
Write Better with Draft - nate
http://draftin.com
======
scott_s
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.

~~~
nate
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.

~~~
scott_s
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.

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arvinjoar
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.

~~~
gknoy
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.

~~~
eru
Yes. Though arvinjoar has a point, in pointing out useful missing features.

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pseut
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...

~~~
nate
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)

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arjunnarayan
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?

~~~
nate
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

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ollysb
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.

~~~
ForrestN
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.

Great work though!

~~~
nate
Thank you. I'll definitely consider all of this feedback for sure.

You are right, people really do like to make decisions about this stuff. I'll
see what I can do.

But do I like Future Bold in caps. Just love it :) The underdog font as Aaron
Draplin would say.

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swampthing
This looks amazing - I could totally see this being the go-to word processor
for bloggers, especially with the editing service!

~~~
nate
Thanks! I sure hope that's a path this can go down.

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pdog
The interface seems inspired by _iA Writer_ [1] and _Ulysses_ [2].

[1]: <http://www.iawriter.com/>

[2]: <http://www.ulyssesapp.com/>

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scholia
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.

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pwthornton
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.

~~~
nate
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...

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auctiontheory
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.)

~~~
saidajigumi
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.

[1] <https://draftin.com/features>

~~~
nate
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.

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Serow225
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!

------
barretts
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.

~~~
nate
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...

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dmor
Ah I love this. Tarantino was right, this is gonna be the writer's year

~~~
nate
Thanks. That's a great quote.

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matb33
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.

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keithpeter
" _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

~~~
nate
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.

~~~
keithpeter
Interesting idea. I can see potential for 'gaming' of this service if your
application becomes popular. Good luck!

------
emhart
Been using and enjoying this for the past few days. Looking forward to the
future of the product!

~~~
nate
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.

~~~
emhart
Can't wait to see them!

------
ako
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.

------
matb33
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

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jiggy2011
I don't get it, is there any way to format text? Is there any way to
spellcheck?

~~~
ajanuary
What's your workflow like? Is there a reason the browser/OS spellcheck won't
do?

~~~
jiggy2011
In browser spellcheck (chrome) has always been a bit lousy to me.

~~~
adestefan
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.

~~~
wmeredith
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.)

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jmduke
A minor note: the landing page, on smaller viewports, has some unfortunate
overlap issues:

<http://imgur.com/Imb7EJE>

Should be a relatively easy fix with some background-fu applied to the footer.

~~~
mkolodny
It looks like a modal (#IModalOverlay) is blocking the search field, the
"Create Document" button, etc. on the screen after you sign up.

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JasonFruit
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.

~~~
nate
Thanks Jason. I have many more plans for formatting on the soon to be done
list. This is great feedback.

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matthewjhughes
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.

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orangethirty
Use it with:

Email: cheese@cheese.com

Password: 123456

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crayola
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).

~~~
nate
On it's way. I agree. I'm great with markdown, and I still need this.

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zenlikethat
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

~~~
nate
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.

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JoshMilo
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.

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nickbarnwell
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.

~~~
ollysb
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.

~~~
nate
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.

~~~
pseut
Real time collaborative writing might be unusual, but real time collaborative
_editing_ happens all the time.

~~~
nate
Ah that's very true. I'll definitely keep that in mind.

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ivraatiems
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.

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stuartmemo
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.

~~~
kevin_morrill
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.

~~~
nate
Ah, yeah, I've seen that. Fixing soon. Thanks for the feedback guys.

~~~
duney
That pop-out menu also leaves artifacts on the page.

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peacemaker
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.

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jervisfm
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.

~~~
nate
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. :)

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xmjw
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.

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tomjen3
Hmm I can seem to test it, but does it do anything LaTeX + svn/git/hg + emacs
don't?

~~~
duaneb
Usability and portability. Of course it doesn't do LaTeX yet.

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dualboot
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.

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epicureanideal
1\. Clicked "try draft" 2\. Got taken to login screen. 3\. Abandoned.

~~~
stephenlee
me too.

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sw93
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!)

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ajanuary
This is almost exactly what I've been designing in my head.

~~~
kybernetikos
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.

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raphman
_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

~~~
nate
Thanks!

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jonahx
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....

~~~
nate
Thanks! Yes, coming soon. I just deployed the backend needed to name Drafts,
just have to add it to the UI.

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baltcode
Please add import and export to/from docx and latex. Also, please add export
to pdf. This could be a great product.

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duaneb
Add LaTeX support and I'd pay money.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Have you seen the online LaTeX editors such as <https://www.writelatex.com>?

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dmragone
Would love to be able to try it out without having to sign up. Guest account?

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czzarr
Great app! Can you say what diff library you used if any?

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jason_adleberg
Can we have sans serif fonts please?

~~~
nate
Maybe. I'm considering some customization options soon. Thanks for letting me
know your request.

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Nightrider
I'm pretty amped about trying Draft, but I'm wondering if SkyDrive is
supported. If not, could you build support for it?

And congrats for launching this!

~~~
nate
Thanks! I use Filepicker.io to handle imports/exports. Not sure yet if they
support SkyDrive. Looking...

~~~
brettcvz
We do!

