I broke the Indie Hackers’ code…
…and waited way too long to launch. Oh well.
TL;DR: I made/am making Penmob, a platform that connects writers and editors for group workshop feedback.
I spent 7 months in total building Penmob, first dinking around, then getting more serious about it, starting and stopping lots along the way. My original intent was to make some sort of “collaborative writing” platform – with no clearer idea of what it’d be starting out – as an excuse to learn a new tech stack, get a freelance job, and become a productive member of society.
I did end up getting some part-time work as a direct result of learning VueJS, which has been great for stable income, but inevitably lead to a lot more distractions from my side projects. Hence being so late getting this project out the door.
Here’s a little qualitative breakdown of what I did for pre-launch marketing, in case anyone finds it useful or interesting:
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Pre-launch promotion on BetaList and BetaPage: I was sitting at exactly zero people on my email list, and figured I’d need a few more than that if I was going to launch a marketplace (2-sided) platform. After posting my landing page, I got roughly 60-70 email list signups. I sent a few pre-launch emails, but severely underestimated how much longer it’d be until I actually launched, so I didn’t do a very good job of keeping those folks engaged. I was also targeting the wrong audience; people who browse BetaList are startup people, and the overlap with writers and editors is pretty small.
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Twitter ads: The Twitter ads I ran had a pretty good CPC (hovered around 20 cents), but I didn’t run them for very long as the site wasn’t live yet. It was a fairly low percentage of people who clicked on a Twitter ad and then signed up for the mailing list.
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LinkedIn ads: After reading the DesignHill interview, while knee-deep in code, I had to smack myself. Varun made an excellent comment that, to start off his 2-sided marketplace, he had to first have designers (supply-side) onboarded ahead of launch. And if I was going to mitigate the anxiety of launching a marketplace, I ought to have editors lined up ahead of time so that there’s an immediate value prop for writers (the actual “buyers”). Seems simple, but that hadn’t crossed my mind before. So I used LinkedIn’s free ad credit to target professional editors. Pro-tip: if you don’t manually set your own CPC, LinkedIn will jack it up to ridiculous rates. I didn’t realize that at first, so I burned through my free $50 at around $7.40 per click. Running ads later, I found that setting it to $2 (LinkedIn's minimum) still gets clicks from people who are still very interested. Even though the CPC is high, the people clicking were exactly who I needed; a much higher percentage signed up for the mailing list, and I even got a handful of unsolicited emails from editors who clicked an ad, found my landing page, and asked to get early access.
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Cold emails: I didn’t need a huge number of editors onboarded ahead of time, but they all needed to be hand-picked and verified. To do this, I augmented the LinkedIn ads with cold emails. I searched through some public online directories of editors who were certified through various organizations. I sent a relatively small number of cold emails (maybe around 50), personalized each one, and made sure that for any replies I got, I’d send them a detailed reply back. I've had long email conversations, and even a couple phone conversations, with every one of the editors who replied to my messages, whether or not they were interested in signing up for the Penmob beta. If an editor I reached out to was interested, I’d send them to the live beta website and get them to sign up with a username/password. Reaching out to professionals also surfaced a few important hiccups in my messaging to editors, so I updated that accordingly.
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Blog posts: After the BetaList launch, a freelance blogger reached out to me about helping me start a company blog. She’s been instrumental in bouncing ideas off of, looking over the website copy, as well as writing for the actual blog. She is also within Penmob’s target audience, which has been a big help. Since I don’t have a large social following, I’d post regular blog updates to the Twitter/Facebook pages, but I also use Quuupromote to establish a wider base of brand recognition and traffic. I nabbed a few AppSumo coupons for Quuupromote, so promotion efforts are going fairly well on the backburner. Social and blog promotion are things I’ll be taking a more conscious look at now that I’m not spending nearly all of my time on development.
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Having friends: A key partner helping get Penmob off the ground was a friend who works with the University of Iowa’s writing program. He has a window into the literary community that I could only dream about.
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ProductHunt: This one was silly. There was a rogue ProductHunt user who stumbled across my landing page and posted it, even though the product was nowhere near going live. It originally bummed me out, since that burned my chance of launching it officially. However, I contacted PH on twitter asking to take down the listing and they did. But not before it got ~60 upvotes, leading to another ~30 email list signups :) Now that Penmob is actually launched, I’ll consider putting up a more official post on ProductHunt.
We’ve been live for 5 days now, and have gotten just shy of 50 new signed-up users via the email list and various small ad tests that are running in the background. Within the first day, we had our first organic paying customer (not myself or someone I know personally), who posted an essay to be workshopped. Now, amongst fixing all of the last-minute website bugs, I’m trying to figure out how to refine the messaging for new prospective writers to post their work on Penmob.
I’ll update with more progress once we make …more progress. Just wanted to come here and say thanks to IH for the inspiration and gut-punches along the way.
I will make one excuse for waiting so long: the mechanics of this website involve one-to-many payouts to editors, and I wasn’t about to half-ass the implementation of something that could bite me later. I ended up switching from a hacked-up workflow using the PayPal Payouts API, to a fully-integrated use of Stripe Connect, after they recently released a big update to their infrastructure that allows for one-to-many payments.
As always, I’m open to any sort of criticism: usability, copy, design, messaging, et cetera, whatever sticks out. The home page is a far-cry from the original landing page, but I’m always willing to take in more feedback. And if you happen to be a writer (including writing for a personal or business blog), please check out Penmob out and let me know what you think!
This is a cool idea. I'm a blogger and I recently wrote about the process of hiring an editor for my blog.
I registered and browsed around and I feel like it keeps pushing me a lot towards editing rather than writing.
After a I sign up as a writer, it offers to give me a quiz to test my skills as an editor
My profile page prompts me to connect with stripe so I can get paid, whereas I would presumably be the one paying.
If I click "Start Writing Now" from the writers' page it just shows me opportunities to edit other people's writing.
The places this seems to not match my needs:
I like working with one editor consistently so she can learn my writing and the mistakes I tend to make.
It would be difficult to move my content between Penmob and my blog. I use Jekyll for blogging, so I write mostly in Markdown. I can render a draft on my blog and then copy/paste it in to Penmob. I tried doing that just now and it works okay, but it seems to get confused about links. It recognizes that they are links, but nothing happens when I click them.
I'm skeptical of the quality of the editors. I don't think it's possible to validate an editor once and then have them go off and edit a short story, then a technical blog post and expect good results on both. I'd feel more comfortable being able to screen who gets hired.
Also, I just finished reading through your post on hiring an editor, and it was excellent. I need to up my content game after this current round of bugfixes.
Oh thanks!
Do you use Penmob to create Penmob? I'd be really interested to see you run a blog post through Penmob before publishing it, link to the rough draft and editor feedback in the post, and then do a follow-up post describing what the experience was like for you as a writer to receive notes from all these different editors.
That's the plan, I've just been too overwhelmed with extraneous stuff this week to write a full post that'd be worth workshopping. Making an additional followup post is a great idea :)
This is great feedback, thanks!
I definitely need to do a better job of delineating between writer-only and editor-only options when new users self-select. Right now, since you can opt to do both, all of the options are sort of mashed together.
To address your other points:
There is definitely a time and place for one-on-one writer-editor relationships. Starting out though, I wasn't going to be able to compete with the much bigger marketplace platforms who do only that "matchmaking" type of service. Instead, the unique part about Penmob is the group feedback, where editors can bounce ideas off of the writer and one another. We're a "workshop", not a "matchmaker", and that style appeals to writers for fundamentally different reasons.
I'll need to eventually implement better text-editing features, but haven't heard from enough writers yet to know what people are looking for. There's a much heavier focus on the editing experience than on the writing experience at present. I use a stripped-down version of Quill -- incorporating additional media elements like links and images will take some extra planning to make sure that the editing experience stays consistent.
Re screening editors ahead of time: this is actually the first big update planned. It's been the most requested feature from editors I've been in contact with, so it's good to hear that it's a request from the writers' perspective as well. I wanted to get the basic version of the platform launched and in front of people first, so that big update is still a week or two out, but it's coming!
Thanks for the response!
Yeah, I might just be thinking about it backwards by thinking of it in the same category as a 1-on-1 relationship with an editor. I think you're right and that "writing workshop" is a more sensible way of thinking about this product.
Yeah, this would be good. From your perspective, what is the best way for a blogger to use Penmob at the moment? A lot of short stories and creative nonfiction is very easily copy/pastable because the most complex thing you have to worry about is probably preserving bold/italics, but most blog posts contain links and embedded media. Are certain blogging platforms more conducive to copying content to Penmob or is Penmob not ready for bloggers at the moment?
Awesome! Interesting that editors want that too, as I would have expected them to want more freedom to take any job, but I guess it also benefits them to not have to work with or share revenue with editors not suited for the job.
Hey, just a quick update that I implemented and tested the basic functionality for hyperlinks in Penmob’s text editor. Images/media are a bit farther down my priority list, though. I’d be very interested in hearing your feedback on what other formatting options feel “essential” vs. “nice-to-have” for a blogger.
Cool. I tried it out and it seems to be processing the links incorrectly:
http://imgur.com/0HS1YsA
I copy/pasted from this blog post: https://mtlynch.io/greenpithumb/
Also, I still can't make it visit the page if I actually click the links. Does that only happen when it's out of draft mode?
I turned my girlfriend onto your site because she's a part-time editor. I think she just edited one of your short stories. She's really enjoying the site so far.
I think it actually has everything essential already.
Links would be nice, but I don't think an editor would ever really have to click one of my links to be able to effectively edit the blog. I like that formatted text and bulleted/numbered lists work already.
Top of my wish list as a blogger would be images. I'd love if you could do
<pre>tag kind of text (like I use a lot of in this post), but at the same time, the more<pre>text that one of my posts has, the less suitable it is for workshop-based editing.Whoops, that was a bug on my part. Should be fixed now if you re-copy.
And yeah, links will click properly when a draft goes live. That's a quirk with Quill, so I'll see if I can hack around that. What's in there now is the basic hyperlink functionality :)
That's so awesome! New editor engagement has been super high compared with new writer engagement, interestingly. Hence my new focus toward writers for the time being, hopefully to the point at which we can see a steady stream of new drafts posted and promoted.
As far as formatting options, there are a few more already available that wouldn't be any trouble to add, I just didn't want to overwhelm the menu with options.
<pre>seems like a coder-specific need, but that might actually represent a large chunk of bloggers. I'll do some testing on that when I have a bit of time.Thanks again for taking another look at it. After another couple weeks of trying things out I ought to have more hard data to show people on here.
True, but I’m guessing there’s still a gap in knowledge for a lot of prospective writers who could genuinely benefit from a workshop. I’ve taken in-person writing workshops in college, workshops run by local community organizers, so when I’d explain the concept of Penmob to my friends I could just say, “like that, but online.” But for writers who haven’t had the privilege of in-person workshops, it’s still up to me to show them how it works and how it could benefit them. That’s one of my big longer-term challenges.
You’re right, there's a whole lot more I could do to account for the inherently multi-media nature of blogs. Hyperlinks are probably more important than images (worst-case, you could link to an image explicitly) in terms of the way text is written and read online. I’ll see if I can incorporate link functionality in a reliable way within the next few days, and punt on the rest until I can survey a larger audience (I’ll leave another comment here to let you know when hyperlinks are working). Quill already does a good job with basic formatting, and in my stripped-down implementation you can either type or copy/paste pre-rendered text with the following styles: bold, italic, strikethrough, subscript and superscript, text-alignment, and bulleted and numbered lists.
Yeah, that was almost universally the first question I was asked when reaching out to editors. They were (probably understandably) wary about a new platform that drives the price down and commoditizes the editing process, but I’ve been able to have some great (and long) conversations with them about the goal of making Penmob the place for the most unique and in-depth editing feedback (thanks to the group workshop aspect) rather than the cheapest editing feedback. My working motto is: better and better, not more and more.
The benefit to editors in this upcoming update is that they can set their own minimum price. I’m hoping that it’ll be a best-of-both-worlds alternative to the public open drafts – maybe the two modes of editing will end up coexisting, or maybe users will flock to one more than the other. Won’t know until we try :)
I wrote two books. I would use this. Ideally I upload a manuscript, accept or reject changes, and download it in the same format (because Amazon has strict formatting guidelines when you self publish). And if you made this a Google Docs extension, that could be a distributor.
That's interesting. You're describing a few of the directions I want this to expand into. Right now, for both technical and platform reasons, we're focused on short-form (i.e. not book-length) manuscripts. I'd like to lift that restriction sooner than later.
But a "track/merge changes" feature is on the radar -- only hang-up with that is Penmob works like a writing workshop, meaning the focus is on developmental editing, so it'll take some design work to make that intuitive.
Other niceties like file upload/export, etc., are on their way.
Just wanted to chime in here to say I think it's fantastic you're tackling this space. I used to write in an online short story community, and have always wanted to "appify" that feedback experience. It's one of my many "bucket-list" of ideas to implement.
As part of that implementation, I had the idea of taking the short-form feedback experience and applying it to long-form book writing by allowing authors to release their book in small bits to a close community for feedback as they are writing - even registered episodic.pub domain for it.
Will be following with very keen interest :)
"Does Penmob have any connection to the actual mob?
Not that we know of, sorry." :D
Thanks! Yeah, the inspiration for Penmob is drawing from personal experience in IRL writing workshops.
I also briefly considered the "serializing" route, and if you end up pursuing a platform in that vein then I'll be very interested in following along. My barrier at the time was that any solution I could visualize was far too "technical". e.g. some folks publish their books and subsequent edits, chapters, or episodes onto GitHub, which is a brilliant use of the platform, but you can't expect writers and their reader fanbases to all sign up for GitHub in order to participate. So I'd just encourage you to put a lot of weight onto the design and UX, making the process easy to grok for non-techies.
That's funny. Just saw someone mention this on /r/writing on Reddit a few days ago. Looks fantastic, great work!
My only feedback would be that when I looked at the site, it seemed like the only listings were the ones on the home page. If there are more, you should add another button below them with something like "View more" that takes people to the registration page.
Oh, that's cool! Do you happen to have a link to the post? I haven't been on Reddit at all with this.
And that's a good point. Right now there are only 3 posted, but as more get posted they will fill in on the homepage. I'll add a "see more drafts" link regardless, which'll take you to the feed of drafts with a bit more of a description for each one.
Can't seem to find it anymore, whoever posted it might have deleted. I do remember people were discussing it in the comments though, so there was definitely some interest!
At any rate, it's cool that you remembered it! I'll try posting something on there shortly.
Probably not your target audience, so take my feedback with a grain of salt. I was a bit confused on what the "open drafts" mean, I'm assuming that if I'm an editor, I could get paid those dollar amounts for editing those drafts?
I would also say it'd be neat to see a "demo" edit on the splash page so I know generally what I'm expecting (what kind of feedback and whatnot).
The login page with "Your workshop awaits" isn't as motivating as perhaps something like "Polish up your next short story hit" or something along those lines (whatever your target use case might be). Being a non-writer, I don't really understand how "my workshop awaits" affects me or motivates me.
Awesome site though :)
Thanks for the notes!
I haven't settled on the exact copy to use for drafts that writers on the website have pre-paid and are currently in their "editing phase". So yes, those drafts under "open drafts" are available right now for editors to work on and get paid. I went ahead and added a one-sentence explanation underneath "open drafts" on the homepage. It used to be "active drafts", but now I'm between "open drafts" and "live drafts". I'm open for suggestions here :)
I do have a mini-demo in the form of a blog post, but at present there isn't an obvious link to it and it's kind of a lot to read through. I'd like to eventually develop something more interactive to demo the editing process, or maybe just make a video, but in the meantime I'll put a link to that post somewhere on the homepage.
And I'll play around with the headline phrase for the login page. Maybe something like "Better writing is just a step away" -- something to motivate actually completing that step of the process. I'm just wary of it getting too wordy there, as I don't want the headline text to distract from the login form or take up too much space.
As for the demo, I think even a simple stylish looking screenshot would do :)
Hmm, okay. That's a better short-term solution :) I'm no graphic designer, but I'll see if I can put something together that's clear and good-looking in the next day or two.
I love projects that improve writing. I publish a science fiction magazine (http://compellingsciencefiction.com), and I wish all the authors who submitted to me used a service like this.
I've actually been validating a product with my writers that is different than your project but in the same space -- I'm working on finding all the little time-sinks and annoyances that short-form authors face, and solving them with an integrated "writer's platform." If the ideas pan out, one of my marketing strategies is to advertise with small publications that tend to attract early-career writers. I'd recommend you do the same for your product. You can reach a very targeted audience for not that much ad spend with a little legwork.
Good luck!
I really dug your IndieHackers interview when it came out :)
And yeah, my biggest challenge so far has been reaching out to writers who are at the right place in their process to both need feedback and recognize that they need feedback. I'll start reaching out to some of the smaller publications that I'm familiar with and see where that takes me. Excited to hear about progress on your writing platform, too!
Looks awesome! As someone who is building a similar product I must admit that it's cool to see other folks out there who agree that that the traditional methods for workshopping can be improved with technology. Best of luck!
Hey, thanks! I remember you mentioning your project somewhere else, and I'm excited to see it!
Great post describing your experience! I'm sure it'll help fellow IHers planning to launch.
I'm not in your target audience, but I have friends who may be in. For me to be able to describe this to them the next time I meet them, it would greatly help if you can include 1 screenshot of the workspace in action on the front page. I "read" what the page said, but it was difficult for me to visualise how the collaborative exercise will happen.
Hey, thanks for checking it out, and for being willing to mention it to friends that might be interested in it.
Either today or tomorrow, I'm going to add a nicer-looking screenshot to the homepage and landing pages. In the meantime there are two posts up that act as sort of a walkthrough, but they're pretty wordy as-is, so I need to figure out how to better promote them. I'll let you know when I get the screenshot posted to the landing pages :)
Just curious - how many months out of seven was the migration of payment API to Stripe Connect accountable?
Oh, only about a week. I spent more time reading the docs than I spent doing the actual integration for Stripe Connect. It's just that they only released a big update to Connect within the last month or two -- before then, the logic I'd put in place to payout people manually via PayPal took quite a while longer, and I ended up scrapping that part.
Cool, it sounds like Stripe Connect does a great job on heavy lifting for you. Now good luck on your product! 👍