Anyone interested in creative writing, what do you think of this poster covering the processes involved in writing a novel?

I plan to dive into greater detail on each topic covered in the poster, with the hopes that it will help people who don't know where to start.

I took a quick look at your app. It's very clean, fairly straight-forward to get started, pretty nice interface. I like that you don't ask for payment details for the trial, thumbs up for that. I'm not currently in the market for a task tracker like this, and Jira is free for me as a single user, so my needs are met at no cost right now.

Some feedback that might be of help: 1) I personally like to be able to see some screenshots/video of a product before I sign up. I prefer to get an idea of whether or not it looks suitable for me before giving away my e-mail address. Screenshots and video also make it easier to get an idea of what the capabilities of the tool are without having to figure it out on my own. My time is valuable to me. 2) A generic Pause button for a task without a specific reason would suit me better than the currently available options. 3) Make it possible to change an existing task to an urgent task and vice versa. 4) Add sorting of the task list by status, due date. 5) Make it possible to move tasks up and down the lists. 6) Add a view showing all tasks, urgent and not, in one place. 7) The price is currently a bit steep for me here in South Africa, especially for limited features provided. I'm also trying to grow my own product user base (Novel Goggles, for writers to plan and write stories), and purse strings are a bit tight.

I've been struggling to get feedback from users myself, so I understand the frustration. I get definite interest, people signing up for trials, but I'm not converting enough of them. Getting those same people that don't convert to respond to an e-mail to tell me why they're not subscribing to my product is something that I haven't quite figured out yet. It's possible that the response rate is for that type of email is so low that I simply haven't had enough people try it to get a meaningful number of responses but I'm still figuring that out.

My strategy right now is to keep getting new eyes on my app and periodically sending out an e-mail requesting feedback. I don't want to spam people, so I don't e-mail too regularly.

My next idea is to add a popup poll within the app itself to try and get feedback while a new subscriber is trying it out. I suspect that this will probably be my best bet for getting meaningful feedback. I already have a feedback section, but a user has to go find it to send feedback, which is probably too high a barrier for entry.

Anyway, I hope you manage to get more traction. Maybe someone else on here has some useful advice for the both of us.

I agree with this view. Any large, complicated project with a large number of dependencies is going to require maintenance over time, regardless of the language or package ecosystem. Keep your simple projects simple, and if you need to use dependencies to get something off the ground quickly, either be prepared to maintain it or to do some additional work to remove the need for those dependencies over time.

This looks really impressive even more so with the small team. For how long have you been marketing/getting word out there? I started trying to get word out on an app of mine last week, things are moving sloooowly.

Thanks for your feedback. We started focusing on marketing a few months ago. Yeah, it's tough to get the word out about the product since there's too much noise out there.

Yeah, tons of noise. Congratulations on getting to where you are, and good luck going forward!

Thanks. All the best with your product!

Hi HN. My name is Lionel and I’ve bootstrapped a project called Novel Goggles. It’s a web app that helps writers with their story crafting by integrating story structuring, outlining, world building, character progression, story arc visualisation and manuscript writing.

I started working on it in mid-2020 while learning JS. It’s my first web project (although I’ve got lots of other software development experience) and first time working on a UI directly, which has been interesting. It’s written from scratch in JS on the client side and using nodeJS on the server side. I decided to avoid React/Angular or similar since the initial scope was quite limited.

Scope creep has since ballooned the feature set but I find that I quite enjoy working on the code propping up the UI, event handling, syncing with the server, etc. so I don’t plan on adopting a front-end framework any time soon.

Features:

- Story structure and outlining.

- Character development.

- World building.

- Create and visualise story arcs.

- Your scene outlining and world-building information can pop up while you write and character information is available in the context menu.

It’s in beta at the moment and I’d love some feedback if anyone is interested in trying it out.

Unfortunately, it requires sign-up to try the app since I didn’t foresee a scenario where I would need to decouple the front-end app from server-side authentication.