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.
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.
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.
It's going to be similar to Github: free for public projects, small monthly fee (~$8) for private projects.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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, ...).
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.
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.
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.
It's probably not suitable for the whole pipeline, but for drafting and editing it's solid.
Massive overkill for my purposes (600-1200 words) but designed for long-form writing....