6 ms·

Tldraw's $2.7M Seed – A new collaborative infinite canvas for the web

154 points by samwillis 4y ago

samwillis 4y ago
What Steve is building is incredible, but almost more so how he is sharing the journey. He is a very good follow on Twitter, lots of lovely content showing how he is solving all sorts of interesting problems. https://twitter.com/steveruizok https://twitter.com/steveruizok You can try the new beta here: https://beta.tldraw.com https://beta.tldraw.com
- blitz_skull 4y ago
  Can you explain how this is incredible with relation to other products on the market? This seems very similar to various other drawing apps on the market. What's the unique value proposition here?
  - rozenmd 4y ago
    From what I've seen, the real-time performance is insane. Dozens of folks on one board with instant updates.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Lagged for me on Firefox the more I zoomed out and thus the more elements were on screen.
  - alixanderwang 4y ago
    the uniqueness is that it's the highest quality drawing app on the internet. even if on paper other products say they do the same thing, there's a huge difference in quality.
  - astroalex 4y ago
    It’s easy to discount a drawing app because it’s been done so many times before. But simply put, this one is just better than the rest. The UI interaction has been thoughtfully refined and never gets in your way. Over time, it’s become the tool I reach for regularly to create sketches. In retrospect, it’s surprising it hasn’t been done this well before!
  - steveruizok 4y ago
    Hey! Steve here, founder etc. The biggest value prop is having a canvas that’s “web native”, and so can render anything that a regular website can. Try pasting a codepen link, scratch project, google maps url, gif or video. Almost all of the developers who built on tldraw’s first release ended up building apps that leveraged this; for example, a spatial collection of graphs keeping track of aws cloud processes. https://twitter.com/foodybrian/status/1572784516586172418?s=46&t=t1PhRDZoGMIBrU-BhcqlVg https://twitter.com/foodybrian/status/1572784516586172418?s=... There are trade offs for using the DOM vs. a custom <canvas> renderer, however I think they’re worth it for the types of applications that can be built this way. We’ve also put a ton of thought (and opinions) into the interactions in tldraw. Some of this can sound pretty ridiculous, like rotating your cursor when your rotate a selection, while also counter-rotating the cursor’s shadow to preserve light direction. But especially with this sort of app, you really notice those details when they’re not there. As a product for developers, my hope is that the quality and attention to detail become part of the value proposition! Users certainly notice it.
    - blitz_skull 4y ago
      Hey, very cool to have you chime in here Steve. After looking again, it seems I missed some of the cooler parts of what you've built here. (That tweet is a pretty cool demo video of some of the things you could make). Also—this answer was exactly what I was hoping to be shown. It sounded like tldraw was capable of a lot more than drawing boxes with arrows that moved, but I hadn't figured out exactly what that was--now it all makes sense.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
- neonate 4y ago
  I went there and the first thing I saw was asking for HN upvotes "we're on hacker news, no direct links but upvotes appreciated" https://twitter.com/steveruizok/status/1598381851055300608 https://twitter.com/steveruizok/status/1598381851055300608
  - fakedang 4y ago
    Honestly why is there a stigma against asking for upvotes? He isn't being pushy about it either.
traverseda 4y ago
How would this be monetized by the developer?
- Jerrrry 4y ago
  ads could be strewn across the whiteboard, having to be overwritten or erased, being consumed by the user in the process.
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    Might want to pivot and mint NFTs from the all the drawing. Oh wait, but the VCs are on to AI, which means...
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Yeah, brands would just _love_ that.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Maybe a subscription for enterprises using it?
- mritchie712 4y ago
  You'd charge people for a version they can embed as a component in their own app.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Who is the actual market for that kind of integration?
- steveruizok 4y ago
  Some opportunities that have come up so far: licensing the engine to commercial products, selling the related services like multiplayer, hosting the experience as an embed, integrations with other services (eg learning management systems), building out the dot com experience into its own a sass product for users / teams, building our own products for other verticals such as pdf annotation or ml image annotation, or door to door sales of nice looking arrows.
braden-lk 4y ago
We use tldraw at LegendKeeper. Our users absolutely LOVE IT. Almost too much; our users are D&D players so they like to make giant family trees and faction relation diagrams. Tldraw handles it perfectly, though.
- johnzim 4y ago
  LegendKeeper looks like a great product too!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SeanAnderson 4y ago
Why did you build a canvas manipulation tool using React as the framework? Are you concerned about reconciliation performance?
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  I think it's like Figma or more concretely react-three-fiber, which bypasses the React renderer for its own high performance one. React is used simply for the DX and for everything else in the UI I imagine, as I like writing in components rather than imperative DOM updates.
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    Looks like that's not correct. If you open your browser console with the React developer tools extension installed, you can see that not only is the canvas built with the DOM, but it's rendered with React, too.
    - steveruizok 4y ago
      That’s right, it’s React all the way down. It could render using anything, really; the React rendering part is quite loosely coupled from the main “what needs to be rendered” application layer.
      - jakelazaroff 4y ago
        That's actually super interesting. I would love to read a deeper dive on how you keep it so smooth, if that's something you'd be willing to share.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Clever name! (tl;dr aw) I wonder how they make money now and if there is a tension there with the free software.
Jerrrry 4y ago
this is dope af.
MitPitt 4y ago
Anyone who tried it, how does it compare to Excalidraw?
- jgalentine007 4y ago
  They seem to be clones of each other. Not sure which came first.
  - simonmales 4y ago
    I heard of Excalidraw first. And a quick browse of GitHub leads to me believe that Excalidraw was first. I've only used Excalidraw, and it's my go-to. But I follow Steve on Twitter as it's fun to see what's he is excited about.
    - steveruizok 4y ago
      I actually contributed to Excalidraw, it’s a great project! They also use my ink (MIT licensed perfect-freehand library) for their pen tool. While tldraw mostly grew out of another project of mine (globs.design), I took a lot of inspiration from Excalidraw’s feature set. We’ve since caught up with eachother on a bunch of features (sticky notes, labels) and hopefully will continue to trade tips and features as separate open source projects.
- simplify 4y ago
  Excalidraw is one of my favorite tools, and for diagramming it's much better. I'm also a happy subscriber to their private collaborative workspaces features. With that said, I look forward to tldraw's library getting open sourced, and discovering what's possible to build with it.
iamnbutler 4y ago
Awesome to see Steve's hard work taking off. TLDraw feels so good to use and I love watching him obsess over the little details on twitter.
bilalq 4y ago
I have an old wacom tabler from 2013 and love that the eraser works here. Google's Jamboard has been so frustrating because of that missing feature.
chadlavi 4y ago
wow good for them. love to use this in a pinch
superjan 4y ago
Makes me think of https://drawball.io https://drawball.io (Disclaimer: A colleague’s hobby project)
rosebay 4y ago
This is clearly self promotion…and the multiple alt accounts / friend accounts to try to create a particular impression of the software…
LinkLink 4y ago
The way this is worded made it sound like a revolutionary MMORPG geo-based canvas which was a rip of the whole world or something. Its just a half decent drawing tool written in webjs library of of the week#52 why would anyone pay 2.7mil to seed this????? I have a scratch game to sell them????
LinkLink 4y ago
Is everyone just selling their college senior projects to vc's for millions now

154 points by samwillis 4y ago

What Steve is building is incredible, but almost more so how he is sharing the journey. He is a very good follow on Twitter, lots of lovely content showing how he is solving all sorts of interesting problems. https://twitter.com/steveruizok https://twitter.com/steveruizok You can try the new beta here: https://beta.tldraw.com https://beta.tldraw.com

blitz_skull 4y ago
Can you explain how this is incredible with relation to other products on the market? This seems very similar to various other drawing apps on the market. What's the unique value proposition here?
- rozenmd 4y ago
  From what I've seen, the real-time performance is insane. Dozens of folks on one board with instant updates.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Lagged for me on Firefox the more I zoomed out and thus the more elements were on screen.
- alixanderwang 4y ago
  the uniqueness is that it's the highest quality drawing app on the internet. even if on paper other products say they do the same thing, there's a huge difference in quality.
- astroalex 4y ago
  It’s easy to discount a drawing app because it’s been done so many times before. But simply put, this one is just better than the rest. The UI interaction has been thoughtfully refined and never gets in your way. Over time, it’s become the tool I reach for regularly to create sketches. In retrospect, it’s surprising it hasn’t been done this well before!
- steveruizok 4y ago
  Hey! Steve here, founder etc. The biggest value prop is having a canvas that’s “web native”, and so can render anything that a regular website can. Try pasting a codepen link, scratch project, google maps url, gif or video. Almost all of the developers who built on tldraw’s first release ended up building apps that leveraged this; for example, a spatial collection of graphs keeping track of aws cloud processes. https://twitter.com/foodybrian/status/1572784516586172418?s=46&t=t1PhRDZoGMIBrU-BhcqlVg https://twitter.com/foodybrian/status/1572784516586172418?s=... There are trade offs for using the DOM vs. a custom <canvas> renderer, however I think they’re worth it for the types of applications that can be built this way. We’ve also put a ton of thought (and opinions) into the interactions in tldraw. Some of this can sound pretty ridiculous, like rotating your cursor when your rotate a selection, while also counter-rotating the cursor’s shadow to preserve light direction. But especially with this sort of app, you really notice those details when they’re not there. As a product for developers, my hope is that the quality and attention to detail become part of the value proposition! Users certainly notice it.
  - blitz_skull 4y ago
    Hey, very cool to have you chime in here Steve. After looking again, it seems I missed some of the cooler parts of what you've built here. (That tweet is a pretty cool demo video of some of the things you could make). Also—this answer was exactly what I was hoping to be shown. It sounded like tldraw was capable of a lot more than drawing boxes with arrows that moved, but I hadn't figured out exactly what that was--now it all makes sense.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
neonate 4y ago
I went there and the first thing I saw was asking for HN upvotes "we're on hacker news, no direct links but upvotes appreciated" https://twitter.com/steveruizok/status/1598381851055300608 https://twitter.com/steveruizok/status/1598381851055300608
- fakedang 4y ago
  Honestly why is there a stigma against asking for upvotes? He isn't being pushy about it either.

traverseda 4y ago

How would this be monetized by the developer?

Jerrrry 4y ago
ads could be strewn across the whiteboard, having to be overwritten or erased, being consumed by the user in the process.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  Might want to pivot and mint NFTs from the all the drawing. Oh wait, but the VCs are on to AI, which means...
- TylerE 4y ago
  Yeah, brands would just _love_ that.
satvikpendem 4y ago
Maybe a subscription for enterprises using it?
mritchie712 4y ago
You'd charge people for a version they can embed as a component in their own app.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Who is the actual market for that kind of integration?
steveruizok 4y ago
Some opportunities that have come up so far: licensing the engine to commercial products, selling the related services like multiplayer, hosting the experience as an embed, integrations with other services (eg learning management systems), building out the dot com experience into its own a sass product for users / teams, building our own products for other verticals such as pdf annotation or ml image annotation, or door to door sales of nice looking arrows.

braden-lk 4y ago

We use tldraw at LegendKeeper. Our users absolutely LOVE IT. Almost too much; our users are D&D players so they like to make giant family trees and faction relation diagrams. Tldraw handles it perfectly, though.

johnzim 4y ago
LegendKeeper looks like a great product too!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

SeanAnderson 4y ago

Why did you build a canvas manipulation tool using React as the framework? Are you concerned about reconciliation performance?

satvikpendem 4y ago
I think it's like Figma or more concretely react-three-fiber, which bypasses the React renderer for its own high performance one. React is used simply for the DX and for everything else in the UI I imagine, as I like writing in components rather than imperative DOM updates.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  Looks like that's not correct. If you open your browser console with the React developer tools extension installed, you can see that not only is the canvas built with the DOM, but it's rendered with React, too.
  - steveruizok 4y ago
    That’s right, it’s React all the way down. It could render using anything, really; the React rendering part is quite loosely coupled from the main “what needs to be rendered” application layer.
    - jakelazaroff 4y ago
      That's actually super interesting. I would love to read a deeper dive on how you keep it so smooth, if that's something you'd be willing to share.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Clever name! (tl;dr aw) I wonder how they make money now and if there is a tension there with the free software.

Jerrrry 4y ago

this is dope af.

MitPitt 4y ago

Anyone who tried it, how does it compare to Excalidraw?

jgalentine007 4y ago
They seem to be clones of each other. Not sure which came first.
- simonmales 4y ago
  I heard of Excalidraw first. And a quick browse of GitHub leads to me believe that Excalidraw was first. I've only used Excalidraw, and it's my go-to. But I follow Steve on Twitter as it's fun to see what's he is excited about.
  - steveruizok 4y ago
    I actually contributed to Excalidraw, it’s a great project! They also use my ink (MIT licensed perfect-freehand library) for their pen tool. While tldraw mostly grew out of another project of mine (globs.design), I took a lot of inspiration from Excalidraw’s feature set. We’ve since caught up with eachother on a bunch of features (sticky notes, labels) and hopefully will continue to trade tips and features as separate open source projects.
simplify 4y ago
Excalidraw is one of my favorite tools, and for diagramming it's much better. I'm also a happy subscriber to their private collaborative workspaces features. With that said, I look forward to tldraw's library getting open sourced, and discovering what's possible to build with it.

iamnbutler 4y ago

Awesome to see Steve's hard work taking off. TLDraw feels so good to use and I love watching him obsess over the little details on twitter.

bilalq 4y ago

I have an old wacom tabler from 2013 and love that the eraser works here. Google's Jamboard has been so frustrating because of that missing feature.

chadlavi 4y ago

wow good for them. love to use this in a pinch

superjan 4y ago

Makes me think of https://drawball.io https://drawball.io (Disclaimer: A colleague’s hobby project)

rosebay 4y ago

This is clearly self promotion…and the multiple alt accounts / friend accounts to try to create a particular impression of the software…

LinkLink 4y ago

The way this is worded made it sound like a revolutionary MMORPG geo-based canvas which was a rip of the whole world or something. Its just a half decent drawing tool written in webjs library of of the week#52 why would anyone pay 2.7mil to seed this????? I have a scratch game to sell them????

LinkLink 4y ago

Is everyone just selling their college senior projects to vc's for millions now