Introducing Proseful — Beautifully simple blogging
by Jonathan SutherlandI've always been irked by blogging platforms and website builders posing as blogging platforms. I've made various attempts at blogging in the past, but always got hung up on the platform.
Most blogging platforms seem to have one or more of the following problems:
- Too expensive for personal use.
- Provide a poor writing experience (e.g. finicky editing and controls).
- Aren't designed for writing long-form content (e.g. tiny text boxes).
- Focused on building full-blown websites; blogging is an afterthought.
- Have cluttered and distracting interfaces.
- The platform's brand overpowers your own.
Progress is slowly being made on some of these problems, like improving the writing experience. But you'll have a hard time finding a home for your blog that addresses all of these issues. So, I've set out to make something that does.
#product-feedback-request
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I don't mean to discourage you with this comment, but I wasn't aware a lot of people were writing on the backend editors of their blogs itself as opposed to writing on a word editor and then copy pasting the post into the backend for publishing.
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Yeah, there's definitely people who will always prefer their fav text editor over any platform-specific one. There's also a large number who will write in something like Word or Google Docs, then do a copy-paste... then have to fix all the annoying cross-platform formatting issues. From my experience working for a media company with a large content team, a big reason for this is because most built-in editors provide a terrible writing experience. Making a writing experience that feels effortless is a big part of what I'm working towards.
Thanks for the thoughts! 🙇♂️
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Looks, uh, pretty ghost-y. Which isn't a call-out, I'm just wondering how you're planning (or if you're planning) on differentiating yourself?
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Thanks for checking it out!
Versus hosted-Ghost: A large differentiator was going to be the rich text writing experience. However, since Ghost recently launched their own rich text editor (which looks great), that's obviously moot now.
Hosted-Ghost seems to be targeting more premium users, which their pricing reflects (i.e. starting at $29-36/month). I'll be focusing more on personal blogging, for which I think the Proseful pricing at $7/month is more reasonable. However, Ghost could change their pricing at any time, so it's not something I'm relying on.
Over time, I think Proseful will slowly and steadily set itself apart due to different ideas, opinions and target audience. Since I've kept things quite basic for the MVP, there's not much at the moment. A small example though: Ghost's Medium-style formatting toolbars/widgets v.s. Proseful's fixed toolbar, which is a more informative and less distracting UX, in my opinion.
Versus open source-Ghost: Installing and hosting your own platform is targeting a much different type of user, so it's not something I'm really thinking about.
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Fair points, all! I was thinking largely in terms of the "bare product", since I host Ghost myself, not in terms of pricing.
I'd say you probably want to charge more (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-to-charge-more/) even for a personal blog platform (people who will pay $7/month will likely pay $10, and those that are that price-sensitive probably aren't worth the $3/month). Anyone who isn't "serious" about blogging won't be paying money anyway, but the "prosumers" that you'll want to sell to likely won't mind the difference.
Additionally given your positioning, you could probably benefit from a "Ghost vs. Medium vs. Proseful" landing page. There are probably already people searching "Ghost vs. Medium", so it has a good chance of ranking on those searches, but also helps to differentiate the market segment you're going after from the one those two are fighting over.
At any rate, it looks great. Good luck!
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Love the idea around Ghost vs. Medium vs. Proseful comparison. This seems really important. I think the hardest thing to compete with is content discovery. Medium rewards good content with views and an audience. I could imagine smaller bloggers (primarily interested in personal audiences) using this though!
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Awesome, thanks for the link. I agree with you on the pricing, and will be experimenting with it once this thing gets some traction. I'll be paying to use it for own personal blog, as it's something I've wanted for myself. Personally, $7/month seemed like a price I'd pay for the product in its basic form. But, again, they do say always charge more.
Definitely going to steal that landing page idea.
Thanks, all the best!
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Lovely looking site - Fonts, layout, branding. Great work. Will this be a site like Medium in the future?
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Awesome, thanks Tobe. No plans for a Medium-like community, though the writing experience is on par with Medium. Just focusing on making a simple, clean blogging experience for now.
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Looks nice, landing page design is great! I'll give it a try.
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Thank you sir!
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I love the simplicity of the landing page! I'll definitely be checking this out.
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Thanks for the kind words Ryan 🙏
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
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Thanks for your thoughts, Bahadir. Do you have any links you can share to your previous work in this space? Definitely agree with your bullet on pinpointing a niche audience. I'll be focusing on personal blogging, as this is something I've wanted for my own personal use as well. Will adjust course and/or focus more as I learn more. The marketing aspect is something I'll have to be scrappy about. I'm a noob, and have a lot more research and experimenting to do in that area. Cheers 🍻
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