[CKKim]

I just watched the video. It shows a few people typing with each other online (in this case working together on a collaborative story), a picture being dropped down near the end, and then it being posted to Facebook.

I understand that the product is the software that allows them to do this but it's not clear to me what unique features are being offered that make it superior to the IM programs and forums people have already been writing collaboratively on for years. What am I missing?

[neoveller]

Yeah, the video was designed in a way to capture the experience rather than the tech. What isn't fully exposed:

- what you see is what you get. whenever you want, you can download the story in epub, mobi, or pdf format. while you might have to pay initially, you keep the story itself for any future download at each stage of its development in any format.

- writing is in realtime. you can see what others write, google doc style.

- content discovery is an enormous sell point here. you can write in gdocs all you want, but will just anyone be able to find and read and comment on it? we make stories accessible to the entire future pen.fm community to share and enjoy.

- we can update you on stories that you've subscribed to, to let you know anything from the fact that it's updated, or the section added itself.

- does anyone really enough shuffling back and forth between word/gdocs, chat, and forums?

- and more. hope that's good for now. :)

[CKKim]

Thanks for that, I get it better now. Writing with this isn't something that interests me personally, but I hope it is funded because I reckon watching other people do it in a "spectator" mode would be pretty entertaining!

[fusiongyro]

My brother actually conceived a somewhat similar idea several years ago, but I figured it wouldn't be worth the effort to code and I'm not sure I even knew what technology would be necessary.

If I understand correctly, the idea here is to replace writing workshops. Instead of writing a draft, bringing it in and waiting while your peers read it and mark it up, it's all realtime. I suppose the thinking here is that if you make the whole thing fun and social people will do more of it, or perhaps by making it interactive it will be faster and you won't go as far with a bad concept, or something.

It's a cool idea, but it still strikes me as too expensive to build for what you're getting. And I think you get better writing out of putting in time and thought. But the amateur market is probably a lot bigger than the professional market, so maybe it doesn't matter.

[neoveller]

What do you mean exactly by "too expensive to build"? I taught myself how to code a year ago, and I managed to build a pretty complete platform in a month.

To put this in some other perspective as well, I started a similar startup Neovella two years ago, before I knew how to code. It was entirely the collaborative writing side of things--no reader feedback or anything. The community grew pretty well, and we published 4 anthologies of short stories from it. The experience was awesome and unexpectedly amusing. My engineering team (1 man with a full-time job, working for free) couldn't keep up with bug fixes and features requests, and so it kind of withered away and died... but Neovella still receives users to this day who hope to find something other than a ghost town so they can continue to write in a community. I sent out an email to my former users telling them about PenFM, and the feedback overwhelmed me. People loved the product and were entirely supportive, and replied as such, even if they didn't have the means to donate anything. That's more of why I'm doing it. Also because I'm finally able to code it up all on my own, and not let down my user-base anymore.

[fusiongyro]

I mean it in a couple of ways. Personally, it was too expensive to build because I simply couldn't see spending the time to do it. Part of that (for me) was that it was 2006 and I just didn't know what technology I'd need to invent or find that would do it. There was mod_pubsub and BOSH, and both were kind of a pain, and that's obviously not what they're planning on using.

The second way is just the perennial question of how is it going to pay the bills. Amateur writers… does that sound like a demographic where everybody has an extra $5/month for your service? Could be, but I'm not quite naive enough to try it and find out. I'm not really a "startup guy" though (I'm here for the articles and the conversation), some people who are less risk-averse seem tempted to try; maybe they'll get rich, it's impossible to predict.

Actually your experience illustrates perfectly what I might mean by too expensive to build, don't you think? You and one guy on the side and you couldn't keep up—you may be tempted to find a scapegoat in yourself, your team or your code but frankly nearly every project needs more developers and more time. This is your hobby now, so you know that you can lavish a couple hours a week on something indefinitely, but you've probably also noticed that boring bug fixes are hard to get motivated to do when you only have an hour left in the day and want to do something fun.

Anyway, kudos to you for learning to code, and I'm sorry to hear your project withered. Sounds to me like you did the right thing here.

[neoveller]

I have a few months of runway. My previous engineer was my dad, and didn't have a sense of urgency about it. I have a month or two of runway now, and every time there's a bug to fix, that bug is the most important thing ever--because until it's fixed, I'm not delivering my users the experience they deserve. They could be elsewhere, doing something else.

Neovella withered not for lack of interest--it withered because it was spec'd out by an idea person straight out of school with an economics degree, and engineer who insisted on building everything in C# :)

[jasondenizac]

I think SignalR and WebApi would be perfectly suited to this type of project, @neoveller. Add some KnockoutJS and host in on Azure for the total package - all for free with BizSpark. Anyhow, I'm being slightly facetious, but you really can't blame the tech stack :)