[dbond]

It is tedious to layout a PDF but actual pain points are handling variable sized images and amounts of text, try formatting recipes to a PDF... Your demo video explains the features but not how it can solve anything that is a major problem to me.

The concept here in designing a template to be filled later is a brilliant idea, but I think its the delivery of the product that may pose the biggest problem. PDF generation doesn't have the same level of complexity as video encoding or payments so when it is used, its expected to just work as the environment doesn't change.

This introduces what I think is the main issue, if I build a website for a client, as a developer I never want to see it come back with problems, so its not worth introducing the risk of a third party service for the sake of a few hours of tedious work. At the other end of the industry any company producing a webapp may have problems with this simply due to how fundamental the feature can be, PDF generation doesn't require the same infrastructure as video encoding or payments, so they will have very different tradeoffs. Your main problem here is that you have no competition so I have nowhere to go if you close and the design online feature is essentially a vendor lockin.

Your assumptions are right but they are what a developer wants, the decisions are mostly made by management where future risk is more important than short term convenience.

Personally I think this product in particular would be much more suited to being a standalone package.

[knkella]

Thanks. Do you think by using an HTML template that can be filled in later is a better idea than visual designer?

[dbond]

The visual designer is great, it adds back in the ability for the designer to alter the template without the developer having to change any code. If this was a standalone product the template format would most likely need to be a proprietary format anyway for some basic piracy protection.

[knkella]

Thanks we will start looking for its uses as a stand alone product.