Idea Validation: Is changing copy a problem?

Hey André, great stuff! Do you mind it if I send your survey to my mates that are copywriters (both at Atlassian). They'll probably give you great feedback about their processes.

At this stage I wouldn't use the tool yet (team too small so it'll be more costly) but when I was in a larger team that would have been quite useful as we had some dedicated blitz session to find errors/mistake in the products, and being able to report things in Jira right away was critical.

Hey Andre,

Filled out the survey.

As a copywriter myself who has been in this situation I'd say this is a GIANT problem. It actually contributes to why I left the startup. Some things they loved to experiment on but when it came to making workflow better they wouldn't have it.

Me and the other marketer even suggested for us to use a CMS but the engineers wanted full control of the back end. Oh wellllll

Let me know if you have anymore questions, would love to help you solve this.

Brilliant 👏👏👏. The only downside imho - the most text heavy websites are made on wordpress, where it’s relatively easy to update page through admin panel, even for non tech guys.
Is there any way to make it a sort of bug tracker tool? Especially for webapps

Great idea and video about the tool. It would work well for me and my team as we have a 3 step copy process from the client to the project manager to the developer. A lot gets lost in the communication and translation funnel.

Awesome idea! I think you could have a lot of success with selling this to web/design agencies.

When I worked at an agency, we had a lot of "change requests" from clients where they would want copy changed, etc. Allowing the agency's client to create those tasks and then they are sent to the agency dev team would be a huge time saver.

Charge the agency for the tool since it's a timesaver for the agency.

It's an interesting idea. There was something very similar either on here or PH recently that had a focus on CSS changes. i.e. make CSS changes visually then export the diff that could be sent to the developers.

A couple of thoughts for you:

1. Make it easier to create a task into a default project. i.e. when a user has made a change show them a 'create task in x' button
2. Some team prefer changes to be atomic rather than a bunch of separate changes to the one page being included in a single ticket
3. When creating tickets users may want to add further comments, priority etc. As a v1.1 feature providing a way to do this without going into their tracking tool would be cool.

Hi all,
Thanks for the awesome feedback.

I’m reaching out because we just finished a beta version of the tool for copy changes on websites (that we discussed on this post some time ago).

I would like to invite you to test it and give us some feedback :)

We called this tool WriteOn, and you can create an account here: https://www.writeon.io

If you have friends or you know someone that might be interested in this, you can share with them! We need all the feedback that we can have right now for the Beta phase.

Thanks
André

I love this idea. A good protion of my clients are not super web-savvy and this would really help me show the before/after of better copy. Integration with tools other than Asana (for me, Trello or Airtable are my top two tools) would also make project managing a breeze.

Hi Andre,
This looks like great concept. It’s a pain point I have and I’m just one non-tech founder with a remote dev freelancer.

I would love a way of just typing in the exact copy that I want, for the dev to then implement.

I think there would be value for smaller teams like mine here as well! All the best

Hey André(s)!

Very nice idea indeed! This is definitely a problem I've been facing in every companies I worked for.

I see two main things to focus on here:

• task-tracking: the back and forth aspect is normal, I'd say copy only gets ready for production in its minimum version, after 2-3 iterations on it, meaning same or different person reviewing and improving it 2-3 times. These iterations must be tracked and linking to task is a good idea, but the concept of "task" should be well thought here, maybe not necessary to have it linked to an external tool.

• translation: iterations on copywriting means iterations on translations. I'd say both aspect should be included in such a product.

You should definitely check this product PhraseApp I've been using in the past at GoEuro, definitely not perfect as of 2016 when I used it, but it was solving part of the issue (not the task-tracking though).
https://phraseapp.com/

Let's discuss it in January around a beer ;)

Abraço.

Hey André! I am not in any way associated with copywriting, but I've seen the demo and thought that this app can be useful for website localization too. Looks more convenient than any other approach I can think of. What do you think?

Seems cool, Andre, although very specific. Not sure what size team this would work best with. Maybe a startup?

Often in larger organizations, a marketer assigns a copywriter the job of updating X copy, and then the copywriter goes off and updates that copy, handing the finished copy back to the marketer for approvals. There's some back and forth there. And when the marketer signs off, that marketer - or a project manager - moves the copy to the developer to implement (if a CMS isn't already in place). So it might be less about the copywriter sending the copy to the developer and more about the copywriter sending it to a marketer and his/her DACI.

The workflow fix you've got here could be with anyone, of course. But the marketer seems to be the most obvious / natural fit. In my experience.

Nice idea and definitely useful if used by everyone on the team. As someone who works with clients, I would love to use it IF the client is open to the process. Also, it will be hugely beneficial to have a screenshot of the page with the new copy inside the task. I always do this manually using Chrome's Developer tools and taking screenshots to paste on a google doc which is shared with the client where they leave feedback.

Best of luck!

Hey Andre,

this is such a great idea. I'm working a lot on frontend development and even though we have a CMS for changing copy something like your tool might be beneficial.

I'm especially thinking about situations where the combination of copy and design is important. You often have only a single line available and it's annoying to enter a new string, save the data or your source code, refresh the page and see if the text is now on one line.

As I'm thinking of it now it might be great to be able to adjust the font size, spacing and so on as well. Then it would be possible to find the right combination of styling and copy to fulfill design requirements.

How is it different from Unbounce, VWO, Optimizely and all the others?

Sounds interesting, had the problem in the past as well. Currently, there aren't any problems because our marketers use Wordpress themselves.

I didn't fill out your survey because I'm not in your target market (I'm a solo developer), but it does seem to me to be a useful tool! I've definitely had to go back and forth on copy changes for startups and contract work.

It looks like that new chrome extension VisBug, but with saving and tracking to make it clear what has changed. Very cool.