Copywriters from Latvia turned startupers: Textok is launched

This looks really well done and quite useful. Great job on your launch! Love how this can help with tone and style which are subtle, difficult and important in communications.

It reminds me somewhat of the insanely priced AxiosHQ tool from Axios which is something like $50,000 year. The Axios tool is less about tone and more about copiloting writers to the Smart Brevity format of writing (https://www.axios.com/smart-brevity) Axios made famous. Axios is very non-transparent about their pricing. Bravo to Textok for being open and transparent.

Textok, the tool that offers companies automation of their tone of voice and style guides, is signing up its first paying subscribers. The online SaaS tool aims to address the issue many marketing professionals struggle with: ensuring consistency in a brand’s communication.

“Style and tone of the text are notoriously hard to define. What is it exactly that makes the text sound confident? Or emphatic? As copywriters who have been in the business of content creation for over 10 years, we know that it is a myriad of small details that define the tone. We incorporated all this know-how into Textok and complemented it with AI solutions,” explains Olga Procevska, co-founder of Textok.

The web-based app is created for a market situation where copywriters often change, some texts are written by humans, and others by large language models, but companies still need consistency in communication to maintain a strong brand identity, explains Katya Firyan, another co-founder of Textok. “With Textok, you can pass your tone of voice to all of your content creators, and they have to comply, unlike with brand books that are written on paper and are routinely ignored. We know this because we have developed many tone of voice and style guidelines for corporate brand books ourselves,” she says.

Textok differs from its competitors by its accessible price and the level of control it gives to brand managers. “From the very beginning, we knew we did not want to create another black box where the algorithm makes decisions for you. We wanted to give users complete control over their brand’s tone of voice. Marketing managers and copywriters don’t want the texts to be written for them; they need comprehensive tools to conveniently brainstorm, draft, edit, and rewrite the texts to get the best possible outcome,” says Firyan.

In Textok, a brand’s tone of voice is defined by more than 90 parameters that span all aspects of style and tone, including the choice of words, sentence structure, readability and flow, and emotions in text.

“It is a very complex system, a combination of practical knowledge, cognitive sciences, and AI, but we wanted to make it super accessible to brand managers,” adds Procevska.

Textok works in English and offers three types of subscription plans, ranging from zero to 89 euros per month. It is created by Textok Ltd. (SIA Textok), a startup based in Riga, Latvia. The company offers part of its core functionality free of charge to promote understanding about quality texts in the industry.

Textok was launched as a free Beta version at the end of December 2023. The team released its new version half a year later and aims to grow Textok into a 360-degree text production platform that will cover all stages of working with texts in corporate settings.