My name is Rahul Sarathy and I posted TextFrame a few months ago on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29234636) as a tool to create animated technical papers. After gathering feedback from the community, I found that the best use case for my tool was for creating tutorials.
I am proud to share my next iteration as a tool to create animated product tutorials. Hopefully you can find use in it to create more engaging tutorials for onboarding and helping out your users.
You can actually still make any of the previous technical animations using the current software. It's just that the outward pages are geared to demo the customer tutorial use case
This is great. I think something like this is very valuable to a small startup or indie hacker who has a product that requires a sign up before their users can see/use.
You know how a lot of SaaS has a video of the user story and what their app does and looks like on the landing page? Well, I think this can be way better, less time consuming, and way cheaper than hiring an animation studio to create that video. You can also edit the textframe as the product grows; something that is much harder to do for videos.
A few of small features can make this way better.
1. The ability to put the textframe in an iframe. So users can use it on their landing page.
2. The ability to auto play the steps. (it should stop autoplay if user clicks on a step to view)
3. More UI customizability so it goes with the landing page.
I see this being more valuable as a marketing tool than a tutorial tool, but I'm only one person. Good work and good luck =)
Don't misunderstand. I don't think the core functionality of textFrame should change. I'm just saying your users might use textFrame to convince their users how their product can solve their user's problems by showing them around the app without actually going into the app.
It is really helpful for SaaS that requires a sign up before users can use their app. Since registration is a big wall people wont go over unless they have a good understanding of the product. Most SaaS products try to do this now with images and videos.
So what I was suggesting is basically casting a wider net for textFrame. You currently market it as a tutorial solution. Consider marketing it as a "product show off/Demo" solution. Which would also include tutorials as well has any other way your users might want to show off their product.
This is very cool. Nice job on this! I like how slick the UI feels when I'm scrolling up and down the tutorial steps.
One quick piece of feedback that I saw right away: Clicking on the next step on the left and then seeing the video update on the right is distracting, so I ended up not even reading the text on the left after a while.
Perhaps you could show "subway stops" on the left to indicate which step you are and how many there are in total, and then have the instruction text above or below the video? The way it works now, your eyes have to dart back and forth from left to right to read the text and then watch the video.
Agree -- the product is interesting but the marketing site design is rough/unfinished to the point where I wouldn't trust the service. I currently use Loom in a similar capacity and think there's a big market for this type of service. Congrats on the launch and good luck!
I have to agree with you, my outward facing pages look a bit unprofessional right now. I assume by the marketing page, you mean 'pricing' page?
I'm glad you pointed out the Loom use case. My whole angle was that I thought products are leaning too much into video, when text has some great advantages: skimming, scrolling, copy pasting, etc.
Hey, cool project! Congrats!
A few more comments that I believe could help improve it:
1.If you click on a box with a step on the left side of a tutorial, it should take you to that step. At least that is how I tried to use it initially. Right now, you can only control going forward/backward through scrolling the page.
2. In the landing page the "View Examples" and "View a Tutorial" buttons look off in Firefox (the text overflows).
It's really cool!
would be great a figma-like interface with dropdown, input field etc.. to better redesign the UI.
Otherwise a way to build a sketch of the UI using a screenshot.
My name is Rahul Sarathy and I posted TextFrame a few months ago on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29234636) as a tool to create animated technical papers. After gathering feedback from the community, I found that the best use case for my tool was for creating tutorials.
I am proud to share my next iteration as a tool to create animated product tutorials. Hopefully you can find use in it to create more engaging tutorials for onboarding and helping out your users.
You can check out some examples I’ve created using the software: at https://textframe.app/examples
Please let me know what you think! You can also email me at rahul@textframe.app if you have any questions or just want to say hello