I launched an AI editorial tool today. Here's the story.
Most writing tools fix your grammar. RedPen, my tool, critiques your argument. That's the core difference. You paste a LinkedIn post, newsletter, blog, or sales page. RedPen scores it across five categories — structure, clarity, argument, tone, CTA — on a 1–10 scale (it's not generous). Feedback is not "your passive voice is high." More like "your hook makes no claim and your CTA is buried in paragraph four." Then it gives you specific rewrites. Not suggestions. Actual alternative copy.
Why I built this: I spent four years at Elsevier building AI tools for academic editors — systems to evaluate manuscripts faster and surface better peer reviewers. Since then I ran Nuance, a Web3 blogging platform with 7,000 users and 16,000 articles. In both roles, I watched the same problem: writers had no way to know if their work was landing. Not a grammar problem. A structure, argument, clarity problem. No tool addressed it.
RedPen is my attempt to address it.
Honest launch state
- Live on Product Hunt today — current rank 66
- 1 sign-up :(
I'm an introvert with a small network, so not sure if this is as expected.
I used RedPen on my own LinkedIn launch post this morning and posted the rewrite as a comment. That felt more honest than a standard "check out my product" post.
I'm not sharing the numbers to be self-deprecating. I think the product is good. What I don't know yet is whether it's good enough to spread without a big launch push. That's what I'm trying to figure out.
What I'd actually like from this post: If you write — LinkedIn posts, newsletters, anything — try it. Two free analyses at redpenedit.com, no credit card.
Tell me: does the feedback land the way a real editor's would? That's the hardest thing to calibrate and I'm still tuning it.
