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Introducing Recontent.app

· 3 min read
Grégoire Mielle

After a few months tinkering with this idea, I'm thrilled to introduce Recontent.app, a solution to help product teams ship localized experiences to their users.

I created Recontent.app for the following reasons:

  • To create a single source of truth for product copy, actionable by anyone

In 2022, product copy should not be hardcoded or stored in static JSON/YAML files only accessible by developers. However, that's the reality for many softwares-as-a-service (SaaS) out there.

Text makes up an essential part of your product. Anyone, from developers to product managers & designers, should be able to fix inconsistencies or misleading translations for your users in a matter of minutes, not days.

  • To provide a pay-as-you-go pricing to a Software category where per-seat pricing is king

Per-seat pricing is the defacto pricing model for SaaS. However, it does not account for how much value you get out of the solution, inactive users or different roles within your organization.

In some cases, it even leads to users sharing the same account to reduce costs, reducing the value of collaborative features.

With a pay-as-you-go approach, you pay for the value you really get. From a small team which only stores hundreds of phrases to an enterprise which needs advanced features like revisions & Google Cloud Storage integration.

The birth of Recontent.app

While working in digital agencies and startups, I've seen many ways to manage content: from hardcoded text, static translation files to Translation management softwares (TMS).

Depending on the size of the organization, product copy can be a shared responsibility between Product managers, designers and developers, or the one of dedicated people (eg. UX writers).

From Figma files, product documents to live fixes, it's hard to ensure consistent copy for end users and to facilitate the localization process.

On one side, developers want an easy & predictable way to pull up-to-date content (hence the static files). On the other side, product managers & designers want to experiment with copy, fix inconsistencies across screens/flows (hence the TMS).

In the end, product teams want a solution that integrates with their existing tools & processes.

Recontent.app aims at providing the right features at every step of the design/development cycle:

  • Simplifying design handoff for designers by exporting source copy from Figma into Recontent
  • Letting UX writers, designers & product managers iterate on translations with revisions
  • Delivering good developer experience with elegant CLI & restful API to integrate to any codebase
  • Ensuring live access to translations to end-users through CDN or other destinations

I've got many ideas for the upcoming months & look forward to hearing first users feedbacks to help you simplify how you manage copy in your product!

– Grégoire