Rotor
Digital Content Creation and Distribution
Rotor is a content creation and distribution platform for individuals or small teams. Write content, customize it for different channels and publish with a single click.
After careful consideration of all the variables, I've decided to scrap the project. Reasons:
-
Interest and feedback from target audience was not even lukewarm, it was actually non-existent. This is most likely something that might have been alleviated by better PR work on my part, IF I was the sole problem of the project.
-
The elephant in the room: Developing AND supporting dozens of integrations. Rotor already integrates with a dozen of external services. Writing the initial implementation for an integration wasn't that hard (with the exception of Twitter perhaps), maintaining all of those integrations while simultaneously implementing new ones will result in an incredibly high workload in the long run. I would probably be left without much time to work on new projects.
-
I was not satisfied with compromises users would have to live with using the product. Rotor's editor is actually quite capable but how much of your content would get lost in translation when publishing would vary greatly:
- Publish to Blogger and lose all Embeds (Youtube, Twitter etc.)
- Publish to Facebook and your carefully crafted article containing Code-Blocks, Images, Quotes etc. would end up as plain-text.
And the list goes on.
- I have another project on the list that does not suffer from the problems listed above while sharing a lot of functionality with this project, meaning I will be able to jumpstart the new project. The outlook of getting back on track with a new project using the fast lane, greatly eases the pain of conceding defeat.
Peace out!
I had originally planned to migrate the project from Bootstrap to Tailwind CSS/UI after completing the MVP. As it turned out Tailwind introduced some major build performance slowdowns with 2.0, making it unfeasible to be used with larger code bases. Sadly I also had to request a refund for my purchase of Tailwind UI realizing that even third-party support for Angular is pretty much non-existent.
I've learned quite a lot in the process of the migration attempt. Most important take-away is to not underestimate the amount of work involved with switching a grown codebase to another CSS framework - especially when you rely on third party Javascript components building upon your current CSS framework.
In other news Wordpress publishing is now available and you can even create new articles from uploaded Microsoft Word documents. Next stop: Facebook and Twitter publishing modules.
With the first four of many more distribution channels completed and ready for testing, the MVP for Rotor is now complete. The product is really shaping up as a publishing solution for individual business writers and very small teams. Especially Rotor's content distribution module has turned out even more powerful than originally envisioned by me and can hold its own compared to established competitors like StoryChief.
Rotor's Page on Product Hunt's Upcoming is now live at https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/rotor.
Not quite sure whether it's worth to bite the bullet and shell out for a pro account, since we are talking subscription money rather than perpetual.
I'm really happy with the progress over the past two weeks. A couple annoying quirks with the editor have been worked out and the first iteration of the user dashboard was completed. Image uploads inside the editor - either by manual insert or image paste -work reliably as well. All in all I must say that NSwag and NSwag Studio have been a godsend for quickly iterating on the backend API and generating Angular Typescript Services from it.
An online publishing platform - no matter how small - without a capable editor sucks. Therefore I've spent the first phase of product development on the content editor. The result - based on a heavily customized version of Facebook's draft-js - turned quite to be capable without getting in the user's way. Keyboard power-users like myself will be pleased.