CEO and Founder of Plottr, Cameron Sutter, discusses how the visual outlining software helps writers organize their thoughts and ideas. He explains how Plottr fills a void in the market by providing a visual way to see the threads of a story weaving together. Sutter emphasizes that Plottr is not meant to replace other writing software, but rather to focus on a few key features, such as visualizing the story and organizing details in a series Bible. He also discusses the importance of balancing artificial intelligence features with maintaining the creativity of the writer. Sutter mentions upcoming features, including a family tree feature, improved timeline, and offline mode.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Plottr is a visual outlining software that helps writers organize their thoughts and ideas.
- The software provides a visual way to see the threads of a story weaving together, filling a void in the market.
- Plottr focuses on a few key features, such as visualizing the story and organizing details in a series Bible.
- The balance between artificial intelligence features and maintaining the creativity of the writer is important.
- Upcoming features include a family tree feature, improved timeline, and offline mode.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Plottr and Cameron Sutter
02:28 – Identifying the Need for a Visual Outlining Software
06:53 – Differentiating Plottr from the Competition
09:58 – Navigating the Balance Between AI and Humanity in Writing
16:47 – Upcoming AI Features and Roadmap
21:24 – Integration with Other Writing Apps
24:17 – Improving User Experience and Intuitive Outlining Process
29:17 – Templates for Structuring Stories
32:21 – Maximizing the Use of Plottr and Support
35:07 – Exciting Upcoming Features and Developments
37:03 – Where to Learn More About Plottr and Get in Touch
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge podcast. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions.
Today we’re talking with Cameron Sutter, Founder and CEO and Founder, a visual outlining software that helps writers organize their thoughts and ideas, making it super easy to arrange and rearrange scenes, plots, character arcs, and more, with NaNoWriMo, Fast Approaching. That’s the national novel writing month in November. This is an app I think you’re really gonna wanna seriously consider if you are a writer and you are planning on participating.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself as I typically do with these introductions. So to talk more about Plottr and how this all works, let me introduce Cameron Sutter. Cameron, welcome to the podcast. Glad you can join us.
Cameron Sutter (00:55)
Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Beau Hamilton (00:57)
Yeah, can you go ahead and introduce yourself and give us an overview of Plottr?
Cameron Sutter (01:02)
Yeah, so let’s see, I’ve been writing and telling stories on and off my whole life. I’m a software engineer by trade. And so I just kind of found a way to marry those two passions of mine. It started out as just kind of a side project for myself. Just as I was writing, I just didn’t love my process. My notes were kind of all over the place. And so I started thinking, you know, what would be my perfect tool? Cause I was trying all sorts of different, different tools out there. Like I was trying spreadsheets. I was trying Google Docs. I was trying Scrivener and I still do use Scrivener, but, but just none of them were the, what I saw in my head of, this visual way to see the threads of your story weaving together. Just, it feels like there should be a way to see that because there’s lots of things going on in this story.
So because of that, I was like, well, I’m just going to start building it myself. And it was just for me. And then it started spreading slowly. Other people saw it, and I put it on a couple of forums and got some couple hundred beta testers. then over the years, it just started growing. And so then in 2020, I was able to quit my job and live off savings for a little while with my wife and kids, which was a little scary. But we’re able to, you know, make that my full-time job. And I’ve been doing that since, so it’s pretty cool.
Beau Hamilton (02:30)
Wow, that’s awesome. That’s cool. Yeah, I was going to ask. So you’ve always been kind of an avid storyteller and book nerd. And you saw this missing void for an app like Plottr in the marketplace. Did you? So you just noticed that there was some features missing, perhaps, that you wanted to incorporate into your own software solution. Or how did that come to light?
Cameron Sutter (02:52)
Yeah, it just didn’t feel like there was anything that matched the way I was thinking of stories. There’s multiple threads of a story and it’s not just like your main plot that you need to figure out. And outlining it is boring. Nobody likes doing that. And trying to read a hundred thousand words or even fifty thousand words to be able to see the story in its, and all the threads of it just was not working. It just didn’t seem like the right way to do it. And so in my mind, I just saw like, okay, there’s multiple threads of a story. There’s gotta be a way to plan each one of those threads individually and just see it visually. And so, yeah, this is what came out of that kind of exploration.
Beau Hamilton (03:37)
Yeah, yeah, that’s huge. Having that visual interface and the right features is really important. We’re definitely going to talk about user interface a little bit later on. I want to just ask kind of broadly, what are some of the integrated technologies you have in Plottr? What kind of features and technologies have you integrated into this software to kind of help, you know, enhance the visual outlining and plotting experience for users?
Cameron Sutter (04:05)
Yeah, so to kind of explain that, I didn’t really give a great overview of what Plottr is. I said how I came about it, but you can think of it like digital sticky notes on a storyboard, kind of, so it’s almost like a user-friendly, colorful spreadsheet. But it’s all drag and drop and you can move things around. And so if any listener or any writers are listening, if you’ve ever tried to put index cards on your wall or sticky notes or use a whiteboard or something, this is kind of the digital equivalent of that. So you can see the different plot lines or character arcs individually.
So to answer your question about the technologies, it’s really just web technologies. There’s not any like super secret technology that we’re using that most websites don’t already use. It’s really the thought and design that goes into the user experience and making sure one, it’s easy for writers because writers on the whole, we’re not technical people. I think I’m probably an exception, so making it easy for writers and making it just intuitive and kind of work the way our brain works, kind of.
Beau Hamilton (05:18)
Yeah, no, I like the kind of visual of the sticky notes and being able to drag and drop because as somebody who, I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got notepads right on my desk here. I got sticky pads. I’m constantly writing things around. I, I always misplace my sticky, my sticky notes, but usually I have them like pasted around just with random notes and sometimes quotes and passwords and all sorts of stuff. So, yeah, having that flexibility on a visual or a software, kind of canvas is great.
Now, as far as, so I kind of want to talk about the competition kind of going back with the missing void that you noticed in the marketplace now. So I used to highlight like my favorite new iOS and Android apps each month on YouTube. I used to make, I still make videos, but I was making a bunch of YouTube app videos. I did this for years and it seemed like there was every month there’d be a new note taking application or journaling app with its own unique design, claiming to be like the best at what it does, whether that’s like simplicity, being distraction-free, being feature-rich, you know, incorporating nowadays it’s AI and third-party cloud support.
Plottr isn’t a mobile application, nor is it simply designed around taking notes. It’s much more than that. But I imagine it occupies its own niche within the competitive landscape of writing software and storytelling tools. So I guess my question is, how does Plottr differentiate itself from the competition and stand out from the crowd?
Cameron Sutter (06:41)
Yeah, that’s a good question. There is a lot of writing software out there for sure. And most of the writing software that we see is mostly focused on writing the manuscript of your story. Or it’s on like world building and being able to build cultures and languages and maps and things like that.
Whereas Plottr is kind of sandwiched in the middle of those where, we’re not trying to, the intent is not that you write your book in Plottr. And it’s not that you can dive deep and build these incredible worlds with fantastical creatures and things like that. Although lots of people do use it for that, to build out their worlds and things. But it’s more trying to be really good at a few small things and not trying to do everything for the writer. And those few small things are senior story in a different way and more like a high-level picture of the story instead of the prose of your manuscript, the story of it, and what’s called a series Bible.
And so a series Bible is all those little details, all those little notes about all your characters, you know, this one has blue eyes, this one has a dog, you know, those kind of things, keeping all those details in one organized place because for writers, when you’re writing book three, book ten in a series, man, you’re not going to be able to remember all those details. And so many writers that we talk to say that their readers will email them and say, why did you change the eye color of this obscure side character in book one? You know, that was my favorite character. Why did you do that? Or my favorite one is this lady kept changing the gender of a dog from book to book to book because she couldn’t remember what it was. So it just kept changing. And her readers were email her in and say that.
So keeping all those details organized in one place and visualizing your story are really the two main things that we really shoot for.
Beau Hamilton (08:40)
Okay, yeah, no, that’s really, that’s funny. And it’s so true, right? Because I can hardly remember, like, you know, the saying is “I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last night, what I had for breakfast”. But especially nowadays with everything being so digital and on demand, you know, that short term and long term memory just kind of get lost and just zapped out of you.
So yeah, that’s an important tool. And I think just kind of reiterating that this is a tool for writers, you know, we can say it’s an app, it’s software, but emphasizing that it’s a tool to help with the writing process, you know?
So, okay, now of course we have to talk about Artificial intelligence, you know, that’s the next logical progression for this conversation, I think. “Artificial intelligence”, I’m going to put quotes.
So I read your blog post announcing Plottr’s AI future, one where you say that we need to embrace AI tools but also make sure that our work has more humanity than ever in it. Is that an oxymoron? Like how do you navigate that balance when determining new features to implement in Plottr?
Cameron Sutter (09:42)
Yeah, so I’m glad you put quotation marks around the AI because what we are calling AI today really isn’t. So try not to get into the weeds too much. These large language models are really good at guessing the next word. And they’re good enough that they really do sound like a human, but they’re not artificial intelligence. There’s no reasoning going on. And my favorite way to explain that is if you put in the puzzle where you have to get the boat across the stream where there’s like a farmer, a fox, chicken and grain, and the boat’s not big enough for all of them, if you put that, if you ask it to solve that, but you say the boat is big enough to fit all of them, then nine times out of ten, it will give you just the normal answer to that, which is totally wrong because they can all fit in the boat. So it’s not reasoning, it’s just guessing the next word because it’s heard that, it’s read that puzzle over and over from different sources.
So I guess how do we manage that? I think there’s a lot of feelings around AI, especially for writers, a lot of ethical questions and a lot of anger and worry. And look, I understand both sides. I’m really good at. I think that’s one of my strengths is being able to see both sides. And I realize that yes, there are concerns. I mean, if something says it can replace humans, who wouldn’t be concerned, right? But it’s also just like every other technology that we’ve always been worried about, like typewriters and computers, word processors, you know, everybody’s always freaked out with those kinds of things. And eventually it just becomes the norm. So there’s both sides of that.
And I think that we, as far as like where we fall on that, we just love our audience without judgment on anything. Like we don’t care how you go about becoming a writer, you know, just writers are awesome and we want to support writers. But there is a balance there with trying to create features that use AI and don’t alienate people that are afraid or are really against it.
And so one thing that we’re trying to do is make it very clear what is and isn’t AI or you know AI in quotes, and when it’s being used and when it isn’t. so right now, there’s nothing in Plottr that uses any AI, any LLM, doesn’t call back to ChatGPT or anything like that. And when we do have those features, we’ll make it very clear what is, when it’s being used and what is actually coming from that and what is actually, what is actually being sent to it so you know that it’s not training on your special story. You know, people don’t want their special story trained in these LLMs.
And the other important thing it’s, that it can’t take away the creativity of a person, I think. It shouldn’t, I guess. You could put in a prompt and it could spit you out something. And as a human, if you just publish that, like the chances of it being good are not great right now, you know, there are some tools that I’ve seen people use that make a pretty decent story, but most of time you’ll have to have your hands in it as a human writing it, editing it, fixing it.
And so the tools that we, the features that we plan to build are going to be very much enabling your creativity, but not taking away your creativity, giving you options, giving you suggestions, but really putting the power in your hands.
So I know I said a lot of things there. Do you have any questions about that?
Beau Hamilton (13:34)
Yeah, no. So I think that’s interesting. Like I, I think the point about artificial intelligence, just not being its own intelligence is a great. So like one example I can think of is if I have to summarize a news article or something, it’ll summarize it using the, pretty much the exact same language that’s used from the author, and if you start plugging in prompts saying like, use your own, create your own unique voice, your own language, then it just falls apart because it’s not trained to think independently and on its own. And a lot of times it, you know, it just, you can clearly see it just regurgitates stuff that’s already been written, right, from the source. So no, I think that’s a great, that’s a great kind of point to make there.
And then also generally your point too, like talking about people naturally are resistant to change, they’re resistant to new technology, but when you look back in history, I think history hasn’t looked too kindly on those that resist new technological change, right? So I think you kind of have to embrace it to a certain point. That said, you can still have some restrictions and exceptions, but I think that’s at least kind of my view on the situation.
Cameron Sutter (14:43)
Yeah, when typewriters came out, I’ve talked to lot of writers actually, and some that were around at that time, and they said, you know, when typewriters came out, everybody thought, you’re not a real writer, if you write with a typewriter, you know, same thing with word processor, you’re not a real writer, if you write with a word processor, it’s like that. No, you’re a real writer, if you write a story, you know, no matter what you use.
Beau Hamilton (15:05)
Yeah. Well, and even the printing press too. Everyone was like freaking out about that. And, and I mean, then it just became, it changed the world for, I would say the better, but, of course there was, you just have to adapt like with anything. I think, you know, we’re constantly evolving and adapting and, that kind of what’s what separates, I don’t know. It’s, it’s a, it’s a tough, it’s a tough situation to navigate, but I think, I think you guys have the right approach and I want to lean, you know, leaning more into that, the artificial intelligence features and roadmap, I guess. What are some upcoming AI features or just features coming down the Plottr pipeline that you have in the works?
Cameron Sutter (15:45)
Yeah, so good question. We actually had some features that we were about to release earlier this year for people to help them brainstorm ideas, like when they get stuck or when just if they want to explore different ideas. And we axed them, we decided not to ship them because it turns out they’re too much of a toy and not useful.
And so we don’t want to just put something out there that, oh yeah, people are paying us for, but it’s not actually that useful for writers. So when we decided not to release them, we kind of changed gears. And so we’re talking internally, what does that mean? And we have kind of two paths that we’re deciding, and one of those is like a more robust version of, give me some ideas and let’s dig into those and brainstorm more, and another one of those ideas is more of the almost like a I don’t even know how to say this like Tony Stark’s, what is Tony Stark’s? Jarvis, Jarvis. So like almost like a Jarvis-type assistant for writers.
And we think that’ll be really cool. Both of those would be really useful, but we’re trying to decide which path to go down first and which is the right one for us. But those are, we’ve got some other features we’re working on, which I’ll talk about, I’m sure a little bit later that we think people are more excited about actually, and then we’re going to kind of circle back to this AI and figure this out and do this.
I’m kind of glad we didn’t do it right away because there’s been a couple of tools that have come out recently that are just really awesome in the AI space. And if we’d come out first, then maybe people wouldn’t care about ours anymore. So I’m glad that we’re taking it slow and making sure we’re doing it the right way and making sure it’s useful for people.
Beau Hamilton (17:29)
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great approach. like, you know, there’s like the arms race of everyone has to jump in on AI. but having the recognition to realize like, no, this isn’t a good fit. We want, we were kind of taking away maybe some of the creative, processes from our writers. I think that that’s, that’s good. Being able to recognize that and kind of change your plan on the kind of on the fly. But in the moment, once you realize you, once you get more data, I think that’s, that’s the perfect approach because this is such a new technology and I don’t think anyone has figured out, you know?
Cameron Sutter (18:02)
It’s moving so fast and it’s so hard to keep up with and that’s one of the problems. It’s like we get something ready and then there’s better and better and better stuff, you know? Yeah, it’s so hard to keep up with. I know, so I’ll actually plug somebody right now. The people at Future Fiction Academy, they are awesome at teaching about AI for writers and I’ve been learning so much from them and they’ve helped me to somewhat stay up on things and their tools are really powerful.
So yeah, that’s kind of the thing. It’s like it’s moving so fast that we almost don’t want to jump on that because it’ll change in a few months. And I don’t think because writers are not very technical by and large, I don’t think they want to have to keep up with that, you know, like what is the best model to use? What is, you know, what are the right prompts to put in? How do I prompt engineer? I think they just want to write. So that’s kind of the approach we’re taking.
Beau Hamilton (18:54)
Yeah. Yeah. I think focusing around that, I think that’s great. And then there’s also such a kind of, it, this AI has is increasingly leaving people with a sour taste in their mouth, you know, just the mention of it. I think it’s already such a, such a big, topic point in everyday life now that people are just, there’s so many different opinions about it. It’s almost better to kind of navigate it or rebrand. I mean, you have like Apple, like they just had their keynote earlier this week. They didn’t even mention AI once. They have Apple Intelligence, which is essentially the same thing. I think, and then the flip side, have Microsoft where it’s like they have the recent event and they mentioned AI like hundreds of times. So I think there’s different philosophies. We’ll see who kind of, how it shapes out to be.
But yeah, no, I think that’s a good approach. I think that, I think focusing on some of the other features too, besides AI, is also great. I know that Plottr has a lot of integration capabilities with other writing apps, like Microsoft Word and Scrivener. So could you kind of talk about some of the integration apps?
Cameron Sutter (20:05)
Yeah, and so that’s a really good point because like I said earlier, there’s so many writing softwares out there and usually writers have this, in the tech world we call it a stack, so the tech stack. I’m sure you’re familiar with that, but that’s how I think of it for writers. What’s your writing tech stack like? So I use Plottr and Scrivener and this for marketing and that for Amazon ads and so forth. So there’s this whole kind of suite of tools that they have to use.
And if we tried to do everything for every author, that would just be crazy and it would be a terrible tool, I think. And so the opposite, like I mentioned before, is trying to be good at one thing or very few small things. That means that you have to play nice with the other tools that people are using to make it fit into their process. And so we thought about that a lot. And I’d say Plottr does a decent job of it, but we could definitely do better and it’s something we’re working on for the future of how to integrate better. But yeah, you can import and export to Word and Scrivener and when you’re able to export to Word document, you can pretty much do anything with it at that point. Like you can convert that to a PDF, you can convert it to an ebook, you can upload it to a lot of these other tools that’ll accept a Word document for actually writing the manuscript, or you could write the manuscript right in Word. There’s lots of different things you can do with that once you have that Word document. And so that’s probably the big one, you know?
But the idea there of being able to import and export from those two, is that no matter what order you do things in, because some writers like to write the story first and then go back and edit, and some people like to plan it out a lot and then write it, and of course they’ll still have to go back and edit it, right? But so we’re making that flexible for whatever your process is. You can go either way. Start with the Word document or come with the Word document. Get the Word document afterwards, basically.
Beau Hamilton (22:05)
Yeah, yeah, I know, everyone has a different writing style. Like I, when I’m reviewing a smartphone, for example, I’ll have like, there’ll be several key pillars to stick to, like build display, battery life, cameras and performance or something. And then otherwise I’ll just, so I’ll stick to those pillars. Otherwise I’ll just kind of stick to like a pantser style of writing with no outline and just kind of just let my thoughts flow. And so kind of having the, the support for those different writing styles and then the user interface is huge, right?
So, you know, along the lines of the interface, which I think is probably the most important element, if you ask me, what would you say, what were some recent updates that have been made to Plottr to improve the user experience and make the outlining process just more intuitive for users?
Cameron Sutter (22:56)
Yeah, so one big one recently was search and replace. I found that so many times I’m coming up with a story and I don’t know the character’s name yet. And so I’ll just fill it in with like XXX, YYY, ZZZ, you know, and then later trying to go back through everywhere and replace that when I finally figure out the character’s name, you know. So that’s really made that more flexible and it just helps you, you know, find what you’re looking for in the story when you have dozens of characters and three books in your series, it’s going to be harder to find those details. So that search and replace has been one thing.
Another thing that’s really helped us is, well, we’re working on this kind of newer version of the timeline where you’re able to zoom in and out better and really be able to visualize your story in different ways and be able to see as much as you want or as little as you want. And so that’s really going to help a lot of users to kind of visualize it in a different way.
Beau Hamilton (23:54)
Do you, when you, when you roll out a new change, is it, do you have like quarterly updates or is it like a monthly update cycle? Or does it kind of just depend on when the feature is, is fully, you know, all the bugs are worked out?
Cameron Sutter (24:08)
We’ve experimented with different things. We’re very much, since we’re small team, we’re able to experiment a lot and figure out what is the best thing for our team and for our users. And because of that, we experiment with a lot of things. And we did have, I think it was two years ago, we had kind of a rigid schedule of every six weeks, we’re gonna release something new. And it was a smaller thing, but it was on a schedule. And then other years we’ve tried like, let’s just release when something is ready. And we’re kind of somewhere in the middle right now where we have this really cool process, I think, as a team where somebody will come up with an idea. We start building like a very early version of it, something that we can, so that everybody can see it. Because just an idea that I say or that I see in my head, but it doesn’t exist in real life, it’s hard to reason about it. It’s hard to know if it’s actually going to be useful to users. So we’ll try and get a very early version that we can play with, that we can see, that we can experience, you know? And then we’ll gather around as a team and we’ll try it out. We’ll use it. We’ll see where it’s good and where it, so it’s a very, it comes with a very collaborative, very experimental process. Okay, for next week, let’s try it like this and this, and then we’ll come back and we’ll try it. And you know what? That wasn’t a great idea. Let’s go back to the first thing.
And so now it’s just like, It really depends on the feature. Some are easy and we know what we want and we can just get them out really quick. But a lot of things, especially with user experience, and especially with people that aren’t very technical, you have to be very careful. Even the wording matters, the where buttons are, and all those kind of things. you really got to think about your users and know your users to be able to make something that’s 100% good for them. Because you could put out stuff that’s pretty good, but it’s not fully there. But we really try and make it a really good experience. And we failed. We’ve definitely failed at that. But that’s why everything’s kind of an experiment with software.
Beau Hamilton (26:12)
Yeah. And it’s a constant work in progress and also like having a hard maybe deadline of like releasing, you know, having a new release features every six weeks or something like, yeah, that could be great for the user, but it could also kind of box you guys in and kind of set you set yourself up for failure, you know? So I think having an approach of, you know, when the feature is ready, it’s, it’ll be out, it’ll be tested. It’ll be as, as kind of picked apart as, as it can be, and that’s the most important part.
Cameron Sutter (26:42)
But we also can’t like spend two years on one feature, you know, because that just that would kill us, you know, both emotionally and probably to our audience, you know, like, yes, this thing is coming this two years later, you know, so so we’ve got to be reasonable about biting off a good chunk that’s actually valuable, but not spinning our wheels for two years until we get every little pixel right, you know, so it’s a balance.
Beau Hamilton (27:05)
Yeah, no, I can totally see that. Now, can you, I think you mentioned, you talked about this a little bit, can you talk some more about the various templates that Plottr provides to help writers structure their stories?
Cameron Sutter (27:17)
Yeah, the templates are really awesome because I was surprised how powerful they are. When I started doing templates, I didn’t realize just how useful they would be. And I thought it was just kind of like, yeah, I’ve got this idea, we’ll put in some templates, but it turns out they’re extremely useful for people. And the other reason they’re great is because I didn’t make them in the sense that it’s not my writing wisdom that is in these templates because, you know, I’m still learning the process. I’m still trying to make a best-selling book and I’m still trying learn to be a good writer. So this comes from people that have written hundreds of books and that have been very successful. And so it’s all their knowledge encapsulated into a, this is how you actually do it. Instead of just like the theory of their book or whatever, this is like, this is nitty-gritty. This is how you’re going to write it.
And they’re really powerful for different groups of people because if you’re an experienced writer the templates you kind of already know like so we have, so like the hero’s journey, we have a mystery one, so the 12 step mystery formula, we have some horror ones, we have Romancing the Beat, which is really popular one. There’s screenplay ones, there’s story engines, story circle, story genius, there’s a bunch that have story in them. And so we have like, and then there’s ones for characters, they’re like, personality tests like Enneagram, the disc personalities, Myers-Briggs. We’ve got a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet. We’ve got an online dating profile character sheet type template, and so it’s just, it’s really powerful.
And what I was going to say is if you’re familiar with one of those systems for writing a story or one of those structures, then it just speeds up your process so much. But if you’re learning, it gives you a guiding hand, like holds your hand and helps you and teaches you how to write your story and how to make it deeper and more meaningful. And so it’s just, I was amazed at how powerful they are, but they really are. They help so much.
Beau Hamilton (29:27)
That’s great. Yeah, that’s such a powerful tool and it really goes along with what you were saying about how your software is so adaptable for different, you know, story-type-telling formats, genres and writing styles. I think that’s great. I want to play around with those different templates after this. I’m going have to download the Plottr and play around with it some more.
Cameron Sutter (29:47)
Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of templates in there. Don’t let that scare you. Just kind of choose one and go, and then you’ll learn them little by little. We’re trying to make a better way to surface the ones that are going to be valuable for people that, you know, the one that you’re looking for, kind of. So we’re working on that.
Beau Hamilton (30:05)
Yeah, maybe there’ll be, maybe I can suggest one for like a YouTube script writing tech product review or something.
Cameron Sutter (30:10)
Oh. Yeah, cool, yeah.
Beau Hamilton (30:14)
Now, now what kind of support do you offer to help users maximize the use of the platform?
Cameron Sutter (30:21)
That, yeah, that’s a great question because a lot of software, either you’ll email in and you’ll hear back in a week or you’ll never hear back or it’s just a canned answer. But that’s one thing that I learned from other companies that I worked from that customer support is really, really important if you really want to make fans. And that’s one of the things we want. We don’t want just people paying us money and they never write that book. We want fans because it’s actually changed their life and changed their career and support is really I think where you make those fans.
And so we’ve got this this awesome husband and wife team who live in Oregon and I love them and they’re so good to people. I consider myself a very friendly person but they are like 10 times that I think they’re they’re so nice and so friendly to people they take care of everybody and they, we try to respond I think it’s within a day depending on you know if we get slammed or something with a bunch of messages. But I think within a day they’ll respond, sometimes even faster, and so that’s one aspect of it.
The other aspect is like training or like how do I use this thing? And so we’ve got a YouTube channel that has both quick two minute like how do I do this one thing in Plottr? And also deep dives of here’s an hour long, this one author has this kind of unique way of using Plottr, so let’s dive into that and and see how they use Plottr, because maybe that’s the way that works for you. It’s a very flexible tool. And so, you know, there’s all sorts of that breadth of really quick, but also a deeper dive if you want to, so you can learn how to use all the aspects of Plottr.
Beau Hamilton (32:02)
Well, shout out to Oregon as my home state, so…
Cameron Sutter (32:04)
Yeah, they’re actually in Portland.
Beau Hamilton (32:06)
Oh they are? Oh nice.
Cameron Sutter (32:07)
They’re in Salem. So it’s like really close, I think. Yeah.
Beau Hamilton (32:10)
Yeah. 40, 40, 40 minutes away or so.
Cameron Sutter (32:12)
Okay. Yeah.
Beau Hamilton (32:13)
But yeah, that’s pretty close. Okay. That’s awesome. Yeah. well, and so true that customer service is, can really make or break a company, you know, it’s like when I evaluate, I’ve told this example before in the past, but like when I was looking at like solar companies, a lot of the, like my decision came down to customer service. because when you have these, this thing like on your roof for, you know, 20 years or something, you want to make sure like if anything goes wrong and you can call somebody, you’re going to get a person, you’re going to get your help, get your, get your issue solved. So having that reassurance and then just, you know, I can say just talking to you, seems like you’re, you’re genuinely care about making a better service and being receptive to users. And, I mean, that’s, that’s what it’s all about really, so.
Cameron Sutter (33:00)
Yeah, so many of our feature ideas and things that are good about Plottr have come from users. So many things. We just, we always listen to user feedback. We can’t do everything that every user wants. That’s definitely a balancing act. But we really do seek feedback and make it better based on what people tell us.
Beau Hamilton (00:05)
Yeah yeah, it’s great for R&D and brainstorming new features and UI improvements. So I totally see that. We’re coming down to our last couple of questions. We talked about Plottr’s AI future and the various UI improvements. Are there any upcoming features or developments in Plottr that you’re just really excited to talk about and want to share with us?
Cameron Sutter (33:42)
Yeah, so the biggest one, I’ll state that one first, because I’m most excited about that, is we’re building a family tree feature into Plottr. And I think that’s huge, because no other software for writers that I know of does this in a way that writers tell me is good. There’s other ones that do or can make it possible or are able to do it, but, we’re trying to make like a very simple, very user friendly, good looking family tree feature.
And man, we get that request so much. I think writers are really going to love being able to put out their, the family tree of their characters. Well, not so there’s two aspects kind of to that one for themselves, you know, to, keep things organized, but also to be able to show their readers like, Hey, here’s the family tree, like on their website or something, being able to put that there. I think that would be really cool.
Beau Hamilton (34:37)
Yeah, that’s really neat. That’s cool. Okay, so you got the family tree. Anything else?
Cameron Sutter (34:43)
Yeah, so there’s one that we’re working on that I’m still figuring out how to explain it. It’s like there’s kind of a missing step in between visually seeing your story and writing your story. It’s a feature that’ll help you with that middle step of now that you have the different threads of your story planned out, how exactly do they fit in the scene? You know? Like taking one scene at a time and like where are the threads going to go and where do they, where do they actually weave into the scene?
So we’re working on that. And then the timeline that I told you about being able to zoom in and zoom out better, where it’s like a Google Maps where you can pan around your story, that’s gonna be cool.
And the other one, I guess, that we’re working on is offline mode. making it, so if you go off into a cabin somewhere and somewhere off the grid or you’re flying to a writing conference, which happens a lot and you’re on the plane, you don’t want to pay for Wi-Fi, then you’re able to use it offline very easily. That’s something that a lot of writers do and it’s already possible. So we have two ways of using Plottr, either the fully offline version or the fully online version. And so we’re trying to make it so even if you’re on the online version, you can use it offline whenever you want.
Beau Hamilton (35:53)
Okay. Wow. Okay. That’s, so you got quite a few exciting features in the pipeline. That’s exciting. Awesome.
My last question for you is where can writers users learn more about Plottr and its features, and then just where can people get in touch with you and your team?
Cameron Sutter (36:09)
Yeah, so plottr.com. And Plottr is spelled a little funky. It’s P-L-O-T-T-R, no E in there, dot com. And then also youtube.com/Plottr. We have a ton of videos on there. We also have a Facebook group, like a community where people ask questions and like, hey, how do you do this in Plottr? Or what do you think the best way to do this is? And it’s a fairly active community. And I don’t know if it’s just facebook.com/groups/Plottr or something like that. I don’t have the link to that one.
But those are probably the three biggest places that you can find us and learn about us. And oh, the support you wanted to get in touch with our team is just support@plottr.com. Just feel free to email us and we’ll reach out or we’ll answer.
Beau Hamilton (36:54)
Well, and I got a shout out. You got a substack and you’re an author yourself. So if you guys are curious about Cameron’s writings, just Google him. I’m sure you’ll find it.
Cameron Sutter (37:03)
Yeah, it’s just cameronsutter.com will take you right to my substack. Yeah, I write about AI and writing, you know, more with the human feeling, or at least that’s what I’m going for so.
Beau Hamilton (37:13)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, we need more of that, I think. So I think you’re doing a great job and just thank you so much for all the insights you shared with us and taking the time out of your day to sit with us and joining us on the SourceForge Podcast. So I appreciate it, Cameron.
Cameron Sutter (37:27)
Yeah, thanks for having me. So glad to be here.
Beau Hamilton (37:29)
Well, thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I’ll talk to you in the next one.