at first a pages template,
now Remarq) made a lot more sense.

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.

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vortico
I suspect a bit of sock-puppetry on this thread. The demo PDF is nice looking,
but there are many more ways to generate PDF from Markdown, via LaTeX or HTML.
Most people willing to use Markdown instead of Word, Pages, etc. would know
how to use tools like pandoc, I assume.

~~~
tnorthcutt
_I suspect a bit of sock-puppetry on this thread._

Based on what?

~~~
vortico
There are a few highly positive comments on this thread that read like
advertisements or featured testimonials.

(This suspicion is primarily based on the average negativity and skepticism by
the Hacker News community :)

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lorddoig
Nice designs, but my eyes almost fell out of my head when I saw the pricing.
The regular price of the mid-tier is double the price of the highest Adobe
Creative Cloud package!

~~~
jagthedrummer
Think about the price in comparison to hiring a design consultant to generate
these reports for you. If they charge you or your agency $50/hour, it takes
them an hour to design a report, and you're producing 10 documents/month,
that's $500/month.

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.

~~~
murbard2
The right comparison would be: how much do you need to pay a designer to
produce a latex template. After that, it's only a matter of running pandoc.

~~~
jagthedrummer
Also, if you know any designers capable of producing a LaTeX template, please
put me in touch!

~~~
murbard2
Touché :)

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?

~~~
jagthedrummer
Thanks for the recommendation!

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.

~~~
murbard2
You could also prevent editing the main title, once you pick it, it's set in
stone (or limit the edits to a small Levenshtein ball). That way you can do as
many corrections to the document as you wish, but it's much harder to cheat
the system.

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forlorn
I uploaded a markdown file with cyrillic characters and got a pdf with plenty
of whitespace.

~~~
jagthedrummer
Oh no! I'll take a look and see what went wrong.

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rhythmvs
Well done! Can we have a look at the markdown input source for the demo pdf?
[http://www.remarq.io/remarq_intro.md](http://www.remarq.io/remarq_intro.md)
returns a GitHub Page 404. (Also, that url in the marginal note, on page 4 of
the demo pdf, is broke, likely because of line-breaking.)

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?

~~~
jagthedrummer
Ah, crap! Thanks for pointing out the broken link. Here's the input document
for the demo.

[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jagthedrummer/213b8a787b3...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jagthedrummer/213b8a787b3382777ce7/raw/dfc89d54a040bfaa0ba20d21cf5438eef2a07f82/Remarq-
sample-markdown.md)

Under the hood is Pandoc/LaTeX. Pandoc flavored Markdown is what is supported
at the moment.

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reqctomaniac
Confluence + word export? For similar price you get reports plus a wiki as
well. I've been using that export recently and it works awesome. You need a
word template, though, but that can be cheaply had through freelance designers
($20-50 tops). I'd consider this if this was a one-time purchase or like
$5/month, but not for that price.

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friendzis
Overall the software seems nice, but there are just too many limitations which
make this a bit of a niche software, IMHO.

    
    
      * 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.
    

Just my 2 cents though.

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yellowapple
Interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant such a steep pricetag, in
my opinion at least.

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.

~~~
jagthedrummer
I think it depends on what sort of rate you're able to charge as a
consultant/freelancer. If you're anywhere near $100/hour (or more) you could
very easily waste more time/money by trying to do it yourself.

~~~
bbcbasic
I think by lowering your pricing you will attract more customers and make more
profit.

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.

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tnorthcutt
I used Remarq when it was in pre-release mode, and it is super slick.
Basically it lets you write in markdown, but easily convert that to good
looking PDFs. Perfect for sending reports to clients/bosses/etc. I'm sure
there are lots of other good uses for it too.

~~~
jagthedrummer
Thanks for being an early tester!

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lost-theory
Looks nice! The design of the example PDF is a bit noisy for my taste (the
geometric shapes at the bottom of every page). And the demo PDF you generate
by uploading a markdown file has a lot of whitespace. But I assume that's all
tweak-able with a real account.

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.

~~~
jagthedrummer
Ah, yeah, I need a better message about images. They work fine if they're at a
fully qualified URL.

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. :)

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chrisbennet
As a consultant, I can see the value for someone who writes at least 1-2
reports a month. I tend to write a single proposal every few months so it
wouldn't make sense for me personally on a month basis.

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.

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someengineer
I don't suppose there's any plans for a Word export feature, is there?

Unfortunately, a lot of consulting jobs require all docs to be in MS Word
format... Infuriating I know.

~~~
jagthedrummer
I don't have Word export on the immediate road map, but I'm not ruling it out.
Sorry I can't give you anything more specific than that.

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samsnelling
Holy smokes, definitely try the demo if you haven't already (midway down the
page). The amount of time this could potentially save me is pretty wild. Well
done!

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vaibhavsagar
My time isn't worth nearly that much right now, but Pandoc as a service is a
great idea. Are you planning on buying LaTeX templates from other people any
time soon? I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on mine:
[https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/resume](https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/resume)

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jsherer
Would really be great to show some examples of the beautiful documents that
can be created right up-front. I assume that's a big selling point because
nobody wants ugly documents. So, I'd take the time and display examples front
and center (instead of the "icons" that are there now).

~~~
jagthedrummer
Thanks! I think this is a good suggestion. I should definitely feature a real
document more prominently somehow.

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blakerson
Looks cool! Will remember if I'm ever needing shiny documents. I agree with
those who support a one-off transaction option. (For example, I love PlaceIt
and don't pay them monthly, but they might be doing good business from people
like me anyway. I see those in the same boat.)

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hmahncke
There's a typo in the browser tab title - I see "Remarq - Beuatiful documents"
in my tab title which probably isn't what you want.

~~~
jagthedrummer
Thank you!

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unexpected
This looks interesting - is there a gallery where you can see the reports
created? Or are you only limited to the demo report?

~~~
jagthedrummer
Here's a page where you can see most of the templates available.
[http://www.remarq.io/articles/new-templates-now-
available/](http://www.remarq.io/articles/new-templates-now-available/)

I should probably make a gallery page and link it somewhere prominently.

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apineda
That's really nice but also really expensive.

~~~
tnorthcutt
That depends on how you value your time, though. If your time is worth three
figures an hour and this saves you several hours a month, it has a huge ROI.

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DataChomp
This looks pretty slick.

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tsax
Wonderful, thanks.

