Paper Website lets you start a website from a paper notebook. It's the easiest no-tech way to start a website. 📖 Start a tiny website from your notebook ✍️ Write your website/blog using pen & paper 🤳 Take a photo of your page to turn it into a live website
Hey Product Hunt 👋!
I'm a 26 year old indie hacker from England, and for the past 18 months I've been building and launching tiny internet projects and documenting the whole process on my blog, Tiny Projects.Paper Website is the seventh project I've built. Thank you for taking the time to check it out!
Why I built Paper Website
I wanted to create a small daily blog. I love writing using pen & paper, so the idea of running a website from my notebook seemed really fun, and a seamless way to start writing more consistently without all the internet distractions, and hassle of setting everything up.
It was! I've now written 40+ daily blog posts using Paper Website, and many others are doing the same. Writing a daily blog post in the morning with my notebook and a coffee is my favourite part of my day - its super chill!
But, more importantly..
Paper Website lets anyone build a website - no matter their age or technical ability. If you can write, you can build a website and publish your ideas to the world.
Here's a showcase of what people have made so far.
Who's it for?
🙋♀️ Someone looking to start a small daily blog
✍️ Writers wanting to build a daily writing habit
🧠 Mindful tech users, who want to cut down on screen-time
👵 No-coders/No-tech: my age 80 gran could use Paper Website
Features
🤖 Powered by OCR and GPT-3
💻 Full website editor to tweak and style your site
📧 Send newsletters & build an audience
📈 Google Analytics integration
🌐 Custom domains for your notebook
🌱 1% of all revenue goes to carbon removal
Hardware
I've created 100 limited edition notebooks. They're high-quality and perfect for building websites.*
*Paper Website is not liable for any paper cuts caused during the creation of your website.Thank you so much for checking out my launch - if you have any questions, I'd love to answer them! 📖
@tinyprojects Hey, Paper Website looks like a useful product. I wanted to make sure if I got this right: so the AI reads the handwritten text and turns it into a typed text? And I guess it only recognizes English handwriting, correct?
@margarita_s88 Hey! Thanks for checking it out :) Your handwritten text is converted into typed text and added as a webpage on your own live tiny website. You can style, edit, share your website etc from there. Currently it's English only - but I'd like to add more languages in the future.
@tinyprojects cool! Please consider adding Russian :)
Another question: have you encountered problems with AI not being able to recognize the text correctly? Not everyone has a good and clear handwritten style...
@margarita_s88 There will of course be a instances when handwriting is bad - but on the whole the GPT-3 powered algorithm is very good. It's trained on bad OCR, so it goes in and corrects sentences if they're hard to recognise so they are coherent. I've thrown hundreds of examples at it, from scruffy doctors handwriting, to a 4-year old's handwriting learning their ABCs (mainly from /r/handwriting) and it's great.
@tinyprojects thanks for your reply, Ben - that sounds great! Haha scuffy doctors handwriting was the thing I immediately thought about. It's very cool that your product can handle that 😉
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I like the idea and the video - nice work! Its not something for I would use for these reasons:
- When I find the internet is distracting I'll turn off my wifi and also all other apps. It's very easy for me to get distracted :)
- I enjoy writing, but I don't want to do it twice - uploading it and editing it is an extra step I don't want to take.
- The contents of my journal are for me, I wouldn't want to post it all over the internet.
I've signed up before for a few apps as services and very quickly ended up spending a lot each month before I even noticed. Writing in my journal is far cheaper and I have a physical copy.
Also what would happen to my posts when I stop paying for this service?
@timmo5 Hey Tim! Thanks so much for the feedback. I totally hear you on turning off the wifi every once in a while to disconnect. A Paper Website can be totally private to you also, not everything needs to be public I agree.
The main reason I created Paper Website is to let people build a website with no tech skills. It's a bonus that it can be used to disconnect & mindfully write some blog posts if you wanted (it is really nice!).
Your posts are never deleted if you stop paying, you can view them any time privately, your website just would be closed to the public :)
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nice! how does adding pictures work, can it be done straight from the phone or only after via the desktop web editor?
@mihai_badic Thanks Mihai! You can add a picture from the editor (which can be used on desktop or mobile!)
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I'm really fascinated by this idea. How well does the model do discerning shapes from letters? How careful does the user need to be when writing notes so the notes only include words? I'm thinking of all the times I'll draw shapes around my words so I can (in my own way) organize themes and ideas.
@_medwards133 Thanks for checking it out Maria! Paper Website is ideally designed for blog-like websites, so written from the left-side of your page to the right (like a book). It will ignore shapes and only pick up words.
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Cool! I have always wanted something like this, it is a pity that I haven't created it before. However, keep going it will definitely blow up. By the way, what website builder have you used to build your site? I love it. I always use this one https://www.boxmode.com/seo-webs... when I am building a site as it is easy to use and also offers many features that help your site to show great results from the beginning.
@joe_johnston1 Thank you Joe! I'm the same - something about the slow, focused and methodical process of writing by hand that helps things stick in your mind.
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Hey @tinyprojects ! Super awesome job again with this new project.
I got to know about you around Feb'21 and since then I'm hooked with your creativity.
Now I wait for your next projects like someone waits for the next season of a super awesome Netflix series.
I usually know people from a long time but don't interact with them so I'm just letting you know that I'm huge fan of your work and I exist (lol).
@shshankm597 Thank you Shashank ❤ That made me laugh so much - you're awesome! I'm going to be writing up a full blog post about this project after this launch :)
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@tinyprojects can't wait to read it, thank you for doing this ❤
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