I'm a .com user so I can't use this (though I'd like to), but here's a walkthrough of all my thoughts as I interacted with your page, and some notes about how you might improve the site given my experience.
To others reading, if you'd like a more formalized version of this type of feedback for your own products, including split testing recommendations designed to help validate the hypotheses, I'm available for consulting and my email's in my profile. Cheers!
---------
"wow, this is a great idea"
At this point, I fundamentally misunderstood what your product was.
Here's what I thought it was, that it seemingly isn't:
I maintain a local dropdown folder full of markdown files. At an interval or when one changes, there's a hook that automatically updates the content of my site. (similar to the way a static site can be made to rebuild and deploy on push).
I assumed the one time pricing was because this was a desktop software that handled that process.
I looked around the page for extra info about installation and how it works – I wanted to avoid having to watch a fluffy howto video.
This didn't work, and I gave in and watched the video. I was happy to see it's only :57 – you might call this out on the page, it would have made me more likely to click, knowing it's short.
With that said, the video was illuminating but had some major issues.
It starts too slow (slides) and promptly gets WAY too fast (screencap).
"Sync your blog posts with dropbox using wordpress" is catchy but doesn't really tell me what I'm about to watch, which left me unprepared.
First, you're in a text editor that's atop wordpress – this is a confusing view for the uninitiated. As a guy who writes markdown in stock-theme sublime, it took me a second to realize you were in a markdown editor, and another moment still to realize that this markdown editor was prepopulated with what would become a blog post. I recommend you hold the hand a little more – open a new markdown editor window on a blank desktop, and quickly smash out a blog post (this period of typing is one of the few places it makes sense to use the blistering speed of the video).
Save this file, and indicate visually (with a graphic or something) that it's synced to dropbox and now in the cloud.
NOW open the browser window, already to the posts list, and hit new post. Spend a little more time showing navigating from the load of the new post window to the scribeWP area of the post – this was not obvious.
One thing that might help here is subtle branding of that content box. This would be helpful for both the videos and users, I estimate.
Consider zooming in on the file browser while it's open – it was not obvious what this was, and it's hard to read with the video at stock size.
Now that I think about it, your demo blog post should be way simpler. It's chaotic af. I understand why you chose this – it's demoing the many supported markdown features. But the visual input of the post doesn't reduce to a glyph that matches my mental model of a blog post, which is roughly H1, H2, P, P, P , H2, P, P, P. If you did that, and WP styled it automatically, and the big headings matched what you'd put in the markdown editor, I think the effect would be much more obvious.
When you return to the "live" version of the blog, have it show the page without the post, and then refresh to show that the post is now there. This would communicate what you're trying to say – it took me a sec to infer that you were showing me the live site to show that it was posted instantly.
Same feedback about the editing – retire the browser window, bring back the text editor, really hold the hand here.
It is good that your video shows that after syncing you still have to press the update button. It took me 3 or 4 views to catch this, though, because it happens so fast. And ...
The product you describe (“I maintain a local dropdown folder full of markdown files. At an interval or when one changes, there's a hook that automatically updates the content of my site.“) is something I’ve built:
Is there a solution to do the other way around?
I have a wordpress blog that I don't update and cost hosting fees. I would like to move it to a free hosting solution like github
I have tested Gutenberg and while it does allow you to write markdown, the editor still feels like a WYSIWYG editor. Also I often find myself just wanting to write blog posts without worrying about formatting, blocks, etc which you can do within the plugin using your favorite markdown/text editor.
It's rather stupid to compare this to an hourly pay because it's all automated once it's made.
Over $40 for something that just converts is a pretty large amount. I get there are other features of the plan, but having no alternative plans is just ... There is no way to even test it. I also just noticed the price went down to $29 now, which is more reasonable, but even so I'd argue there should be alternative plans that maybe doesn't include the full support etc. I'd assume most people won't need to take advantage of that.
I could probably setup something similar in a couple of hours, I mean there's no magic done here.
Parsing markdown is easy and I already have that as a part of my web-framework.
You might not be the target audience. Regardless how many open source libraries or even products exist, there will be a market for users who prefer a single-click install with support.
Non-technical enough that they can't develop or debug a solution themselves. There's a large-ish category of Wordpress user who can basic PHP to tweak a template if they have to and do basic admin tasks, but not much more and rather not waste time on things like that, are first-and-foremost writers and want a writing workflow that's nicer than the WYSIWYG editor in the WP backend.
Yeah, it was 45 or 49 last night. Agreed – as a one-time purchase, in the "lol are you kidding we spend that on lacroix before lunch" territory for marketing depts.
Interesting. I think the ideal use case might be as a glorified - but light weight - blog post idea store.
That is, thoughts for a new blog post come at the most inconvenient times. If there was a way to capture that via the device in my hand and have that end up a non-published CPT that would be great. Let me flesh flesh that out (outside WP) and eventually login, look it over and decide to move from CPT to post, page or other CPT.
I can see that being helpful in a number of cases.
25 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 61.6 ms ] threadI'm a .com user so I can't use this (though I'd like to), but here's a walkthrough of all my thoughts as I interacted with your page, and some notes about how you might improve the site given my experience.
To others reading, if you'd like a more formalized version of this type of feedback for your own products, including split testing recommendations designed to help validate the hypotheses, I'm available for consulting and my email's in my profile. Cheers!
---------
"wow, this is a great idea"
At this point, I fundamentally misunderstood what your product was.
Here's what I thought it was, that it seemingly isn't:
I maintain a local dropdown folder full of markdown files. At an interval or when one changes, there's a hook that automatically updates the content of my site. (similar to the way a static site can be made to rebuild and deploy on push).
I assumed the one time pricing was because this was a desktop software that handled that process.
I looked around the page for extra info about installation and how it works – I wanted to avoid having to watch a fluffy howto video.
This didn't work, and I gave in and watched the video. I was happy to see it's only :57 – you might call this out on the page, it would have made me more likely to click, knowing it's short.
With that said, the video was illuminating but had some major issues.
It starts too slow (slides) and promptly gets WAY too fast (screencap).
"Sync your blog posts with dropbox using wordpress" is catchy but doesn't really tell me what I'm about to watch, which left me unprepared.
First, you're in a text editor that's atop wordpress – this is a confusing view for the uninitiated. As a guy who writes markdown in stock-theme sublime, it took me a second to realize you were in a markdown editor, and another moment still to realize that this markdown editor was prepopulated with what would become a blog post. I recommend you hold the hand a little more – open a new markdown editor window on a blank desktop, and quickly smash out a blog post (this period of typing is one of the few places it makes sense to use the blistering speed of the video).
Save this file, and indicate visually (with a graphic or something) that it's synced to dropbox and now in the cloud.
NOW open the browser window, already to the posts list, and hit new post. Spend a little more time showing navigating from the load of the new post window to the scribeWP area of the post – this was not obvious.
One thing that might help here is subtle branding of that content box. This would be helpful for both the videos and users, I estimate.
Consider zooming in on the file browser while it's open – it was not obvious what this was, and it's hard to read with the video at stock size.
Now that I think about it, your demo blog post should be way simpler. It's chaotic af. I understand why you chose this – it's demoing the many supported markdown features. But the visual input of the post doesn't reduce to a glyph that matches my mental model of a blog post, which is roughly H1, H2, P, P, P , H2, P, P, P. If you did that, and WP styled it automatically, and the big headings matched what you'd put in the markdown editor, I think the effect would be much more obvious.
When you return to the "live" version of the blog, have it show the page without the post, and then refresh to show that the post is now there. This would communicate what you're trying to say – it took me a sec to infer that you were showing me the live site to show that it was posted instantly.
Same feedback about the editing – retire the browser window, bring back the text editor, really hold the hand here.
It is good that your video shows that after syncing you still have to press the update button. It took me 3 or 4 views to catch this, though, because it happens so fast. And ...
https://blot.im
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/
HexoPress is another such tool. If google docs is your go-to editor, you can blog from gdocs using http://hexopress.com
It's free. FYI: I made HexoPress.
This link should help anyone get started: https://github.com/netlify-templates/gatsby-starter-netlify-...
Over $40 for something that just converts is a pretty large amount. I get there are other features of the plan, but having no alternative plans is just ... There is no way to even test it. I also just noticed the price went down to $29 now, which is more reasonable, but even so I'd argue there should be alternative plans that maybe doesn't include the full support etc. I'd assume most people won't need to take advantage of that.
I could probably setup something similar in a couple of hours, I mean there's no magic done here.
Parsing markdown is easy and I already have that as a part of my web-framework.
See: https://github.com/DiamondMVC/Diamond/tree/master/markdown
You might not be the target audience. Regardless how many open source libraries or even products exist, there will be a market for users who prefer a single-click install with support.
Edit: it looks like the price was higher than $40 before. That’s still insta-purchase. OP, the parent commentor isn’t your audience.
That is, thoughts for a new blog post come at the most inconvenient times. If there was a way to capture that via the device in my hand and have that end up a non-published CPT that would be great. Let me flesh flesh that out (outside WP) and eventually login, look it over and decide to move from CPT to post, page or other CPT.
I can see that being helpful in a number of cases.