Launched this week
Manuscripts.app
For academics who have outgrown the spreadsheet tracker
57 followers
For academics who have outgrown the spreadsheet tracker
57 followers
Manuscripts is a Mac app for academics who've outgrown the spreadsheet. Draft, submit, revise, and repeat. Most tools pretend to be project managers or reference managers. Manuscripts does one thing: it tracks where your papers are in the submission journey—which journal, which round, which reviewers' comments triggered which revisions. One-time purchase. No subscription. No cloud. Your data lives on your Mac. Built for how academic work actually feels: slow, iterative, and often unglamorous.
Manuscripts.app
The "outgrown the spreadsheet tracker" insight is universal — academics, founders, and project-finance modelers all hit the same wall: a workbook starts as a tracker and gradually becomes a brittle source of truth that no one trusts. The fix is usually a tool that owns the workflow shape (state machine: drafted, submitted, revised, accepted) instead of a free-form grid. I see the same in finance — we ship valuation and project-finance templates on Eloquens (https://www.eloquens.com/channel/samir-asadov-cfa) precisely because the template encodes the state machine, not just the cells. Question: do you let users define their own status taxonomy or is the journey fixed (drafted → submitted → revised → final)? Different journals have different conditional-revision steps that don't map cleanly to a linear flow.
This is a very specific and very real writing workflow pain. The hard part with academic manuscripts is not only tracking “which draft is current,” it’s remembering why a revision happened and which reviewer/editor constraint it was meant to satisfy.
I like that you’re treating the submission journey as its own object instead of trying to force it into generic project management. Do you find academics mostly struggle with version/control chaos, response-to-reviewer tracking, or just the emotional load of keeping the whole process straight?
What happens after acceptance? Does the workflow just end or is there a post-acceptance phase? Congrats on the launch!