Friday Check-in #5 - Pivot!

So, it’s been a while, hasn’t it!

I did say I’d write these whenever I could. And it’s been a weekend and a half. I’m in Madrid, re-visiting the city 5 years after I left after finishing college. It’s largely unchanged, except for all the nerdy shops that have coalesced near the university area. I couldn’t be happier.

But at some point I should return to business, and this point is fast approaching. So:

What happened last?

The big news is that I found someone willing to give some awesome feedback!

After asking for marketing advice on the UK’s Tabletop Industry Network Discord, someone that was square in the target audience volunteered to take an earnest look at Bardic Tools.

They registered, played with the app, and wrote very detailed and incredibly valuable comments on the things that worked, and the things that didn’t.

In short, there were two big issues with the product:

• The design was not appealing. It was too sci-fi, too techy, and made the product seem more complicated to use than it actually is. That, they said, would have been an instant turn-off if they clicked on a FB ad.
• They didn’t have time to find and upload their own sounds. More precisely, they wouldn’t even know where to find them! Digging deeper, it seems that they mostly use Spotify and YouTube. Idle chat with other DMs confirms that this is how most people go as well.

I will be eternally grateful for to this person for their thoughtful feedback. It allowed me to see glaring gaps in the business model, and to discover vital things about the audience (they don’t want to search for sounds). So…

What do we do about it?

Let’s address the concerns one by one:

Redesign

The design is easy: We just change the colors and fonts. I already had the great logo and business card design from FreeRPG day, and the colors seemed to work well together. After prototyping a bit, I settled on a very light beige background with a slightly blue black for the font and shadows, and vice versa for dark mode. It works surprisingly well!

Now, for the font. I didn’t want to use multiple fonts for the landing page, so this had to look epic on an <h1> while being legible in a <p>. The other requirement was that I want to use Google Fonts where possible, so I just scoured the Serif, Display Serif, and Slab Serif sections until I settled in an appropriately fantasy one.

Adding in some flourishes for titles and a cover image, we’re done!

An epic redesign for the landing page:

Now, the soundboard was slightly more complicated. In fact, it was so complicated that I learned the basics of Figma just to experiment before jumped into the code. It wasn’t fun, but it was the best decision.

Figma allowed me to think in terms of “how can I make this both epic and usable?”, instead of “how can I center this div?”. That led to much more epic results that, honestly, weren’t that much harder to implement.

So, now it’s done! The new design, complete with dark and light themes and switches and amazing scene cards with background images. I love it so much and, the best part, the person who gave me feedback loved it too!

Foreign sounds

This one is a bit more complicated. It seems I’ll have to provide sounds bundled with the app.

For now, I’ve decided I’m not going to invest any money into this, and instead contact composers I love that publish their music with a Creative Commons license to see if they’d be okay with me putting their music in Bardic Tools.

Surprisingly, most of them were fine with it! They were even excited about the project. It’s fantastic how much you can get by just asking.

So, now I have a library of sounds to comb through, upload, and catalogue.

But, which sounds do I need? How do I present them?

The short answer is: I don’t know yet. This is what I have to work out in the next couple of weeks.

The Plan: Pivot!

I’m going to be traveling a bit for the next two weeks, I’m going to lay out a rough plan in the form of milestones, and I’ll check back in a couple of weeks to see how much progress I’ve made:

• Milestone 1: I can add features to the frontend. Right now, the htmx sound board is starting to break apart, and adding new features will be hard. I’ve got a Proof of Concept in Svelte for just the soundboard part, and I’ll need to finish that rewrite before adding features.
• Milestone 2: Users can use a single pre-loaded sound. This will require me to figure out the flow to add a sound, as well as the UX to search and insert it.
• Milestone 3: Users have 100 pre-loaded sounds to use. This will mainly be me combing through sound libraries and uploading the relevant ones. I may sketch out broad scenes (haunted manor, deep sea…) to help me make a list of which sounds would be useful.
• Milestone 4: Users have 1 scene they can load in. This is mainly me figuring out the storage and UX for loading and re-using scenes.
• Milestone 5: Users have 10 scenes they can load in.

If I can get this done, I’ll gain three great benefits:

• I can rework the Features section in the landing page with entries for “100+ hand-picked sounds” and “10 fantastic locations, ready to play”.
• I can start creating custom scenes for adventures/encounters I publish in the blog.
• I can start charging for “lifetime access to sounds for a flat fee”.

So, that’s the rough plan!

Let’s see how much I can get done. This Svelte rewrite is a bit painful. I think small bursts of chipping away at it are all that I can manage, so that’s what I’ll do!