Editorially is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Editorially is shutting down

stet.editorially.com

58 pointsrobertwalsh058 comments

Shameless plug: I'm building Penflip.com, an alternative to Editorially. It has a clean markdown writing interface and git for version control. It's like GitHub, but for writing. I quit my job 5 months ago and have been working on this full time ever since, 100% bootstrapped. I think the space still has tons of untapped potential.

http://www.penflip.com

To me, markdown IS clutter. Currently I use google docs and mediawiki for collaborative writing. I would try to differentiate yourself from those two options. I agree there is untapped potential in collaborative document editing, but in my consulting experience with corporations, the missing factor isn't the editing experience, but in the linking together of docs and multimedia inclusion. You are potentially on a long, long road, but godspeed to you!

I've been using Penflip to crowdsource & collaborate on stories from startups for a book called "The Other Side of Startups". Feel free to contribute to it here: https://www.penflip.com/MicahCohen/the-other-side-of-startup...

I've looked at your project for the purposes of writing a book but it feels like the technology should be able to do so much more and make things easier.

These were my initial penflip impressions: * I'm ambivalent to markup, it's not a big feature to me. It's another thing to get used to when I'm really looking for book writing to make things easier straight away. * It makes certain actions more tedious. I want to be able to write subsections, move 'm around if need be. I don't want to be tasked with creating files for chapters and what not. * It's far too technical looking. It's too much like Git. Git is great for code, I love it for that. But Git is pretty involved. Writing should be made easy. The only thing hard about writing should be the writing itself. I don't want to read a manual to learn how to use the tool. If I'm writing a book, all I need to know is how do I create chapter 1 and start typing from there. Everything else becomes information overload. Surely there must be a nicer way to get the benefits of Git for writing but for an audience that doesn't want to think technical.

I do recognize your project is still in the early stages and you've purposely kept your feature list small to begin with. I hope it becomes something huge and I agree with you the market is there.

Thanks for the feedback, and for checking out Penflip. Usability is definitely not a trivial task to solve, especially while trying to maintain all of the version control power that comes with git.

That said, when was the last time you played around with Penflip? I've received lots of similar feedback (too technical, too hard to use, cluttered UI) so I'm continually stripping down the interface and simplifying everything. In the past few weeks the writing interface has been cleaned up quite a bit. Still has a ways to go, but it's getting there.

I've been working on some technical documentation using Penflip, and I've really been loving it.

Small quibble: Using either underscores or asterisks to make are valid in markdown for making italics. The buttons in the editor use underscores. I would really love the option to choose which one the buttons generate.

That is a small quibble indeed :) Have to say I actually prefer underscores as well.

I don't see a pricing page. What's your business model? Sorry if this question is too intrusive but I'm always asking that before using any online service to identify if I'm the product being sold.

Coding up pricing right this minute, actually.

It's going to be similar to Github: free for public projects, small monthly fee (~$8) for private projects.

Seems too small a price. A lot of people like to use the GitHub pricing model but it's a very unique thing. Imagine how many $8 a month subscriptions you would need for just one software engineer. You're looking at needing 1k paid subscriptions per employee. If you can get 1,000 paying customers you're doing really, really well. Personally I'd consider charging more, and not have any kind of free product. Free versions are time and money sinks, and even if you say it's limited support, you're going to spend valuable time helping people who will never support your startup and all your hard work by giving you what matters, their money.

If you don't think you can charge more than $8 a month and have people pay you, I consider thinking about features that add more value.

Also, this is just me speaking from personal experience, a lot of people like to dish out advice to startups, so I know where my feedback fits in. Not everything applies to everyone, but when I see sub-$20 plans and freemium it's such a warning signal. Like a klaxxon in my brain. You need some usually unrealistic name recognition and social network type hockeystick adoption for an $8 plan to ever work.

You're totally right. It's not a lot. At this point, I'm only looking to cover server bills, then living expenses after that. Baby steps.

The $8/mo is just a starting point. There's also a $22 plan for more private projects.

The real business is in organizations and enterprise. The software has much, much more potential for groups vs single users with some collaborators. Those plans are coming down the road, I just can't develop fast enough. I'm excited.

Based on experience, I think your $8 plan will cannibalize your $22 a plan. The cold hard math of more private projects probably doesn't justify paying 150% more.

I totally agree here. An $8 plan may be viable if you're trying to target hobbyists or for an entry level plan, but if it exists at all it must be paired with a professional plan that cost significantly more. Remember you're trying to target professionals that treat time as money. If your tool brings enough features to the table to save a single hour a month, that's worth at least $20 for anyone in a professional capacity. If it doesn't then it's basically useless.

good comments I think

Does this announcement make you nervous about continuing your product? Are you interested in being connected to the people behind editorially to talk about it?

> Does this announcement make you nervous about continuing your product?

Not at all. Execution is everything.

> Are you interested in being connected to the people behind editorially to talk about it?

Sure, can you connect me?

I disagree. If you have a flawed business model, or a product that's simply not that desirable, then execution doesn't matter. Junk ideas remain junk, regardless of how well they are marketed.

In this case, it's my opinion that the startup in question was just never a good idea to begin with. No solid business model and no good reason why it would be widely adopted.

I'm not the author of penflip but you're missing a big thing: Editorially had 11 people on staff (https://editorially.com/about).

Penflip apparently is just one person.

If penflip makes $500k/year, it's a lot for 1 person but not even close to covering 11 people.

Collaborative writing is not a junk idea. There is a bazillion of different takes on that (draft, all the etherpad clones, google docs, ...).

Starting an entire company based on collaborative writing is a junk idea. It's a niche service without much room for improvement, and it's currently being provided for free by one of the largest software companies in the world.

There is no way that this will ever achieve anything close to $500k/year. For this to happen, at $8/month it needs to attract 5000+ subscribing, paying users. This is not going to happen when anyone can just use Google docs for free. Especially when Google is more well-known, better maintained, and integrates into existing Google accounts. There is just no good reason to sign up for a new service.

Most people have never heard of draft or etherpad. I'm willing to be that they are not actually generating any substantial revenue either, which is the benchmark for whether it's a good idea to start a business or not.

That's nonsense. Their are whole industries that could use better collaborative tools (such as the book publishing industry). Have you tried writing a book? The tools are so limited.

Google docs for example is not a great tool for writing books, in fact there are very few tools that are particularly nice to use that are web based and strong on the collaborative front.

I think the problem perhaps with Editorially is too much pressure to get things going early. If there's 10+ people with salaries, sales better be good. I think a bootstrapping approach or an open source approach a la WordPress would be much more viable. Editorially seems to have only failed because of their specific criteria, not because there's isn't a need for a better tool.

No, I don't think there is much of a demand, at least not enough to sustain an entire business. You would need to be pulling in serious money from publishers, and on top of that, you're trying to change a system that largely already works. I've published myself, and e-mailing drafts was fine. The only times I've ever seen collaborative documents being used by average people were a) real-time coding interviews, and b) filling out forms. People would not be willing to pay money in either case, no matter how good it is.

In the same vein, starting a store is silly, Walmart is already selling everything one could ever want..

A store is the wrong analogy for the point you're trying to make. A store has the dimension of locality, which means that a store that duplicates another one exactly but is in a different location can still propser. (Starbuck's, McDonald's, etc.)

If you're selling worse quality products at a higher price than Wal-mart, then yes, it is silly to start a store right next door. You will probably lose money, like most startups based on bad ideas.

If execution is everything Editorially had a pretty stellar group of folks with proven track records executing, and are still shutting the doors because of a lack of paying customers. Execution is important, but so is the market for a product.

A one-person shop obviously has fewer bills to pay, but also a much shallower pool of talent (no matter how talented the one person is) to pull from for executing.

Keep HN updated on your progress. It’s an interesting case study of two approaches.

Thanks, that looks interesting ... but I don't really see the point, unless it's about collaboration. (I write in customized templates in Microsoft Word's Web View.)

I'm in the middle of using github to write a science fiction novel (about 60% through, currently). Git isn't perfect for text, but it's the least problematic of all systems I've tried. It keeps everything by default. It allows non-destructive edits. Commit-with-comment is a decent system for allowing others to suggest edits. It provides a good backwards-looking overview of where you are and how you got there. There are some nifty analysis things you can do with it.

It's probably not suitable for the whole pipeline, but for drafting and editing it's solid.

Did you look at Scrivener?

Massive overkill for my purposes (600-1200 words) but designed for long-form writing....

I've looked at it, but the features don't match my needs very well. On the input side, I don't need much more than basic text editing. On the backend, Scrivener has versioning, but I feel like git is more robust. There's also more information online about how to do interesting analytical things with git.

If you've used Editorially and enjoyed it, I'd like to recommend my own application that I am currently developing called Typewrite ( https://typewrite.io ). Though it's only been in development for about a month an a half, it is relatively inexpensive to run and I don't plan on shutting it down anytime soon.

It has live collaboration like Google Docs, and a simple interface like Byword, iA Writer, or Editorially. I'm working behind the scenes to add features and documentation and plan on releasing updates for it every so often.

If you are interested in seeing why I created Typewrite, please read the first blog post at: http://blog.typewrite.io/2014/simplicity-in-real-time/

My email to mandy when i signed up:

>It seems awesome. However earlier I had asked, How this is different than Google Docs in terms of 'competition' and features.

Her Response: >The principal difference is that we're focused exclusively on the editorial process, while Google Docs also aims to do a lot of other things. I don't have a feature comparison handy, but you might be interested in this article from FastCo: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672260/editorially-wants-to-red...

Point, I was not convinced, this or any other App of this kind, is going to stand the competition (from Google). Let alone stand out.

For me the big difference is markdown. I rely so heavily on markdown for writing, and having a native platform where I can drop markdown and have it parsed correctly, and also get feedback/edits from others is huge.

For example, I'm writing a technical book right now. I wanted to write it in markdown for ease of writing and flexibility of output. I also needed reviewers to help me out with editing and checking out the contents. Editorially was a perfect product for me in this place. Maybe the reason they went out though was that it was just too small of a niche. Still makes me sad though : (

iA writer is the best for MarkDown, I am myself an addict to Markdown.

I dunno, Draft is doing quite well as far as I can tell. I'm using it to write a book & maintain a bunch of other writing. A lot of people who have to write constantly care a great deal about the experience of writing, not to mention the specific features. Google Docs is a competitor for Microsoft word, neither offer a pleasant writing experience.

People used to say the same thing about Microsoft and Office.

Yeah but Microsoft Office had a clear attack vector: it cost a significant amount of money and you could "beat" it for some (but not nearly all) people by being "good enough" and free.

Google Docs is free (yeah, you're "Google's product" yadda, yadda, but hardly anyone cares about that, they just know they aren't paying for it) which makes it much harder to attack unless your product is substantially and demonstrably better than it in at least some very important areas.

To some degree, it's still true for Microsoft and Office.

What was this? Can someone explain it?

These shutdown notices should have a required synopsis of the service so I know what I will be missing out on.

I used it, it wasn't live like Google docs, but everyone involved could still contribute to a markdown document.

An HTML view is available for every document.

From looking at Penflip, it looks like it was a way for a writer and editor to collaborate before publishing.

Seems strange to shut-down the business after only four months post-public launch.

It feels like in this space your best options are to go free and push for scale or to go after premium markets.

Writers tend not to have huge budgets, but professionals such as PR teams and lawyers also need heavyweight tracking/collaboration tools and have the money to pay for a solution.

This is exactly what I was hoping would happen. The thing is, the problem they were trying to solve is a big one for organizations where a lot of writing gets done. But for whatever reason, the product was focused on individual writers.

Also not sure what the rationale is for not open sourcing. At the very least it gives former employees something to show around.

Not enough time for a pivot. Does this mean folks aren't starting with enough cash to get through the initial hurdles?

Alternatives:

- Draft - http://draftin.com/ - Penflip - http://penflip.com/ - Typewrite - https://typewrite.io - StackEdit - https://stackedit.io/

There's also Quip, but its focused on mobile so doesn't fit well in this list. I did a pretty deep breakdown on two of four above (along with Editorially) earlier this year - https://zapier.com/blog/collaborative-writing-tools-editoria...

Very surprising to see this happen so soon. I'm a happy user of Draft -- made by HN (and Y Combinator album) Nate Kontny. https://draftin.com/

There site is already in postmortem, I would have liked to seen what they had built. We learn more when we see awesome ideas that don't gain traction, it's often depressing though. I also see a trend of all these assets just vanishing. Even when sites opensource after failure, seldom anything comes up it. I will proffer the uncomfortable suggestions that the balley-hooed software practices, despite the back-patting, are not uncoupled and modular. In fact, we have reached the age of massive coupling in the full stack, even the deployment.

We had been using this in earnest at my company since August. It's basically the best tool of its kind—and unlike most other tools of its kind, our copy editors loved it. The thing it was missing was team-editing features. But it had the editing process, which is the one thing keeping people with Word, down.

There are a lot of publishing houses that could use something like this. Editorial workflow is a big weak point as we switch from doing a lot of things in print to doing a lot of things on the Web.

Take a look at Draft:

http://draftin.com

I'm familiar—I did a lot of testing. The problem with Draft, IMHO, is that it has a slightly higher complexity level, though the product itself is probably Editorially's closest match on the feature ratio. I need to be able to sell this to the average writer, and that's not always easy if the complexity level is too high, alas.

I completely understand that. It definitely has a higher intimidation factor than Editorially ever did.

Really bummed to see Editorially go. We tried a lot of different writing tools at Zapier and it was definitely the best for handling the editorial process.

Some potential replacements for those looking are Google Docs, Draft, Penflip, or Quip. Here's a big write up on the differences between those tools:

https://zapier.com/blog/collaborative-writing-tools-editoria...

gosh, there's so much i could say here; let me bullet-list:

b1. businesses have a need for collaborative writing

b2. businesses are mired in their ms-word mindset

b3. businesses will pay for a tool they need...

b4. ...unless they can get it for free from google

b5. i don't care about businesses; thus ends this list

w1. i care about writers, individuals exercising creativity

w2. writers don't write collaboratively; editors can suck it

w3. writers certainly won't pay for a collaborative tool

w4. it's highly doubtful writers will pay for any tool...

w5. ...but most especially if they can get it for free

w6. writers won't even _use_ an over-engineered tool

w7. writers want the tool to just get out of the darn way

w8. writers are quite happy with a empty field to write in

w7. editorially was over-engineered, and is penflip too

w8. draft-in started just right, but is now over-engineered

w9. writers don't trust storing their stuff "somewhere else"

w10. version-tracking is great, but not the be-all, end-all

w11. github? order-of-magnitude over-engineered for writers

c1. communication is pervasive (facetime, hangouts, twitter)

c2. collaboration doesn't need to be built into every tool

c3. to the extent it is needed, use stuff like sugarbox.io

c4. javascript writing tools will be beer- and speech-free

c5. i can point to a dozen, and release my own next week

c6. so nobody is gonna build a business on writing tools

c7. html is so old-fashioned, with http://strapdownjs.com

I would be most grateful if the people involved in this did a little public post-mortem. One of the ideas near the top of my queue is related to writing, so I'd really benefit from hearing about their explorations. And I imagine there are many others that feel the same way.

So sad to hear this. This is one of my fave online tools.

You should try https://draftin.com/. For what little writing I've done, it always seemed to work well. Right from the beginning it worked well with exporting and publishing, which were my main concerns.

+1 - my favorite tool. I got into the Editorially beta just after, like, within a couple days, I began using Draft. Couldn't tear myself away.

This was the best collaborative writing app I've ever used. My heart hurts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com