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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

#41

Post by spoonjim »

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…

Small companies are like 10% of the software market -- 75% of the revenue is sitting in large enteprises. So, frankly, while getting you on board is great for marketing and customer development (a lot easier to engage with a small company than a big one)... don't expect them to really care.

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

#42

Post by CodeWriter23 »

jolenam wrote: post #24
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #15

Why limit Ditto to only text assets?

While there’s a chance we expand to other types of assets in the future, we want to tackle text first. We think text is often more cross-functional than images or other assets — it’s worked on by people from legal, marketing, customer success, in addition to engineers and designers — but there isn’t a unified suite of tools focused on text right now. There are lots of areas around text we still want to tackle and int…

There is a unified set of tools for working on text, either Office 365 or Gsuite, both with their +/- but definitely get the job done. They have revision control, visualization, etc. the problem is finding the dang file 6 months from now...

From my perspective, the problem to solve here is to have an authoritative repo of assets accessible via API, CLI, cloud dashboard, ERP add-on. IMO that's the value play. It answers the "do I have the latest X" in everything from an SOP document to a software build, and enables the responsible parties to push updates across the organization seamlessly. Also, will probably help with the "which dang file is that in" problem products like Teams try to answer but still fail miserably at.

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

#43

Post by jolenam »

whoisjuan wrote: post #33
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 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 h…

Really appreciate these suggestions -- thanks! Excited to make some updates to our landing page based on the feedback we've received here.

Agreed that we should explain how Ditto syncs text across the stages of product development better, especially since that's the big vision (end-to-end text management).

We do have persona-specific pages for writers, designers, and developers (you can find those in the Product dropdown in the top nav, in the section near the bottom of the page, or in the footer). On these pages, we try to verbalize the specific problems those segments are facing, and then specifically how Ditto solves them.

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

#44

Post by jessouyang »

aparsons wrote: post #34

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 produ…

Thank you!

- We released first released our web-app and Figma plugin around a year ago, right at the end of our YC batch (Jo and I went into YC pre-product). Our developer integrations (API/CLI/SDK and Developer Mode) were released 2 months ago.

- All of our customers (including larger enterprises) have actually found us organically! We were lucky to have the support of different design and content/UX writing communities from the start, and they were able to champion the tool on their teams. We've tried our best to be super hands-on with these teams, offering onboarding and support calls, shared Slack channels, and tips on selling Ditto to other stakeholders in the company. On some teams, however, we're definitely still working to expand outwards from content to design to EPD, especially with our new developer integrations.

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

#45

Post by jessouyang »

jfk13 wrote: post #40

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…

Wow, great catch with the Safari font issue; we've just fixed it. Thanks for finding that!

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

#46

Post by jessouyang »

sefrost wrote: post #39

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!

Totally -- even beyond just spacing/fitting in content into the designs, the text in-app strongly informs what the user knows and understands, which is critical to the design itself. Designing with lorem ipsum and other placeholder text has a lot of potentially negative downstream effects, in addition to slowing down product development.

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

#47

Post by jolenam »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #42
jolenam wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there’s a chance we expand to other types of assets in the future, we want to tackle text first. We think text is often more cross-functional than images or other assets — it’s worked on by people from legal, marketing, customer success, in addition to engineers and designers — but there isn’t a unified suite of tools focused on text right now. There are lots of areas around text we still want to tackle and int…

There is a unified set of tools for working on text, either Office 365 or Gsuite, both with their +/- but definitely get the job done. They have revision control, visualization, etc. the problem is finding the dang file 6 months from now... From my perspective, the problem to solve here is to have an authoritative repo of assets accessible via API, CLI, cloud dashboard, ERP add-on. IMO that's the value play. It answe…

We definitely agree that there’s huge potential in becoming the “authoritative repo,” or as we like to call it — the single source of truth — for all assets, accessible by tools used by every role. Hoping to focus on text first, but not ruling this out for the future.

What we’ve also seen from customers is that it can be hard to work on product text in document tooling like Office 365 or GSuite because those external docs feels detached from the context of the designs and the app, and require separate maintenance and manual copying + pasting to move it into the tools where product development is happening (ex: mockups, the codebase). We’re hoping to address this at Ditto with lots more future integrations (like you mentioned!) with other design tools, project management tools, etc.

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

#48

Post by jessouyang »

lukeramsden wrote: post #30

The amount of time I've had to spend making PRs to multiple branches across multiple codebases just to change full-stops... I've sent this to some of my colleagues.

Definitely been there as an engineer as well. The amount of overhead and engineering time it takes to make punctuation changes, fix spelling errors, and even simple iterations to copy in-app only increases as a product's surface area increases. Thanks for forwarding us along!
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