I want to help you write better...
afterthedeadline.com
afterthedeadline.com
You see, when I write, I spell check the document about 20-30 times. And your thing only allows 80 requests in a month. Is that a joke?
Explain what a request is, otherwise I look at the pricing page and shut it down, because it's totally overpriced. Now, if you you would say each article I write gets spellchecked for $0.063, no matter how many times I spellcheck it, then I would be fine with that. But everytime I spell check I pay that amount? Ridiculous!
And I think it's also a bit unclever how you did the pricing.
You should go like this: "Get your article professionally spellchecked for 7cents. That's all you pay". People don't pay per month, they just pay per article. However, the minimum amount they can put on their account is $5. You can't actually put 7 cents. And there should be no monthly recurring bill.
So you may have very concrete data on actual usage, but have you also looked at what users think about your pricing?
2,500 posts per day, some edited a few times.
That's averaging 76,041 unique posts being spell checked each month...
What realistic price should this be?
The demo works very well btw, I am impressed. It's the pricing you need to think about.
You might want to consider pricing that reflects the type of site... how would you charge HN for the service? There are enough users here who would benefit from it. Does it really costs you X to spell check? Could you lower the costs to achieve a faster growth?
The top plan is for an estimated 500 writers, with 50,000 requests/month, and costs $200.00. That's significantly lower than $1500/month.
Beyond that, seems like you can work out a licensing deal to host your own server. Problem solved.
It doesn't seem like a huge price to pay for a startup that relies of well-written material.
The style subsection demo retains a couple of errors after following the suggestions of ATD (though I guess if the person checking it is paying attention, they would notice and fix up the sentence).
The grammar subsection demo does not catch the missing hyphen in one-hit wonder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-hit_wonder).
I'm loving it Raffi. I use it to check my HN posts.
I think this is pretty comparable to Word, and what you're really offering is that same functionality on a different platform viz. blogs.
It would be very cool if when explaining things like "passive voice", it gave an example of a revision of the specific text in question (instead of a random example). Of course, that's hard to do (approaching AI), so you'd probably get Eliza-like responses much of the time. And you only need to be comparable to Word anyway.
1. I help you find errors in your writing. Despite the limitations of spellcheck and misused word detection they are still a valuable safety net to have.
2. The style checker is useful for helping you write better. Writers like to come up with massive lists of pet peeves. Memorizing these lists is too much for a human. After the Deadline automatically flags this stuff. It isn't the same as a human editor but it does help.
3. A good copy editor will flag and revise most cases of passive voice and hidden verbs. After the Deadline doesn't rewrite these for you but it does flag them. This is a useful service to call your attention to these things. See: http://jaffeerevises.com/Nominalizations.htm
4. After the Deadline explains your errors when you make them. When you write in passive voice you can click "explain" and learn what passive voice is. If you use the wrong indefinite article you can click explain and learn why it is wrong. I see these as teachable moments and by giving you snippets of grammar info when you need it, I am helping to make you a more aware writer.
BTW I recommend Write to the Point by Bill Stott. Will checker out Zinsser's work.
Still Mr. Franken said the whole experience had been disconcerting. “It’s a weird thing: people are always asking me and Franni, ‘Are you okay?’ ” he said, referring to his wife. “As sort of life crises go, this is low on the totem poll. But it is weird, it’s a strange thing.”
Neither can the spell checker in your browser. Why? Because most spell checkers do not look at context. After the Deadline does.
Visit http://www.polishmywriting.com/nyt.html to see the answer.
Besides misused word detection (and contextual spell checking), After the Deadline checks grammar and style as well.
My sentence needs the period moved to the left a bit.
Not if you're English.