973 karma · joined February 1, 2009
Working on Sudowrite (https://sudowrite.com), an AI-powered creative writing thingy.
Previously made, then sold, Photojojo (http://photojojo.com), Jelly (http://workatjelly.com), and other things.
See also: http://amitgupta.com/
Contact: news.ycombinator.com@amitgupta.com
Hi, I'm Amit, co-founder of Sudowrite. Every other post in this thread is hiring someone to build software. I'm hiring someone to help build the company.
Our company is weird. No VCs, 30,000+ paying users, 3+ years of profitability, and the nicest coworkers you've ever worked with.
You should read the job listing even if you don't want the job b/c it is the best one here:
Founders are supposed to bluster through this kind of thing, but I struggled to even write a proper job listing to hire his replacement.
Finally I just decided to write to spend a week writing those feelings into the listing. Surprisingly, this yielded more applications than we've ever had for a position!
PROFITABLE, SUSTAINABLE SMALL TEAM, MAKING SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT
Kind, smart, low-drama people, seeking the same to help make writing tools authors dream about.
Our users have published thousands of books using Sudowrite, and we're building a sustainable company, not chasing unrealistic growth targets set by VCs.
* We help the next generation of storytellers tell better stories.
* We believe the future of writing is AI & human collaboration.
* This is the 3rd year we'll pay a profit-sharing bonus.
* Co-founders both had prior exits.
—————————————————————
Hiring: Product Design Lead
* Craft clean, playful new UX/UI and talk to users. A lot.
* You should have: Great taste and product sense, lots of agency, and a sense of humor, adventure, and hope.
* Nice to have: You write, you code, you're good at animation.
Comp: 150-200K, equity, 401K, profit share, retreats, unlimited books.
—————————————————————
I won't go line-by-line here defending the cutesy copy and all that since it's not my job to argue with people on the internet either… but on a few key points that interested me:
- language support: I don't believe we're being disingenuous. Sudowrite works well in many languages. We have authors teaching classes on using Sudowrite in multiple languages. In fact, there's one on German tomorrow and one on French next week: https://lu.ma/sudowrite Our community runs classes nearly every day.
- student usage - We do sometimes offer a student discount when people write in to ask for it, and we've had multiple collage and high school classes use sudowrite in writing classes. We'll often give free accounts to the class when professors reach out. I don't believe AI use in education is unethical. I think AI as copilot is the future of most creative work, and it will seem silly for teachers not to incorporate these tools in the future. Many already are! All that said, we do not market to students as you claim. Not because we think it's immoral -- we do not -- but because we think they have better options. ChatGPT is free, students are cheap. We make a professional tool for professional authors and it is not free nor cheap. It would not make sense for our business to market to students.
- press quotes -- Yes, we quote journalists because they're the ones who've written articles about us. You can google "New Yorker sudowrite" etc and see the articles. Some of those journalists also write fiction -- that one who wrote the New Yorker feature had a book he co-wrote with AI reviewed in The New York Times.
> I then noticed it was last updated in 2020? I highly doubt you guys have been around for that long
So many of these objections feel bizarre to me because they're trivial to fact-check. Here's a New York Times article that mentions us, written in 2020. We were one of the first companies to use LLMs in this wave and sought and gained access to GPT-3 prior to public API availability. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/science/artificial-intell...
We released our own fiction-specific model earlier this year - you can read more it at https://www.sudowrite.com/muse
A much-improved version 1.5 came out today -- it's preferred 2-to-1 vs Claude in blind tests with our users.
You're right on the faq -- alas, we've been very product-focused and haven't done the best job keeping the marketing site up to date. What questions do you wish we'd answer there?
The editing process is a lot harder to build around than the more straightforward "continue this text for me". Partially because the models are really suited to do the latter out of the box, and partially because there's more nuance and subjectivity on the latter and it's harder to make it work well today.
That said, totally doable. (We put most of our effort into AI for human editing and control with Sudowrite.)
Did you have any themes around the questions you asked?
- We believe the future of art is AI & human collaboration. Sudowrite is the best AI for creative writers.
- We have a rapidly growing paying user base.
- We've been featured in The New York Times, New Yorker, Verge, etc.
- We believe new tools will enable a renaissance in art & creativity and we want to help the next generation of storytellers tell better stories.
Wanted: React + Node Engineers (who also write!)
- We’re 100% remote and support work-life balance. We meet up in person a few times of year, last time in Hawaii. We encourage diverse candidates from all over the world to apply.
- Details: https://sudowrite.notion.site/We-re-hiring-Engineers-come-he...
Apply by emailing careers@sudowrite.com
And DRM-free! Cool. Feel free to pirate, I guess.
How long did it take him to get to 1 million copies sold, and was there anything he did along the way that had an outsized impact on his success?
There were many more pubs to publish to and more people bought short story anthologies.
We believe Human + AI collaboration is the future of all creative endeavor, and we’re building an AI-powered tool for creative writers.
The founders, @superamit and @jamesjyu, are authors and repeat founders with exits, our investors include the founders of Twitter, Gumroad, Wordpress, Parse, and others. Our users love us, and so does The New Yorker.
We’re building the founding team and looking for:
* React Software Engineer, Full Stack: https://bit.ly/2WBtAU0
* Lead Designer: https://bit.ly/3A1cmwL
* Machine Learning Engineer: https://bit.ly/2WBtAU0
We have…
- Lofty ambitions
- Down to earth work hours
Ideal teammates…
- Love reading and writing
- Are optimistic and take pride in their work
- Have infectious good vibes
APPLY: Using links above (or email careers@sudowrite.com)
QUESTIONS: email careers@sudowrite.com or DM us (@jamesjyu or @superamit)
The bulk: Wake up early, write/paint/do the creative thing for a few hours. Then spend the rest of the day taking walks, attending to mail, and the other nonsense.
The core message, similar to Pressfield's the War of Art, seems to be just sit down and do it, same time, same place, every day.
As an aside, we're building a creative writing tool specifically made to jump in when writing block hits and get you going again. https://sudowrite.com/ Sometimes you just need a little kick to get inspired and keep going.
Would definitely recommend this to anyone that finds themselves pushing certain to-dos forward from one day to the next.
Sudowrite co-founder here. We didn't leave out GPT-3 to deceive and will probably include it in the FAQ we're putting together.
Our reasoning to leave it out initially was more about getting the right audience for our beta test:
- Most people outside the tech world (our intended audience is fiction writers at this point) haven't yet heard of GPT-3, so we didn't want to confuse them.
- There's been a problem where people who want to try out GPT-3 try to get access to it through apps that use it. AI Dungeon deals with this a lot. OpenAI discourages direct user access to the prompt, and we've scaled back some of our features already to prevent unfettered access.
I agree it's a little confusing; I'd want to know what was powering the tool myself. Hopefully as OpenAI opens up access we can be a little more open as well.
Just as clarification, this example is human written text (I wrote it!)
When you click "Open Wormhole", you'll see the output from Sudowrite offering different directions you could go from this start.