Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

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Somewhat related - I think write.as has a huge opportunity here to sell to businesses. When I've done content marketing my core problems were:

1. I want to write a draft, solicit comments to improve, edit, spell check, and run through tools like Hemingway

2. I want to publish to different platforms like LinkedIn, a blog (static site using markdown or Wordpress), an email tool like Drip, and Medium. Maybe missing some others.

3. Formatting the posts for each service is a PITA. Need images in different sizes and need to place them in the posts.

Ideally I'd like to be able to do all three using a single tool, connect my publishing platforms, click publish (maybe schedule them) and would have drafts in LinkedIn, Medium, Drip, etc.

This would save me so much time that I'd easily pay $50/m for this (and we're bootstrapped and cheap/"capital efficient"). Looks like write.as is heading somewhat in this direction but sadly doesn't hit the major platforms (yet?) Huge market, painful problem, selling to businesses, can build a great tool around content marketing workflow. Got the hallmarks of a great business.

That's definitely good to know -- I appreciate the insight! We were indeed headed down this route in the early days with these integrations. In another life, I might do this. Particularly, having a simple format (like plain text / Markdown) that could then be interpreted in its own ways by all these platforms was the original dream.

But the consumer space is our sweet spot. I can genuinely talk about why I care about building a $6 / month blogging platform for consumers -- I wouldn't have that same passion building something I don't have much personal interest in (even if there was more money involved).

From a business perspective, this space is very under-served, as far as platforms that writers can rely on still being here in 10 years. And we have plenty of avenues to business customers, from support [0], to more API access, to larger community hosting [1]. Mostly, I personally want everyday people to have a service they can depend on, where they aren't being mined for data, they get their digital freedom back, etc. That's not something many others can say or even have interest in.

[0] https://write.as/pricing

[1] https://writefreely.host

Thanks for the response. TBH I was a little confused about whether you were trying to serve personal customers or business customers. From your response above it's still not clear =) It sounds like you don't care much about the business customers (great! focus is good!) But then you say:

> And we have plenty of avenues to business customers, from support [0], to more API access, to larger community hosting [1]

I think the fact that you mention both groups on your pricing page had my hopes up. In general if you're going to focus on consumers that's great, but you might not be doing yourself a favour from a marketing or resource-allocation perspective by talking about business customers.

Just my 2c!

That's great feedback. I've always felt the way it's presented was sub-optimal, so it's good to at least confirm that :)

Consumers are our focus, but we do need those few business customers to help get us to profitability quicker. That, and the fact that we solve some niche business needs, is why I still want to target them in some way. I have a few ideas in mind to do this (particularly around marketing) that I want to implement soon. Would you mind if I picked your brain on some of the changes I've been thinking of?

Email away! It's in my profile.

This isn't what you're looking for, more an indication that there is a real need for these types of services. Checkout: https://www.wordable.io/ - which focuses solely on Google Docs to Wordpress.

It's kind of nuts to think that these somewhat "edge" cases are so large as to be able to build a business around.

It is not an edge case - the PR tool market is huge and there is a lot of business that serve it. Perhaps not super many that serve the micro/small sized segments (which this would be), but there are several alternatives to chose from.

Wordpress is a massive market and text drives the web. I think these can be great businesses. Hadn't seen Wordable - thanks.

Realize this does not solve your problem, but for the writing and drafting part. I personally use Blot ( https://blot.im ). It's been really great, especially for actually getting content written. You just tie it to a dropbox or git repo and write markdown and it does the rest. You can self host or use the hosted service.

Can't recommend it enough. The developer is also super responsive on email which is great when figuring it out. Only thing to nitpick about is documentation could be a bit more clear. You can see the result here https://blog.jonasbengtson.se/

I think they're in this not only for the money. Their goal is to provide a user-centric blogging platform, not a corporate-centric one.

Shameless plug: write your post from the comfort of your Emacs and automatically upload it to write.as or any other writefreely instance:

https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el

Looking at your requirements, what you need seems more to be a PR & communications tool. One example of that is the company I work for, Mynewsdesk (www.mynewsdesk.com), where the stripped down version include more or less what you ask for (more or less, we have our own email integration against sendgrid, and no integration against Medium). But we handle other stuff you list.

Our cheapest nonfree alternative cost $120 a month though, but perhaps that is close enough to be interesting? If not, there are many other companies in the PR tool market - perhaps one fit your needs.

Interesting, thanks. Looks like I may need a couple of the feature MND has. But I'd much rather use a purpose-built tool that's made for my specific scenarios. As an example, I don't need monitoring or contacts.

Monitoring and contacts are mostly stuff built after everything else for upsell opportunities. But there is a lot of companies in the space so no doubt that you can find one that cater to your subset of demands.

The post shows the risk in such a move. The 3rd party integrations can be turned off without warning (such as this case). What do you tell your paying customers?

Your paying customers are still going to have to post their articles to different sites regardless of whether you support it or not. But you could make it easier for them. I would tell them:

"Medium cut off access so you have to go there directly to post. We've formatted your post for Medium - cut this and paste it to Medium here: [link_to_create_new_post_on_medium]."

Publishing to multiple platforms via a single click is nice, but the most painful part about publishing to multiple platforms is formatting the posts so they look good everywhere you post.

Sounds like the hard bit is in the reformatting, otherwise you can just use zapier?

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