Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

I'm the sole founder, developer, marketer, and everything-else-guy for http://www.scribophile.com and http://writerfolio.com.

They've funded my travels across the world for the past few years. Right now I'm living in Germany with my German girlfriend whom I met in Australia.

Scribophile has since become one of the largest writers communities online, and we're about to have our 100,000th critique written (sometime in the next 5 days if usage numbers stay average). There's been over 35.2 million words of critique written on the site.

I'm not making a million bucks and companies aren't knocking down the door in a rush to buy me out, but so far I've managed to pay off my student loans, save a little cash, and not worry too much about where my next rent payment will come from.

A budding journalist friend of mine has been looking for a place to put her writing portfolio and she hasn't been happy with blogging/squarespace/etc.. I just sent her writerfolio.com, I hope she likes it and signs up :)

Scribophile sounded interesting, but I left when I found out that I need an account to actually see anything. You even have a free user tier, so WTF?

You don't have to take my word for this either. Some basic (free) analytics can give you a ballpark estimate of how often this is happening. It's probably a non-negligible ratio of your incoming new viewers.

Turns out that most writers who post their work in public are horribly scared of it being stolen. There's also a myth about something called 'first publishing rights' that persists despite my best efforts to eradicate. Long story short, the site is completely hidden from the general public because the writers who use it prefer their work to be visible only to other members.

FWIW, it used to be visible to the public for a long time, and I would constantly get complaints from my members.

I continually forget that customer service is 80% dealing with crazy people.

As a coder who writes, seeing someone having success with building writer tools makes me happy, since that's the path I see myself going down at some point.

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