Looks like an awesome service that I'd love to use. Currently using Grammarly for proofreading, auto correct, etc.
My only drawback is the price. $3.33 per word? Seems ridiculously expensive, no?
@_shahedk Yeah, that's way more than I would pay a writer. The highest writers are generally paid is twenty-five cents a word (it's normally lower). Seems like you would be better off just hiring a great writer, or pretty much any other editor.
Hey, guys. John here. I agree that the pricing is high but I'm collecting some of the best editors in the business. There are plenty of fiverr folks who will make sure your and you're are right but we are working within the confines of your needs, brand, and organization to bring out your best.
As for our tech we are currently building out a few cool features but as it stands you and your editor can talk via Slack and share documents as necessary. This is a very hands-on process. Again, if you don't want that there are plenty of options.
Let me know what else you guys would like to know!
@johnbiggs John this is touching on a major personal and commercial need. Editors have so much quality and fit variance, I would like to see the editor profile before paying. I'm looking forward to different tiers of pricing and quality. When will you be quitting your day job to build this fulltime?
@johnbiggs there are also plenty of professional journalists/editors that are at a high level that got paid $40k a year at their last newspaper job. Professional freelance journalists don't get paid even a third of the rate listed above.
You create velvet rope with your price tag, you lose most of your audience. (And if you're trying for an elite user base, you need to say that.)
I hope you find a balance with your pricing.
@johnbiggs I'm confused who the pricing model appeals to. If I'm cool dropping $1600 on a 500 word blog post (the average) then I probably have an in-house editor or at least a regular freelance editor. I still love the idea though and I'll try it out - just maybe for something smaller
Neat idea. After reading "Simple, transparent pricing" I was unable to find any clue about the pricing on the website. And that would be nice as I would love to have any idea what sum should I plan in my budget ;)
@adamlabedzki I found that to be pretty odd too. You have to upload a document to see a price. I uploaded the first pdf I could find (legal form from a dentist) and got "$160 for 536 words".
Careful, on your "Our work" page, there's a mistake in the first sentence of the "after edit" document :)
Great product though, would love to submit a piece to your editors!
@antoineauffret there's more than one mistake, actually. First, the words "have been" are repeated. Secondly, the comma between "130 billion, times" isn't correct, either (it should probably be placed after "times"). There are a few errors scattered throughout the "After editing" document, for example on page 3 the penultimate paragraph just ends without its last sentence being complete.
I'm all for charging good money for a good service, especially one that requires an extensive amount of training and experience, but their example doesn't seem to fit their claims.
@dertyp@antoineauffret I had a quick glance over the example, as it's something I could be interested in. However, not at that price, and not based on their example, which should have had several people going over it a hundred times to make sure it's correct.
I picked up more than a handful of errors.
@antoineauffret It has quite a few minor issues still, but I think the idea they're getting across is that this is more of a structural edit than a proofread. What they did was take an article from complete shit to semi-decent rather than take it from complete shit to grammatically perfect shit. At that price you'd hope for both, but if they're working more with editors than copy editors it's not that surprising.
A good structural edit is tougher to do and a lot harder to find than someone who will just correct spelling and grammar, but success depends more on rapport with your editor. I'm not sure I'd trust it to a service, particularly at that rate. This thing would probably benefit from some form of introductory pricing to get over that hump. The people who know enough to recognize the value of this service also probably care enough not to trust their writing to just anyone.
@jxav I agree with you, but if I send a complete shit but grammatically correct article, I'd expect the "after edit" piece to be at least as good in terms of grammar. IMO the grammar "regression" is not acceptable, especially for that price. Besides, the overall give the impression that the work has been done quick and dirty, regardless of the relevance of the structural improvements...
I used to write a lot more and helped organize a small group of blogging founders in a project called Startup Edition with @nbashaw a while ago. Often before publishing our posts, we would share them and get feedback, often using this GitHub-like version control editor. Having a fresh pair of eyes review your writing and suggest specific edits was incredibly helpful.
@johnbiggs -- this probably goes against what you're focused on -- paid editing services -- but do you see this evolving into more of a community of writers helping each other?
@rrhoover@nbashaw Potentially. We are building as we're flying so it's hard to say. We have a great group of editors who are getting started on the platform so we could soon start creating an editorial A-Team that the world can access.
I would NOT mention TechCrunch alongside the times - the editorial integrity of TC is really subpar, can't even count the grammatical issues, typos and other crap I've seen go through on assorted live posts...and is it really 3 bucks a word? or was somebody kidding? could not find pricing info on the site...
@passingnotes You might be confusing an editor with a proofreader? An editor makes sure that the story is on-topic, powerful, and communicative. A proofreader catches typos.
@nrose@passingnotes I think I was confused. Have you thought about providing the full writing service? I think it's easier/faster to write than to edit. And then you could prove your ROI. If I give you a list of topics and you provide a set of blog posts for X dollars, I can measure that. Whereas, if I write the piece, that's already a lot of my time, which is expensive.
remarkable idea. created by someone who truly understands the problem and can solve it. i had that need myself numerous time. would not be surprised to see this take off
Great idea. I rely on a fairly informal reciprocal network of folks who write and have professional experience in topics I write about today - it's nice to know of other alternatives, especially for more long-form content. This will be super-valuable if you classify and can search for editors w/ experience w/ certain types (and topics) of content.
Would love to hear more of your long term product vision, @johnbiggs. From the looks of it, Typewriter seems more like an MVP test – I mean, it's a web form that funnels high-end freelancing work to you and a couple of editor friends, who work with clients the old fashioned way, right? What's your mission? Why have you created this? Side project or 100% project? I see you're also CEO of a fintech product currently in waitlist phase.
Many of the upvotes seem to be people projecting their hopes for what this service could be, not what it is. It's surprising and intriguing that this got front-paged. I too was drawn to this product because I think there's a need for on-demand editing services. The product I imagined I was clicking was actually an API or Gmail plug-in or Google Drive add-on or Zapier zap or IFTTT channel that makes it a one-click or no-click affair to get quality editing done at a good price. That's pretty far from what it turned out to be!
Being a direct competitor in this space, I agree that the price point is quite high for just editing and/or proofreading. I believe that John's (@johnbiggs) service is meant to be much more than that. To me it seems like more of editing with editors that are specialized in their fields and know what and how to say it. The editors seem to be influencial in their field and provide more than just editing; they provide insight as well. Of course that comes with a price which some people are not willing to pay, and that's understandable. I know that we had a difficult time fine tuning our pricing to find that sweet spot where you are still getting high quality as well as value. Of course there are many services that provide editing and proofreading, but it seems they are trying fill a need by having influencial editors in their fields which no other service provides. We had the same issue with editorr; there are other services that do what we do, but we separate our service by creating a unique way to dispatch our writing request. This allows for a faster turn around time, and overall just being awesome! Point being, unless I am misunderstanding the point of the service, it's much more than just proofreading and editing. For that, you need to pay more.
This looks like an awesome service. I'd be interested to see them expand into AI editors after they have amounted a substantial amount of documents and data.
Always good to have more products to help writers, but at $0.30 per word, this product is an order of magnitude more expensive than competitors at $0.03 per word. I don't see how it's worth 10x.
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