My wishlist didn’t bring many users, but I launched the closed beta anyway

I’ve been working on my first project for some time, and I decided to start writing about it here too. So I guess this is #001. The project is called Zirel. It’s made for writers, worldbuilders, game masters and other people who create fictional worlds. The main idea is to help them organize characters, events and other parts of their world, see how they are connected through a graph, and find possible mistakes or holes in the lore.

For around two weeks I had only a wishlist page. I didn’t suddenly get a lot of signups from it, but I didn’t want to just keep working alone and waiting for something to happen either. At some point I needed to put the real website online and let people actually try it. So now Zirel is in its first closed beta. The website is open and anyone can look through it, but registration currently requires a personal invitation. I’m planning to invite people in groups of around 15–20. The first group can try the current version and tell me what is broken or confusing. Then I can fix some of those things before inviting the next group, instead of having 100 people report the same problems at once.

I’m also working on a way to request beta access directly from the website. Until that is ready, people can contact me and tell me a little about what they are working on. If you have time to look at it, I’d be glad to hear whether the idea and the website are clear from a first visit.