Looking for early feedback — Season Desk for vertical/short-drama writers

This is a very smart niche choice. The vertical short-drama market is growing fast, and creators/production houses are forced to work at a breakneck pace. Solving their messy workflows is a great B2B pain point.Here is my blunt feedback on your product and your path to validation:Target the Production Companies, not just Writers: Freelance scriptwriters are notoriously budget-conscious and might hesitate to pay for a subscription. However, the production houses funding these 60-episode seasons are bleeding money on inefficiencies. If your "AI generation cost" and shot-list features can save them even 5% on production budgets, they will gladly buy team licenses.Address Security & IP upfront: In this industry, content piracy and script leaks are massive risks, and writers usually sign heavy NDAs. You need to make it explicitly clear on your landing page how you protect their data and character bibles.The Landing Page Hook: Since you stated what the tool is not (not a player, not CapCut, etc.), make sure your landing page shows exactly what it is within 3 seconds. A simple, interactive wireframe or GIF showing the "Character Bible ➔ Shot List ➔ Cost Calculator" pipeline will convert much better than just text.Acquisition Idea: Go to specific communities on Facebook, Discord, or WeChat where short-drama producers and ghostwriters look for gigs. Offering them a free "Season Template" spreadsheet in exchange for joining the waitlist could be a great lead magnet.Best of luck with the launch! Just signed up for the waitlist.

Creator communities will be more revealing if the ask produces an artifact. Share one season-planning template or mini checkup and ask participants to bring a single episode workflow. That turns a waitlist signup into a small commitment and tells you which object—character, cliffhanger, shot list, or cost—they value enough to import. I’d use those response patterns to guide the next round of outreach, rather than a broad waitlist alone.

For a 60 to 100 episode season the person with the real pain is rarely a solo writer, it is the producer or small studio running several seasons at once, and they have budget and bring the whole writer's room with them. A year of Pro free mostly recruits people who like free things; I would instead offer to sit with five writers who have a season in production right now and rebuild their existing Sheet inside the tool for them. Also, the waitlist link sits on a throwaway-looking domain, which is a real trust problem for a creator deciding whether to hand over unreleased scripts.

I don't have an answer yet, just an ongoing experiment that might be relevant. I sent an APK straight to one friend with zero instructions beyond "type one thing you'd want your phone to do" — no pitch, no landing page, just watch what a real person does with it. That was three days ago and I still haven't heard back, which has taught me more about my own assumptions ("sent" quietly becoming "seen" in my head) than about the product itself.

For your niche specifically, aryan_sinh's question is the right one — I'd go further and ask if any of them have hacked together a spreadsheet-plus-Notes version already. If they have, that's your actual competitor and your onboarding should map to whatever's already in that spreadsheet, not to a blank Season Desk.

The workflow you’re targeting is specific, but the harder question may be whether writers actually feel enough pain to leave Notes/Sheets/CapCut chats. Have any target users already tried to solve this workflow themselves or asked for something like Season Desk?