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It\u2019s been a month since we gave public access to the platform. In the meantime, the feedback we received changed.<\/strong><\/p>\n Before the launch, we chose our beta-users, and they were interested in making the platform better. The promise of increased productivity, a framework that will allow them to focus on being creative, and better time management were the goals. <\/strong>After the launch, it\u2019s different.<\/strong><\/p>\n The constructive feedback kept coming. Our Concierge – Jira Service Desk – proves to be a very easy to use and efficient communication tool. It\u2019s a pleasure to answer back to writers and tell them \u201cHey, we made last night the change you suggested. Please check and let us know if it\u2019s what you needed. Also, thank you because we are sure the other writers will benefit from it too.\u201d<\/p>\n And then comes the other type of\u00a0feedback revolving around the next two ideas:<\/p>\n While for a few seconds I cringe knowing that these are absurd arguments (I\u2019ll explain below why), I make an educated effort I taught my brain to do a long time ago and force myself to approach it as an opportunity to communicate and explain more. It\u2019s an educated effort because, at first, it hurts to have somebody criticizing your hard work. Being complacent in getting hurt is useless. Therefore, I changed my POV and observe the way I can turn this into a positive experience.<\/p>\n When you start something with the purpose of creating a disruption in an industry and offer new and hopefully better ways of doing things, you have two choices:<\/p>\n You\u2019ll need an internal team: partners, employees, or a mix of both. You\u2019ll also have the external team: friends knowledgeable about the writing industry, software development, business strategy, in our case also professional writers (some very busy, rich, and famous) that will give you precious advice for free. You\u2019ll be surprised how many people are willing to help just because they can.<\/p>\n This team will have to fill in certain roles:<\/p>\n We cover all these functionalities with a small team. It helps that we have experience in various domains and as core belief continuous learning.<\/p>\n You have literally few hours maybe a day to celebrate your hard work and sacrifices. The first 100 users of your product are reason for celebration.<\/p>\n The what if<\/em> roller-coaster starts:<\/p>\n The what if <\/em>phase is short. You trust your industry research, your data was collected from relevant writers, the system is good and with a short learning curve. And most of all you trust the mix of gut, knowledge, love, sacrifice, time, money, grit, and faith that brought you to this point in time and space<\/strong>. You\u2019re here to stay and persevere. The grind is real and you\u2019re moving on no matter how hard it is.<\/p>\n The future is less worrying than the present. Plans are in place for different situations. The goal remains the same: to build the best digital tools for writers.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s go back to what started this article:<\/p>\n We spent a lot of time thinking about pricing. We end up with two strategies. I will talk about the one you see on our website. The second one is not useful yet. This core product is a writing software with project management (research, planning, execution, monitoring) and analytics tools. As an Early Adopter you pay a fix price of $6\/ month for life. It includes the core and all the other developments: collaborative writing, editing tools, ePub and other formats export, marketplace, writing contests, and other features. This will end in a month. You might as well take advantage of it now<\/a>. While we took in consideration a series of factors on deciding the price, the conversation started with how much me, Emanuel the writer, will be willing to\u00a0pay per month for a platform that will allow me to write my books, keep everything organized in one place, be able to have a lot of functionalities from export to writing on a mobile phone. The conclusion is that $9 dollars it\u2019s about right. I\u2019m willing to pay less than $10 dollars for a digital environment where I can unleash my passion, create worlds and mold beings that will exist because I gave them life.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ll start with the conclusion. As a project manager with over 14 years of experience I can tell you that Kanban is the best project methodology for a writer and the way we personalized it for writing in Asengana it will help you be more productive and manage better your time. You DON\u2019T NEED TO KNOW the Kanban theory to use it. And you don\u2019t need to know any theory to use Asengana. But, for the sake of argument, let me explain it.<\/p>\n As project management methodology, Kanban is easy to understand and apply. The information online is abundant. Only one of the software solutions promoting Kanban used by companies all over the world, Trello, announced last year that they passed 50 million users. As a writer, there\u2019s quite a high probability that you already used a Kanban style tool and you\u2019ll find our application in Asengana familiar. For those of you that don\u2019t, it\u2019s easy to understand. The concept of Kanban comes from lean manufacturing. Kanban was the card that stopped the production line when there was a defect or not enough components for the respective step.<\/p>\n \u201cThe kanban card is, in effect, a message that signals a depletion of product, parts, or inventory. When received, the kanban triggers replenishment of that product, part, or inventory. Consumption, therefore, drives demand for more production, and the kanban card signals demand for more product\u2014so kanban cards help create a demand-driven system.\u201d – Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It was adapted in business and software development as a tool for controlling WIP – Work In Progress – on a Kanban Board.<\/p>\n In Asengana Kanban Board, you have a simple five columns structure: Backlog, To Do, Doing, Done, Archive (Reader Ready). The tasks for your project are actually the scenes of your book. Every day you decide on 5 scenes (approx 900 words\/scene – that is just an assumption we used as a starting point) you will work on. During the day you can add or remove, but as soon as you add a sixth and save the board, you\u2019ll get a Kanban Card that \u201cstops the production\u201d. This allows you to plan for a manageable amount of writing every day.<\/p>\n Another specific application you\u2019ll find in the Manuscript page. Here are listed all the scenes grouped by chapter of your book. It can be quite\u00a0long even if the sidebar navigation is easy. Activating the Kanban button will hide all the Scenes except those from the Doing column. This will allow you to focus only on the Scenes you want to work on that day or the next days.<\/p>\n To end this article, there are a lot of writing solutions and each one is a fit for a way of writing. Asengana is for those writers that want to have easy access anywhere to write, be productive and be able to manage better their time. We think the price is right and Kanban is the right and easy-to-use project methodology.<\/strong> We are certain that we will improve Asengana and always deliver more value than its price.<\/p>\n\n
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Crash course in how we started this business – setting the framework<\/h3>\n
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Phase 1: Building the software solution<\/h4>\n
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Phase 2: The launch<\/h4>\n
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Phase 3: The future<\/h4>\n
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Writers come from all walks of life<\/h5>\n
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Price is not too much or not enough. It\u2019s what you\u2019re willing to pay for the right tools to support your passion.<\/h5>\n
There\u2019s an entire conversation about free products that sell user data, freemium (money are charged for the additional features to the free version), or just selling your product. Compared with other SaaS solutions, we\u2019re a niche product useful for a limited number of people (see above). We went with what-you-see-is-what-you-get.<\/p>\n
The premium accounts will be those that will use Ambassadors’ Club referral system. That means that you need to be invited by a member of our community. We decided on a price of $9. For all the other users the price will $12 or more, depending on the additional features they want to access.<\/p>\n
I live a parsimonious life. I have to. Every time I crave for something, I just don\u2019t. Every dollar I don\u2019t spend on essentials goes into Asengana. Living in communism was part of me being educated this way. Except for family, friends and my profession (project manager), I have only one passion: writing. This is what a live for. I even put writing aside in order\u00a0to build Asengana for longer than I wished.<\/p>\nThe suggestion that writers don\u2019t understand and can\u2019t learn Kanban is absurd. It denies the essence of being a writer: an inquisitive and creative mind in a process of continuous learning.<\/h5>\n
I\u2019m proud of me and my team. We built an entire software solution in less than a year while having jobs, families, and we didn\u2019t burnout, we never had an argument. We had fun in doing this and loved our project. Oh, and we used Kanban.<\/p>\n\n
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