[08:24 pm: Marketating = marketing + meditating.]

A major principle behind this word count tracker, let's call it The Pathwooded Word Count Tracker, is that writing occurs at all times of the day. You never really stop writing.

Writing isn't just the physical act of scribbling things on a piece of paper. It's not just typing on a keyboard or dictating into a speech recognition app. As David Perell suggests, writing happens when you talk to people throughout your day, when you engage in heated Twitter discussions, when you debate ideas on Reddit and in YouTube comments, and even as you sleep and let your ideas incubate.

Same thing for coding. Coding isn't just writing while loops, crafting classes and methods, or dragging widgets around in a no-code tool. Coding starts when you flesh out requirements with a user, scribble down ideas for a new feature, or ask your coworker for their opinion about how to implement new functionality during a water cooler chat. Not all meetings are useless when you're building software with a team.

In the same vein, we want to capture all the opportune moments of writing throughout the day. So we probably shouldn't have a fancy rich text editor in the first version. Typing production-ready text into The Pathwooded Word Count Tracker isn't the main use case, or at least it's only one of the many use cases.

As you go about your day, you’ll have many ideas pop into your head. At the grocery, you could suddenly have an idea about how to describe the problem your SaaS product solves. You could watch a movie with friends and stumble upon a great wording of your new features. You’ll be at a restaurant with your date and they’ll say something that lights a bulb in your mind.

You want to capture these thoughts quickly before they disappear. The Pathwooded Word Count Tracker will let you save them and the word count contributes towards your word count goal for the day. Because it's all legit. Even the rough words you use to describe the concept, a hint that forms the seed of a more complex idea, could be a bullet point in your outline. Save it!

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