In February and March I devoted a lot of time to getting Write.as out on any welcoming site that would have it. We gained around 200 emails, a few app downloads, and even some enthusiastic compliments from strangers. So I solicited an open policy for feedback everywhere I could, and jumped back on the Android app, Chrome OS app based on it, a command-line client, and infrastructure.
Since then, marketing has been on word-of-mouth mode, and Twitter has been our trusty companion. Our handle @writeas__ is proudly announced in any place it can be associated with the product, and we follow back all new followers that don’t appear to be bots or pure advertising. This has already sparked a few conversations.
Our Twitter following is modest, but we get a lot of interaction around new client announcements, and a good amount of questions on future features. We’ve heard about ways users are leveraging Write.as that we never even planned. One user emailed us about a problem they were having, which led to a simple (now obvious) improvement to our API, and me following up to let them know we made that use case more straightforward.
We’ve also been communicating passively. After posting about our telnet server on /r/linux, someone asked if the code was open source — so we open sourced it. We’ve talked with a few developers about our software stack, which they can see and watch any time on GitHub. And we’ve continued putting much of our code online, both client and server. We hope this will become another useful channel to converse with everyone, especially developers.
By simply talking to anyone who wanted to talk about our app, we’ve learned what platforms to develop for next, what features people want most, and even gotten some warm and fuzzy feels to keep us going strong. If you’d like to talk, we’re always listening on Twitter and electronic mail: hello@write.as.
