[enewc]

I disagree. If you have a flawed business model, or a product that's simply not that desirable, then execution doesn't matter. Junk ideas remain junk, regardless of how well they are marketed.

In this case, it's my opinion that the startup in question was just never a good idea to begin with. No solid business model and no good reason why it would be widely adopted.

[kkowalczyk]

I'm not the author of penflip but you're missing a big thing: Editorially had 11 people on staff (https://editorially.com/about).

Penflip apparently is just one person.

If penflip makes $500k/year, it's a lot for 1 person but not even close to covering 11 people.

Collaborative writing is not a junk idea. There is a bazillion of different takes on that (draft, all the etherpad clones, google docs, ...).

[kskz]

Starting an entire company based on collaborative writing is a junk idea. It's a niche service without much room for improvement, and it's currently being provided for free by one of the largest software companies in the world.

There is no way that this will ever achieve anything close to $500k/year. For this to happen, at $8/month it needs to attract 5000+ subscribing, paying users. This is not going to happen when anyone can just use Google docs for free. Especially when Google is more well-known, better maintained, and integrates into existing Google accounts. There is just no good reason to sign up for a new service.

Most people have never heard of draft or etherpad. I'm willing to be that they are not actually generating any substantial revenue either, which is the benchmark for whether it's a good idea to start a business or not.

[pknight]

That's nonsense. Their are whole industries that could use better collaborative tools (such as the book publishing industry). Have you tried writing a book? The tools are so limited.

Google docs for example is not a great tool for writing books, in fact there are very few tools that are particularly nice to use that are web based and strong on the collaborative front.

I think the problem perhaps with Editorially is too much pressure to get things going early. If there's 10+ people with salaries, sales better be good. I think a bootstrapping approach or an open source approach a la WordPress would be much more viable. Editorially seems to have only failed because of their specific criteria, not because there's isn't a need for a better tool.

[kskz]

No, I don't think there is much of a demand, at least not enough to sustain an entire business. You would need to be pulling in serious money from publishers, and on top of that, you're trying to change a system that largely already works. I've published myself, and e-mailing drafts was fine. The only times I've ever seen collaborative documents being used by average people were a) real-time coding interviews, and b) filling out forms. People would not be willing to pay money in either case, no matter how good it is.

[davidandgoliath]

In the same vein, starting a store is silly, Walmart is already selling everything one could ever want..

[ternaryoperator]

A store is the wrong analogy for the point you're trying to make. A store has the dimension of locality, which means that a store that duplicates another one exactly but is in a different location can still propser. (Starbuck's, McDonald's, etc.)

[kskz]

If you're selling worse quality products at a higher price than Wal-mart, then yes, it is silly to start a store right next door. You will probably lose money, like most startups based on bad ideas.