Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder • Hacker News Board

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#51

Post by triumphantomato » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

putrikarunia wrote: post #50

triumphantomato wrote: post #46

This is super cool work, congrats! I've been looking for a good low/no-code tool to build a static website to sell some assets I've developed, wondering if TypeDream can fit the bill. How easy is it to: + A/B test pages (e.g. for conversions) + Measure user interaction to understand incoming referral, bounce rate, time on page, user journey, etc. + Integrate with other automation tools like n8n.io I'm new to this so…

Oh that's really cool. To answer your questions: - A/B testing: not supported yet, although we are thinking on building this. Would love to learn more from your use case! - Incoming referral, bounce rate, time on page are available through our built-in analytics. If you're familiar with Plausible https://plausible.io , we're using their self-hosted version to offer the analytics feature, so you should get everything…

thanks for the reply! will have to check out Stripe's email/orderflow integrations, didn't know about those :)

does TypeDream support custom email domains? (example: myemail@mysite.com)

re: A/B testing - my use-case is pretty simple. i have some assets i'd like to sell and want to A/B test what landing page converts the best (could also be useful to A/B test what landing page converts to the highest price/longest subscription if someone's selling subs).

alternative use-case -- A/B test what article titles lead to the most search engine (or other inbound referral) traffic. let's say i have a set of content i've created, i'd like to have test same blog post with different article titles to know which one performs the best

does that help?

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#52

Post by putrikarunia » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

triumphantomato wrote: post #51

putrikarunia wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that's really cool. To answer your questions: - A/B testing: not supported yet, although we are thinking on building this. Would love to learn more from your use case! - Incoming referral, bounce rate, time on page are available through our built-in analytics. If you're familiar with Plausible https://plausible.io , we're using their self-hosted version to offer the analytics feature, so you should get everything…

thanks for the reply! will have to check out Stripe's email/orderflow integrations, didn't know about those :) does TypeDream support custom email domains? (example: myemail@mysite.com) re: A/B testing - my use-case is pretty simple. i have some assets i'd like to sell and want to A/B test what landing page converts the best (could also be useful to A/B test what landing page converts to the highest price/longest sub…

Here's a link to the Stripe payment links https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links.

For email domains, we don't handle your emails. You could use any email provider that you want, like MailChimp, Sendgrid, etc. Since connecting custom domains doesn't require you to point your nameservers to Typedream, you can add MX records, etc. that is usually required for you to set up your email provider.

Thanks for your explanation on A/B testing, that makes sense and we have had a couple of similar requests as well! This is definitely something we're looking to add as a feature.

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#53

Post by putrikarunia » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #24

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #3

I’m very impressed with what you’ve discussed here. I think there’s a real market for no-code website builders that are user-friendly. How do you justify charging $144/year for a static site? Carrd.co offers similar features and charges $19/year for their Pro plan. Serving a static site is basically free. If your editor itself is that valuable, why not sell the editor as a software package and let me take my built si…

Carrd has a major limitation: it is explicitly a "one-page site" builder. You cannot create multiple pages and link them together. Unsurprisingly, most Carrd websites I see are promotional of some kind, linking out to a bunch of third party sites, or Amazon affiliate links.

Yep, thanks for pointing that out!

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#54

Post by what_is_orcas » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

putrikarunia wrote: post #7

what_is_orcas wrote: post #5

Wow, I built a prototype of something almost exactly like at my last job. It didn't go anywhere after that for a variety of reasons, but I remember asking myself "I wonder if this sort of thing would be worth releasing/open-sourcing?" Looks like I won't have to wonder forever, I can just watch y'all and find out.

Oh interesting, what sort of issues did you face? Perhaps we could learn from your experience!

The main issue we had, and a big part of why it didn't get picked up, if you ask me, really came down to defining our user. The design team who requested it originally made it sound like it would be a tool that product-owners would use to build their sites, get approval from the design team, and push to go live, but I later came to understand that it was for the design team to design the websites so that they could hand the designs off to developers, which raised the question of what the developer would actually want from a designer to make their lives easier. I (the only developer in the conversation) requested an internal component library, but when I left 6 months later they were still wrestling with the question of how to give developers designs...

I hope y'all don't have anything to learn from that experience... at least y'all have gone to production =)

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#55

Post by iamstupidsimple » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 2:26 AM UTC

nawgz wrote: post #38

codebeaker wrote: post #17

>Much like Notion and other block editing methods, site content is represented in a JSON format. Each block has a type, for example, a block of Paragraph would have the type "Paragraph" and would be represented by {"type":"paragraph", "text": "Hello World"}, and an image would have the type "Image" represented by {"type":"image", "url":" http://placekitten.com/200/300 "}. A page consists of an array of blocks represe…

> The JSON React serialization doesn't seem to offer much value I mean, you don't see any value in being able to declaratively state an entire app? ...

The DOM is a declarative state for a document.

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#56

Post by simplify » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 4:45 AM UTC

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #3

I’m very impressed with what you’ve discussed here. I think there’s a real market for no-code website builders that are user-friendly. How do you justify charging $144/year for a static site? Carrd.co offers similar features and charges $19/year for their Pro plan. Serving a static site is basically free. If your editor itself is that valuable, why not sell the editor as a software package and let me take my built si…

This is an odd question. Since when do SaaS companies charge based on hosting cost? If their service is superior, people will pay for the saved time.

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#57

Post by putrikarunia » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 6:57 AM UTC

what_is_orcas wrote: post #54

putrikarunia wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh interesting, what sort of issues did you face? Perhaps we could learn from your experience!

The main issue we had, and a big part of why it didn't get picked up, if you ask me, really came down to defining our user. The design team who requested it originally made it sound like it would be a tool that product-owners would use to build their sites, get approval from the design team, and push to go live, but I later came to understand that it was for the design team to design the websites so that they could h…

I see... Interesting problem, we had a similar issue previously where we didn't define our users well. This time we rigorously interviewed potential users before even started anything :D

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#58

Post by nsonha » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 7:41 AM UTC

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #55

nawgz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The JSON React serialization doesn't seem to offer much value I mean, you don't see any value in being able to declaratively state an entire app? ...

The DOM is a declarative state for a document.

Is this a joke? Ask any mobile or desktop app developer (people who program UIs in a non-broken platform) how they think about having state inside the views.

Only on the web there exist people who hack around for so long they actually believe the hack is the right way.

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#59

Post by kevsim » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 8:11 AM UTC

putrikarunia wrote: post #25

kevsim wrote: post #22

Looks very cool! Did you base it on an opensource editor or did you build it from scratch? Asking because my startup has invested a lot into building our editor with SlateJS, so I'm always curious what other teams settle on.

Oh we use SlateJS as well! Mind sharing your experience with it?

We've certainly had our battles. When we first made Kitemaker[0], we were using the "old" pre 0.5 version of Slate and we built a lot of functionality on that.

When they did the total rewrite, we put off upgrading for a long time and that was probably a mistake because we just kept building up new things that needed to be ported.

Earlier this year we bit the bullet and ported things over to the newest version. I like the API a lot and it works quite well for us. The best part is that internally slate is "ready" for building a collaborative editor, so that's what we did. Work items in Kitemaker are fully collaborative, using operational transformation.

Downsides of slate for me are:

- Docs are lacking still. They were better before the re-write IMO and still catching up

- Memoization of leaf nodes doesn't work properly so you get a lot of unnecessary re-rendering (at least in the version we're using)

0: https://kitemaker.co

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#60

Post by putrikarunia » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 8:33 AM UTC

kevsim wrote: post #59

putrikarunia wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh we use SlateJS as well! Mind sharing your experience with it?

We've certainly had our battles. When we first made Kitemaker[0], we were using the "old" pre 0.5 version of Slate and we built a lot of functionality on that. When they did the total rewrite, we put off upgrading for a long time and that was probably a mistake because we just kept building up new things that needed to be ported. Earlier this year we bit the bullet and ported things over to the newest version. I like…

Wow I can imagine the struggle of upgrading :D... But you did it, that's awesome! Real time collaboration is something we need to do very soon, glad to hear that. Thanks for sharing!