We had the chance to interview Mr. Cameron Sutter, the founder, and CTO of Plottr, as part of our exploration of the newest trends in business. We learned that one of the main pillars of a company’s success is its ability to comprehend the consumer and meet their specific needs.
Continue reading to learn how Plottr, the brainchild of a software engineer, helped him become an entrepreneur. Learn more about the software, its features, and its effects in the current situation. The future of Plottr was another topic we covered.
Also, Mr. Cameron Sutter has some advice for upcoming entrepreneurs. Read on to get some great insights.
In Conversation with Mr. Cameron Sutter, Founder of Plottr
Listen to Mr. Sutter’s motivating story in his own words!
A warm welcome from SoftwareSuggest, Mr. Cameron Sutter. What is your success mantra? Something you have followed personally that has helped you in your journey.
“Keep on, keeping on.” No matter what’s going on in my life, if I’m patient and diligent and focus on doing just a little bit of work at a time, I know I’ll keep pushing forward and eventually reach my goal.
How has Plottr equipped itself to deal with the Covid-19 situation better?
We were fortunate, as we have been fully remote since before Covid-19 started, so there was not much of an adjustment in terms of our working environment. Along with that, we’ve made sure our team knows that their well-being comes first, and we encourage them to make health-conscious decisions.
Our team has largely stayed healthy since the pandemic started, which has allowed us to continue developing Plottr and serving our audience without much disruption.
Our readers are keen to know what prompted you to create Plottr. Tell us about your journey so far.
I started building Plottr in 2014 to help me write my first Young Adult novel, as I was having a lot of trouble creating an outline and organizing my story ideas. I’m a software engineer, so I created the perfect tool for my process. So, between my six kids, wife, and full-time engineering job, I started working on Plottr on the side.
After a couple of years, I released a free beta version – and the positive feedback from that really gave me the hope and encouragement to keep going. A couple of years after that, I started selling the software, and then in late 2019 I found an awesome business partner (Ryan Zee) and quit my job to work on Plottr full-time… just before the pandemic started.
We relaunched Plottr in May 2020, starting with about 1,000 existing customers. We just passed 20,000 customers in January of this year, about two and a half years later. It’s been quite the adventure!
Which features are most valuable in Plottr?
Just about everyone’s favorite feature in Plottr is the Timeline, a story-optimized grid where you visually outline and organize your story ideas using scene cards. It’s like organizing index cards on a fancy digital corkboard – you can easily visualize different ways of constructing (or revising) your books. You can drag and drop cards across plotlines and chapters, organize them by color, filter by story elements, and even export your work to Microsoft Word and Scrivener. There’s so much you can do with the Timeline to craft your stories.
Plottr also has more than 30 proven plot templates, like Hero’s Journey and Romancing the Beat, to help you outline or revise your books. Our templates cover just about every genre, from romance to suspense, horror, fantasy, and beyond, so there’s something for everyone. They include detailed descriptions and suggestions, so they’re a really powerful tool for writers interested in learning the craft of outlining books and those who need guidance restructuring an existing work.
Our series bible functionality is also really powerful. You can actually use Plottr to organize all of the books in your series in one file. That means not just the plot of those stories but also the character and location details. For example, you can track custom character data, organize characters by role on a per-book basis, and even use built-in templates to help you think through their psychology.
We have a long list of features we’re working on, many of which users suggest to us on our public roadmap. Some of these include advanced worldbuilding functionality, new templates, or new ways of visualizing story details.
While Plottr is primarily known for serving fiction writers, we also make enhancements to help writers better organize works in other mediums, like narrative nonfiction and academic writing or even blog writing.
The aim of Plottr is to help writers plan and organize their writing to the greatest extent possible, and we will continue to keep our focus there.
Where do you see Plottr in the next 5 years?
We have so many ideas for features that will help storytellers organize and visualize their books in new ways, and we’re really focused on making Plottr the best tool it can be.
But we also have plans to serve the writing community in other ways. Last year, for example, we ran a few intensive workshops for writers exploring craft subjects like Three Act Structure, and we plan to expand those offerings this year and into the future.
We are also developing a related track of events to help writers advance their careers in some very practical ways. We will always strive to be a vital partner in the success of the writers who use Plottr – and we will continue to listen and adapt as needed.
Are there any ideological principles your organization follows to maintain the brand value?
We believe strongly in creating a culture of over-delivering and exceeding expectations – and we do that primarily by focusing really intently on the customer experience and listening to feedback. That includes customer support, in-app feedback, NPS surveys, public reviews, annual feedback surveys, Facebook Group comments, YouTube comments, and so on.
By listening intently and asking questions, we have acquired a very good sense of what our customers and prospective customers want from us. We spend a lot of time thinking through that data to develop Plottr and get the product details right.
As a result, when we have a new release, we often have customers share that they were just thinking about wanting this exact feature or that the feature solved a problem they were just having. That’s always really cool to hear.
What is your advice to young entrepreneurs?
It’s not for everyone. There will be serious ups and downs, and the adventure may not be what you expect. It’s definitely not what I expected!
But if you have a good idea and surround yourself with talented people you can trust, stay focused on what you can control, and don’t try to do it all by yourself, then you never know what you can create.
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