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31 Comments

👊Punch me! It is your turn...

http://www.onefinaldoc.com

👊Punch me! It is your turn...

In the last several months, I have critiqued your landing pages, judged your copy, questioned your business acumen... now it is your turn.

My brother and I have been working on www.onefinaldoc.com since last Christmas. I would really appreciate your brutal honest feedback, even though I guess IHs are not the target audience.

Is it clear what we are trying to solve? For whom we are trying to solve?

#landing-page-feedback #idea-validation

submitted this linkon February 19, 2019
  1. 3

    When I first hit the landing page (laptop), the page feels a bit off, there's no proper typographic hierarchy.

    Current: https://i.imgur.com/GDowMM2.png

    Your big title and subtext are very similar in style, so it looks like a paragraph of writing. You can break that up by using a serif + a sans-serif or similar. Similarly, your email message to the right has a similar sized font, so to me it feels a bit unnatural.

    I'm no expert and probably talking out my arse, but here's a rubbish 2 minute rendition as I'm not at home: https://i.imgur.com/3zu0YWU.png

    Now, I feel my eyes read the brash headline, then the other large dark text (the email), so I get what you mean, then the subtext. I just grabbed the colour from the bars on the right, but this helps as it makes it secondary to the primary title + email.

    The same is true a bit further down, your titles + paragraphs all look a bit the same, and it makes it feel a bit wordy. I'd personally probably drop the Microsoft Word™ bit from a title too as it makes it lengthy, I'd include that below if you need to.

    "We auto-upload all documents to your personal repository where is dead simple" should be "where it's", I'd probably not use the word 'dead' either, but again, personal.

    Being pedantic now, but you use nice centering and symmetry above, and your footer is out of shape slightly: https://i.imgur.com/nsD7yEV.png

    One final thing is I didn't notice it was free before I went below the fold. Maybe change your top action button to have the word 'free' in it?

    You also violate my personal indie hacker pet peeve of not having a screenshot of the product, and my second pet peeve of not being able to see any more info if I don't surrender my email - I usually avoid sites like these as I feel like they're hiding a poor UI.

    No idea if the above helps you at all, but there you go 😂

    1. 1

      And I will fix the typo! Thanks again

    2. 1

      Thanks for all your opinions. We can do a better job on type font weights or even use sans serif in text. There were some choice on going with serif because almost nobody use them and we want to shock, but we will ponder on this for sure.

      About the symmetry in the footer, you mean the phrase "Free..." or the title?

      1. 1

        If you ignore the top text, the *free bit and the button /form are out of line. I'd add 'free' to the button and drop the *free bit.

  2. 2
    • Is not clear what is what I'm paying for
    • Is not clear if there's a human involved on this (is someone looking at my super secret contract?)
    • Is not clear what's the deliverable, yes, a single document, but is that a word? a pdf?
    • How much am I going to pay for this?

    The message is very clear: I'm going to be exchanging word files cc'ing you and somehow that's going to tell me what the latest version is. The details not so much.

    1. 2
      • In the beginning you will pay for nothing because during alpha there is no paying plan. When we move to beta, we will have a paying tier if you have more than 1 version controlled thread.
      • Good point. There is no human involved we are building a git pipeline for Word documents.
      • The MVP deliverable is a site for your thread where you can visualize versions sent via email and compare them. Similar to a git diff. We later will let the owner of the project (who added us in the thread) to accept/reject changes (like pull requests) and we will build a new word document for her/him with the changes included (Word document).
      • We haven't decided on price yet. I believe it will be about $25/user.month for unlimited projects/threads. There will be a free tier with 1 to x projects/threads.
      • We will improve the how does it work.
  3. 2

    There were alot of good points ...but none of them mention

    Contract collaboration shouldn’t be this f*cked

    I am not a prude..however this is not the first thing a user should see in an SaaS landing page .

    and then..you don't even fully own it..you spell it like this..F*cked

    seriously ?

    If you are going to curse..then own that shit !

    The reason people spell it with the * is because its supposed not to offend ,
    ( you did know that shit right ? )

    because sometimes people/customers are in their fucking feelings and really feel some kind of way about shit that may seem unimportant to you...but guess what..you never know who is going to see that..or who it offends

    1 word can kill months of hard work
    1 bad word can kill sale

    So don't fucking , fuck this up with some bullshit trying to be fucking cool .

    SearchTile.com

    1. 1

      First things first, thank you a lot for brutal honesty.

      This was a choice of words that we thought a lot about and I can handle the critique: "this is not the first thing a user should see in an SaaS landing page", no... because most SaaS landing page, let's be honest, are fucking (with no *) boring. Even more when they target markets outside the tech community. We wanted to stand out and we believe that among more than 1 billion Office users we will find enough people who will not get offended and, yes, think it is cool, no shame about that.

      Your other criticism is one that punch me harder, and I like it: "If you are going to curse..then own that shit !", I think you are right. Somehow we thought of using "f*cking" to soft it a little. But this is the kind of thing that is quite hard when you are not a native english speaker and do not have the same cultural background, I would be much more confident if I was targeting Brazilians because we understand the culture.

      I will ponder on that and would really like to hear from other IHs on this subject.

  4. 2

    Hey Fred, this is an intriguing idea.

    I believe I used to be in your target market (a knowledge worker in a medium sized company who constantly collaborated with others on documents). I'm now using Google docs which comes with its own challenges, but in my previous roles I remember the pain of having a million versions of a document circulating in emails, and trying to keep track of all the versions and changes to create the final. :)

    Some comments:

    • The very first line "Your team wastes thousands of hours sifting contract changes in long, nerve-racking, email threads." is a bit confusing. Do you mean sifting through document edits in long, nerve-wracking, email threads? I wasn't sure what 'contract changes' meant.
    • I really like the line "Tame your version (dis)control" with the strikethrough. That's a compelling statement that spoke to me. I agree with another poster than you don't need "MS Word" in this line but can explain it elsewhere.
    • Ditto what others said about privacy statement.
    • You might be limited to smaller enterprises unless you sell this as a solution that can be installed within a company. At my previous role, we would not have been allowed to send internal documents to a third-party service like this.
    • The actual functionality is a bit too vague. It refers to a personal repository - what is this? How is that better or different than managing documents in a folder?
    • I found myself searching for an example of 'how does this work'. If you can, it would be valuable to create a short explainer video or at least an example of how this would work in real life. I'd be hesitant to sign up and send my documents without "seeing" first how this works.

    Wishing you the best on this!
    Sarah

    1. 1

      Hey Sarah, thanks for your detailed commentary. Let me try to address some of the points:

      • First line: english is not our native language, and what we want to mean is exactly what you wrote "sifting through document edits in long, nerve-wracking, email threads". I may use your words, if you don't mind. Also... accept other suggestions for this phrase or other phrases, if you have.
      • Version discontrol: Thanks, we spent a lot of time in the copy. I was afraid that if we do not use MS Word in the text it would not be clear that we are talking to Office users. I am still in doubt of this point, but maybe we do not need to insert it in the title, still not sure.
      • privacy: note taken
      • "within a company installs": We plan to have an enterprise plan that can be sold on premise. That being said, the reality is that a lot of companies (I think I even could say most of companies) use email with its insecurities to share important documents. All the data we gather is encrypted and only decrypted when we need to use it to process the emails. We have a lot of thoughts on security measures. This is certainly a point we should explain better.
      • vagueness: It was a choice. We wanted to leave people curious and give more information later. This is a point that a lot of people criticised, I guess it is a strategy that does not work for our specific case.
      • how does it work: somehow related to previous point, but let me try to explain to you. When someone add us in the email thread, we receive a copy of the documents/versions. We process this documents and add them to git. Every sender is a branch. We email back to the thread with a link to a page where users can compare versions. In the future, the person who added us in the email thread will be able to accept and reject other users changes as if they were pull requests. Our challenge is to explain all this without being technical. So, we want to show, not tell. For that we need to develop a little bit more the app. We are considering creating a video.

      As you were in the target audience, would you mind if we contact you to talk more later?

      1. 1

        Awesome! Yes, definitely feel free to ping me to talk more about this as you build it out! I probably won't be able to test this very well in my current environment, but I am happy to give my thoughts as a potential customer would.

  5. 2

    Maybe you should address what I assume will be one common objection -- "I don't want to copy you in my emails, they're confidential! And how do I know you're not going to listen in on what I'm doing and sell it to my competitors?"

    1. 1

      Fair point. We were in doubt of going with a very short version and let people sign up out of curiosity or explaining more. But security and privacy are just too important not to address. You are right. Thanks

      1. 1

        It'd be worth mentioning GDPR too!

  6. 1

    Doesn't Microsoft Word provide this functionality itself with SharePoint and OneDrive? I have collaborated with others on the same word documents online, and while it was far from a great experience it worked. You should probably mention on the landing page how your solution differs from Microsoft's own.

    1. 1

      Yes it does, but it is not reliable for many reasons. Besides, people collaborate on Word documents via email with people outside their companies and there is not guarantee that everybody in the thread have the same set of tools.

  7. 1

    My instant initial feedback without thinking too hard about it:

    • It looks really nice.

    • The curse word in the heading is bad. Looks unprofessional and unappealing to me.

    • The top of page copy wasn't clear to me and should be more concise.

    • I immediately thought, "how would this be better than a shared Google Doc?" and couldn't find this information.

    • "Just carbon copy magic@onefinaldoc.com and reply-to-all... to doubt your own eyes" - Now I'm really confused. I don't understand what it feels like to use the service or what the interface looks like.

    1. 1

      Hi Sean,

      Thanks for your feedback.

      • Someone else also mentioned the curse word. We thought it would create an interesting contrast to the boring style of most tools available for our target audience. But we may have gone a bit too far. We will think about this.
      • We will work on the copy
      • Google Docs is synchronous and for most workers (and especially when you are negotiating a contract) it makes more sense to work on your changes thoroughly and than share it with others. But it's a good point. This advantage may not be clear and we should address it.
      • Since we are on alpha, we still have few images and they are a bit rough. That's why we don't show the UI. But maybe we should explain better with words how it works. Just to clarify, non-coders usually collaborate on documents via email, which is a clumsy way to do this. We don't want to have to teach them Git commands, so we are incorporating it on their current practice. New versions of a document on the email thread work as pull requests. Then, any part can access the project/thread repo where they can see all the versions and easily compare them. The fact that I'm writing all this shows that we have to make it clearer on the website.

      Cheers

  8. 1

    I'm probably not your target audience but I didn't understand anything :(
    What does it do?
    Who is it for?
    Why are there strips?
    Anyway, good luck.

    1. 1

      Version control for Word documents.
      For Office users: lawyers, administrative people, economists, etc.... essentially no-coders.
      Stripes are part of branding. We chose red stripes in the above the fold to bring attention to the email and shock a little bit. We wanted something different from the mainstream design of our times.

      Thanks!

      1. 1

        Okay, now the question: "Are you sure lawyers, administrative people, economists know what is version control at all?"
        Another question is if this product is about version control, why do you pay so much attention to email settings or whatever?

        1. 1

          Good point. Many probably don't know and one of our challenges is to present the advantages of it in a very concise and simple way.
          Thanks

      2. 1

        Ah... now it's clear. Thanks!

  9. 1

    Hey,
    love the layout!

    But you do not have any Imprint and Privacy Statement on the page.
    Would be quite important to add because of at least those two main reasons:

    • Imprint: I am always interested who is behind a company so I can see if I trust the product to be there in 2 month from now
    • Privacy Statement: You want me to send you all my (really sensitive) contract data and do not tell me how you will handle that information....maybe you will sell it to my competitor as business model? (Just a crazy thought, that could come up)

    Maybe a pricing page would also be good. Would tell me about the business model and if that is a legit service. (So IMO you should not be to cheap)

    1. 1

      Thanks about the layout, I did it my self in sketch and a friend "translated" it to css.

    2. 1

      Good points. We were trying to be short in the description but the privacy statement is too important not to include: you are absolutely right. Thanks for opening our eyes.

      On imprint... you mean like an about us page?

  10. 1

    Hi Fred & Felipa,

    Just signed up and sent an email with some feedback (or expectations). If it will be anything like Git (with a more non-dev intuitive UI/UX), that'd be awesome.

    I wish you all the best with the built.

    Valentijn

    1. 1

      That is exactly the idea. We want something with the power of git for Office users who won't want to learn commands etc. The idea is also to be frictionless, this kind of collaboration already happens via email, we just want to make it clearer.

      Thanks for the kindness.

  11. 1

    Hi everyone! Here is Felipe, brother and co-founder.
    Glad to be part of the communty. It's been quite a ride to build www.onefinaldoc.com, since I don't have any coding or entrepreneurial previous experience (fortunately, he has). I am the one that lived the problem we are trying to solve, though :).
    Like he said, honest feedback are very much appreciated.
    Cheers

  12. 1

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