I make Ncored, a PDF editor built only for heavy CAD drawings. I launched it here in May and this sub gave it 420 upvotes, 99k views and a lot of blunt advice. Here is what happened since, numbers first. Numbers, 5 months in: - 1,366 downloads as of today - paying customers in Germany, Australia, Malaysia, Italy and, finally, Lithuania. Here is the part that surprised me: I built this expecting it to be needed only here in Lithuania. Every one of them found it on their own - now in the Microsoft Store as well as the website, in English and German One thing I got wrong: I spent the summer on cold email and directory listings. Over 200 emails to firms, zero sales from any of them. Every buyer I could trace came from a post where they watched me build the thing. Lesson taken: show the work, skip the pitch. The bigger lesson, and the reason I am posting: A tool built for everyone fits no one. Adobe Acrobat, Nitro and Foxit all open PDFs, and they are fine at it. But open an 80-sheet project set out of ArchiCAD in them and you can feel they were not made for it. A drawing PDF is thousands of vector lines, layers and viewports on one sheet. For software that expects text, that is the hardest job you can hand it, so it struggles exactly where a designer needs speed: zooming into a detail, flipping sheets, marking up. So I stopped trying to compete on feature count and built for one group: design offices. Heavy AutoCAD, Revit and ArchiCAD sets open fast and stay smooth on zoom and pan. The toolset is small on purpose. Each tool is added only when enough real users ask for it, and tested on real projects before the next one. Everything runs on your own machine, nothing is uploaded. Several of the buyers chose to buy it once rather than subscribe, which told me something about this crowd. What it still is not: no measurement or takeoff yet, no OCR, no forms, no live collaboration. If you need those, it will not replace your current tool. Measurement is the one I hear most, so it is next. The video is the app itself, on a real site plan, no mock-ups. A real question for the builders here, because I keep second-guessing it: is it right to add tools one at a time, each one properly tested before the next, or should I ship a big toolbar now and clean it up later? If you have been through this with your own product, I would rather learn from you than find out the hard way.   submitted by   /u/Rockstonerable [link]   [comments]