Show HN: Lunette – A word processor designed around writing, not formatting

This is valuable advice, OP. Definitely suggest doing these things.

I second almost 100% of this feedback. Especially where you started: OP’s comment is much more illuminating than anything on the site. My only quibble is this:

> I would probably leave out the fact that you are "husband and wife."

If that were the language I’d probably agree, and probably wouldn’t have given it much more thought than that! But I think “husband and wife team” swayed me from that instinct. It’s a good balance between humanizing and establishing a shared interest in using the thing they’ve built. I don’t know how representative my reaction is, but “we created [thing] because [actual human experience and need it satisfies]” tends to be a persuasive way to get me interested, and actual human stuff feels more pertinent to me in that framing than stuff about the humans detached from the thing.

I think this is cool, and it might even scratch a writing itch I have with literally just taking notes. Your explanation of what motivated building this sounds a lot more like my experience with note taking than writing any other kind of prose.

One nit about the site I haven’t seen addressed yet: overall it’s pretty good on mobile (besides the front page screenshot being too tiny to understand; addressing that is a whole can of worms, but…) the header is breaking the signup button even on my very large phone, and stuff vertical alignment feels weird. You could fix the former, but I’d consider dropping “for free” (it’s a general assumption for most people walking up to a site unless they feel like they’re getting a hard sell) and adjusting styles to fit the content on one line. Definitely look at the vertical alignment though, because it’s gonna look weird regardless of wrapping.

Yes, a word processing app like MS Word is technically more suitable for typesetting than it is for writing. No, that's not a major problem.

I tried building a similar project some 10 years ago, when "Zen writing tools" were all the rage.

Nobody wanted to pay for it. It wasn't general purpose enough to be usable by the general public. And novelists (who I was targeting) are poor and cheap. 90% of people who say they are "working on a novel" will never finish it to ever even try to sell it. Of those that do finish, 90% of them won't make more than pocket change. For the weirdos who finish and make significant sales, the app they used to write was never a significant problem for them. They usually have an anachronistic approach that has nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with personal taste and comfort (George R. R. Martin famously uses WordStar 4.0 on an MS-DOS system).

If you want to make an app for writers, don't make it around the writing process. What aspiring authors need, first and foremost, is training on how to finish a manuacript. After that, everything else is a minor annoyance in comparison. But some of the most common areas where people seem to drop the ball so close to the goal line are: not having a good editor, screwing up the typesetting, having dorky cover art, and thinking posting on Twitter once a week counts as marketing.

The 90% of dreamers don't have what it takes and they know it. They don't even invest their time, so they're certainly not going to invest their money. Tackle trying to convert more of the 10% of finishers into sellers. That might involve a writing tool as a hook to get people in, but the salable part of the app will probably never be the writing process itself.

Open source? Closed? Web-app only? Locally installable? Privacy policy? Pricing?

Would you be happier if it made you money or if a community helped you build it?