Every two months or so I get a call from my Internet Service Provider (that one in the US no one likes) where they try to get me to add cable TV and a landline — two completely unnecessary services for me. They tell me TV is free for 6 months and it's a great deal, but it never changes the fact that Netflix already provides the scant video entertainment I need, and I will never want to have cable TV in my house, not even if they paid me to have it.
I use GitHub to host my open source code, but would never pay $7 / month to get private repositories. Instead I'd host code on my home server or install Gogs somewhere on the internet if I want to get fancy. But GitHub does one of the best jobs I've seen at not pestering me to pay for services I don't need. More importantly, they do this despite me not paying them already.
Users like me hate freemium software because of the monotonous, “Hey, wanna upgrade now?” ads they incessantly face from a service that's just supposed to be solving their problems. Now that I'm on the other side of the equation with Write.as, I'm just concerned with making Pro features discoverable in the midst of all the functionality they get for free. Because paid features don't just pay our bills; they make Write.as useful in a ton of new ways.
Right now you'll notice a few spots that, in a way, fail our “No ads ever” policy — we're advertising for Write.as. So one of our biggest tasks now is to hide all of these “ads” from view by default. Instead, Pro features will show in their normal spots for free users, and will gently inform you when an upgrade is required only after you've tried to perform a Pro action. In this way we hope to remain distraction-free, but make the upgrade process effortless if you want it, so your creation process is never interrupted.
Leading up to the Write.as 2.0 soft launch I gathered feedback on what new features users wanted most through a quick survey. In return for their feedback, they got to reserve the Write.as username they wanted before everyone else.
More than 70 people took the survey and registered a name before the #launch. And the ones that left an email address got an email last night letting them know they could finally log in.
When you're building a product, milestones like this are great catalysts for more forward progress. When your work is finally out in the open, there's suddenly some urgency to everything you do. Write.as ran perfectly without updates for 11 months while I worked on the next iteration. I could take a break or defer a bugfix until later if I didn't feel like working on it at any given moment. And even when bugs were squashed, it wasn't as impactful as it is now, where each improvement brings real users a slightly more stable product.
Next week we'll start spreading the word more outside of this group of users we already know like the product. I'll continue updating here (i.e. partly testing in disguise 😉) on our progress as we go.
Today I deployed about 500 commits and 11 months worth of code that makes up the second major iteration of Write.as.
This is the largest thing I've built by myself, and today I'm thoroughly reveling in that. But more importantly, I wanted to talk about what Write.as is now, such as: still a work in progress.
Especially in the online world, 11 months is a long time to be working on software and never release it. I've always prioritized quality and reliability over development speed with Write.as, so I simply didn't want to release anything until it was perfect.
But now it's pretty close.
The Write.as you're looking at now is good, but not as slick or easy to use as it should be. However, I learned in the past several months that you can still hold quality to a high standard and ship pre-perfection if you know which things need it the most. For Write.as that's the writing experience. Your work is automatically saved as you type on the apps and web application, and that's still solid. Now you can create a blog (like this one!) and add posts to it, whether you wrote them before or after signing up — that's solid too.
But I still need to make maintaining posts, blogs, and external site integrations as easy as publishing on Write.as already is. Currently it's pretty rough, but it's getting there. And with a little feedback from everyone now that it's out on the web, it'll be much easier to polish the edges that need it.