Aurelius is a beautiful, minimal writing app.

I've wanted a better place to write for a while now. Aurelius was inspired by blurt.app (which was acquired and is no longer accessible). I tried other writing apps but none I quite liked. So I decided to build my own.

Here are the features that Aurelius has right now:

✨ Focus mode 🎯 Writing Sessions w/ target word count or time ☁️ Save your work to the cloud 🔗 Share a private link to your posts ⚡️ Writing Streaks 🎵 Music player to help focus 🥅 Daily writing goal

One decision I made is to not have a landing page. Aurelius is a writing app and that's what the focus is on — writing. So the home page is the editor. No sign up required to write. It's great for one-off writing sessions. You can download your posts as markdown (more formats coming soon)

But signing up gives some nice goodies like tracking writing sessions, saving posts to the cloud, sharing private links to posts, daily writing goals etc.

Hello everyone! I sort of didn't stick to the tasks list I set last week. Most of what I did was actually prep work, learning things I didn't know in SEO and content marketing. It was totally worth it. Here's my weekly progress update for https://useherald.com:

🥅 Goals for the past week:

• Put marketing plan in to action
• Add banners feature in the widget
• Show an example of banner on the website
• Ship waitlist feature (last one before I launch)

✅ Finished:

I spent most of the time learning SEO and copy writing for landing pages. I got some very useful feedback for copy writing. I'm working on updating the copy for the home page.

• Did some SEO work
• Started a blog for Herald and wrote an introductory blog post. Couple more articles in progress.
• Add banners feature in the widget
• Ship roadmap feature (only the dashboard part. Public roadmap is almost done. Went with roadmap instead of waitlist because I needed it for Herald)

🎯 Actionable goals for this week:

• Update home page copy using keywords
• Create features page
• Update product images
• Finish public roadmap page
• Launch!! 🚀

🙃 Struggles

It's been nearly a month since I started working on this. I've made good progress too. While I could keep working on it, I'm not gonna wait anymore and just launch. Herald has enough basic functionality, enough to show what's possible. So it's time to launch.

Hello everyone! I hope you're having a fantastic weekend. This was a pretty good week. I finished all the tasks I set out to do and did some more work. Here's my weekly progress update for https://useherald.com:

🥅 Goals for the past week:

• Add ability to create custom changelog templates
• Add pictures of widget and public page to home page
• Figure out how to get signups
• Deploy app in the monorepo

✅ Finished:

• Add ability to create custom changelog templates
• Add pictures of widget and public page to home page
• Figure out how to get signups
• Deploy app in the monorepo
• Add banners feature in the app dashboard
• Add a simple blog to write about Herald

🎯 Actionable goal for the this week:

• Put marketing plan in to action
• Add banners feature in the widget
• Show an example of banner on the website
• Ship waitlist feature (last one before I launch)

🙃 Struggles

I've made this mistake before and I'm on the verge of doing it again. As a developer, I like to build but I haven't spent nearly enough time on marketing. That changed this week. I've been studying how to go about marketing my product. This week I'm slowing down the building a lot (whatever coding task I set are pretty trivial) and work on some of the marketing stuff I've planned. Honestly I feel like I'm way out of my depth 😅, and feel anxious but I gotta do it. That's the only way to reach my goals.

Hello everyone! I hope you're having a productive Monday. Here's my weekly progress update for https://useherald.com:

🥅 Goals for the past week:

• Update the home page with better copy
• Add signup form
• Fix Netlify build issue when using the widget
• Work on the public changelog page
• Add ability to create custom changelog templates

✅ Finished:

• Update the home page with better copy
• Add signup form
• Work on the public changelog page
• Fix Netlify build issue when using the widget

🎯 Actionable goal for the this week:

• Add ability to create custom changelog templates
• Add pictures of widget and public page to home page
• Figure out how to get signups
• Deploy app in the monorepo

🙃 Struggles

No struggles as such. Figuring out the Netlify build error took up more time than expected.