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Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

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Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#31

Post by alex_g »

jolenam wrote: post #26
whoisjuan wrote: post #21

I understand the problem that you guys are trying to solve. I experience this pain eveyday at my job. However this landing page is not doing a great job at explaining the solution. I'm sure once you see the product everything clicks but the current communication is not really explaing well this problem or showcasing well the features and workflows of your solution.

Thanks for your feedback -- definitely want to make sure our landing page explains Ditto clearly. Any specific suggestions for what to improve on or what's confusing?

I agree with the parent comment.

I understood what the problem your product was solving from the title of this Launch HN thread, but viewing the landing page, I think there's big room for improvement for how you explain that.

I think a few things would help:

- Revise your copy to speak more plainly. You're addressing folks working on many different parts of the product, but the language comes off as jargon. As a starting point, I think the title of this thread is way clearer

"Keep product text in sync from design to production" -- Makes sense

"manage and componentize the words across their product from design to production." -- I have no idea what that means

- Replace all of the screenshots and graphics. I see this done a lot, where screenshots are shown and the reader is supposed to understand what's happening, but is not often effective, because they don't understand the context for the screenshots, and it's not clear what part of the screenshot they should be focusing on. I would suggest you provide a very simple clear animation that demonstrates the "magic" behind your application. If it's syncing copy across many different tools and stages of the product, show that magic happening. In other words, if a reader saw nothing but this graphic/animation would they understand what your product is offering them? The demo video is not what I'm referring to, although it is helpful and should remain on the page, maybe even move it up a bit.

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#32

Post by jolenam »

kcolford wrote: post #22

This is a great idea. Have you considered moving into the closely related field of localization? If your managing copy all the time then you also have to manage it in different languages. There could be a lot more you can do with that...

Yes, localization has been on the roadmap from the very beginning! As a first step, we'll be launching the ability to create "variants" of text (ie. for each language translation) in Ditto next week. This way, teams will be able to add translations to text and view it in their mockups, without having to manually mock up each language for every screen. These variants will also be available to fetch via our API/CLI.

In the future, we plan to build on top of this and provide more localization-specific features -- things like translation memory and machine translation (for that initial pass).

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#33

Post by whoisjuan »

jolenam wrote: post #26
whoisjuan wrote: post #21

I understand the problem that you guys are trying to solve. I experience this pain eveyday at my job. However this landing page is not doing a great job at explaining the solution. I'm sure once you see the product everything clicks but the current communication is not really explaing well this problem or showcasing well the features and workflows of your solution.

Thanks for your feedback -- definitely want to make sure our landing page explains Ditto clearly. Any specific suggestions for what to improve on or what's confusing?

I feel that is not entirely clear how you enable this workflow that keeps all this text dependencies at sync. The collaborative part makes sense. But what's more important about this tool is explained with a somewhat vague graphic (https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5fb84e8c68f67b29553103fa/604...)

I think it would be more useful to see an explanation that showcases how this text components sync across all tools and how that allows you to always have a single source of truth for your text.

I think another valuable thing to showcase is to showcase the features of this solution by persona. What do you get from this as a writer, designer, PM, developer... That's extremely important IMO. If you don't do this, it's pretty hard to relate to this problem and solution.

Verbalizing the problem in the communication is particularly important. I know this is a problem many cross-functional team have but it's a very discrete problem. It's easy to familiarize and relate to this problem if you explain it.

"Forget about outdated text in your product and the painful and lengthy process to update it.

Ditto is a platform that allows you to write and collaborate on your product text while keeping everything in sync.

From design mocks in Figma to your text strings in your production code, with Ditto everyone gets the same product text seamlessly."

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#34

Post by aparsons »

Simple, beautiful app solving a real pain point. Kudos to OP and team! I have some general questions, not directly related to the product, but rather, the company:

- How long has it been since you released the product? I’ve always been curious as to when exactly in a product’s lifecycle that HN Launches occur. Certainly seems to skew towards somewhat established companies.

- You have some great names using your product! Did you market to specific teams within these companies or to the company as a whole? I’d love to learn how you went about successfully acquiring these “big fish” customers as a young product and company.

Thanks

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#35

Post by jolenam »

valyagolev wrote: post #29

Thank you. This seems very useful, and I'm considering proposing this right now to a couple of companies I work with. However, as a person who used things like poeditor in different small places, there was always a concern about monthly payment for something used quite rarely. In this case, they'd pay for 1-2 months of intense use and then cancel the subscriptions. In those small companies, I think they would gladly…

Definitely understand where you’re coming from. The main reason we decided to go with a monthly pricing model is that we see Ditto as a tool that spans the product development process and roles of a company. Compared to localization management systems, which might come into play mainly at the end of a project, we’ve seen pretty consistent usage of Ditto across the drafting, design, development, and post-launch phases with our current customers. Oftentimes, designers and writers will use our Figma integration in the early stages of a project (taking advantage of the text component library to reuse existing text) and then other stakeholders like legal or marketing will come in to Ditto approve/review copy. In parallel, devs can fetch the latest copy from their command-line whenever there are updates as they’re building. Post-launch, updates to copy can be made in Ditto, and then easily pulled in by engineers.

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#36

Post by jessouyang »

eggbrain wrote: post #19

First off, congrats on launching, the product looks super smooth! Had a few thoughts off the cuff: 1. From a product perspective, do you worry about relying heavily on Figma? If marketing and design teams move towards different design tools like Invision, or if Figma changes / restricts API access, or decides to move into this same area, I could imagine it could cause issues down the line. 2. From the sales side of t…

Thank you! That means a ton.

1. We integrated with Figma first on the design side due to a couple of reasons: we were really excited about the growth on the platform, the community, and their ability to serve as a single source of truth for design (with live editing). As an early developer on both their Plugins platform and REST API, we've definitely seen their APIs evolve.

Ideally, we want to be design-tool agnostic (including integrating with Sketch, AdobeXD, InVision, etc.) and integrate with everywhere copy lives (including docs, sheets, etc.) once we have enough engineering bandwidth. We think serving as that text layer / infrastructure for text is a fairly different value prop from design tooling, but we do hope to decrease our reliance on Figma over time.

2. Copy is definitely unique in that it's touched by so many roles horizontally in an org (not only in EPD but also marketing/legal/etc.), unlike a lot of role-based tooling (devtools, design tools, etc). We've been really lucky so far in seeing a lot of our growth happen organically by those at larger companies with roles owning the copy (UX writers, content designers, copywriters, etc.) championing our tool to other stakeholders. However, this is definitely something we're still trying to figure out how to do effectively, and we've seen some cases where adoption is held-up because of cross-team communication.

3. At the moment, Ditto brings text into development as structured JSONs, which we keep fairly open-ended on how teams want to integrate into their UIs and 3rd party tools. They can also manipulate the text in development and/or bring it into A/B testing frameworks. In the future, we hope to handle some of those use cases ourselves :)

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#37

Post by valyagolev »

jolenam wrote: post #35
valyagolev wrote: post #29

Thank you. This seems very useful, and I'm considering proposing this right now to a couple of companies I work with. However, as a person who used things like poeditor in different small places, there was always a concern about monthly payment for something used quite rarely. In this case, they'd pay for 1-2 months of intense use and then cancel the subscriptions. In those small companies, I think they would gladly…

Definitely understand where you’re coming from. The main reason we decided to go with a monthly pricing model is that we see Ditto as a tool that spans the product development process and roles of a company. Compared to localization management systems, which might come into play mainly at the end of a project, we’ve seen pretty consistent usage of Ditto across the drafting, design, development, and post-launch phases…

Yeah, I understand. The clients of mine I'm thinking of are small, non-technical companies. They would absolute love something like this, but they're just not developing and redoing stuff as much as they'd need to justify this expense (in their minds).

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#38

Post by jolenam »

alex_g wrote: post #31
jolenam wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your feedback -- definitely want to make sure our landing page explains Ditto clearly. Any specific suggestions for what to improve on or what's confusing?

I agree with the parent comment. I understood what the problem your product was solving from the title of this Launch HN thread, but viewing the landing page, I think there's big room for improvement for how you explain that. I think a few things would help: - Revise your copy to speak more plainly. You're addressing folks working on many different parts of the product, but the language comes off as jargon. As a star…

Super useful, thanks for the advice. It's definitely been a challenge to figure out the right language/vocabulary to describe what we're working on, especially since what we're solving for isn't talked about.

A clearer graphic that demonstrates the "magic" is also a great suggestion!

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#39

Post by sefrost »

This is a great idea. I think the length of an iteration could be shortened on every single project I’ve been on if designers used production copy when designing - as problems with the design often come up during development as copy isn’t as the designer thought it would be.

Good luck!

Re: Launch HN: Ditto (YC W20) – Keep product text in sync from design to production

#40

Post by jfk13 »

Looks great!

One tiny detail: in Safari, the content of the yellow "celebrating the launch" banner unfortunately wraps the final ">" onto a second line, and ends up looking oddly placed as a result.

(I suspect this is a Safari bug rather than something you're doing -- it doesn't happen in Chrome or Firefox -- but you might want to try and avoid it. It seems to be specific to using font-weight:500 with the Inter font there; changing it to either 400 or 600 makes the issue go away.)

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