When I was working on Startup Edition, contributors would often share rough drafts of their blog post asking for feedback. I did the same and found it to be one of the best ways to improve my writing. Nice to see someone build a community just for this.
@rrhoover Definitely sharing your rough drafts is a great way to improve! We ran some twitter polls to find out about people's publishing habits and found that for 50% of writers ~75% of their drafts go unpublished. Then we followed that up with another that found for 60% showing a draft to just one friend lead to it being published 90% of the time! That's why we wanted to make this 😄
On a sidenote, we really didn't expect to be featured yet, we'd talked about not having this out yet as it's very much a "rough draft." Maybe it's good for us though, and will be helping us to practice what we preach! 😅
@nico_lrx Hey Nicolas! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Your comment highlights why we are keeping the design rough -- posting to a clean and beautiful (some might say perfect 😉) platform like Medium has an intimidation factor associated with it, we believe. In a way, we want Only Rough Drafts to be the scapegoat for you -- on a "rough" looking platform, your writing can be rough, and that's OK. What's important (as @rrhoover mentioned above) is to get over our natural fear of sharing our ideas, and just hit the "Get it out!" button and put yourself out there, get some feedback, and use that to develop the next draft.
That and this is still very much a beta version / MVP / [insert your favorite excuse here😛] of the platform! Better days coming soon!
From the same folks who brought you https://www.producthunt.com/tech..., Only Rough Drafts is a community to share your drafts and get feedback. You can generate private links so only those you share your draft with can read it. They also lock posts if they are public after they get 25 views I believe. It's just enough to get some feedback, but not enough to go viral before you are ready.
You can publish to the platform using the native app Rough Draft.
@nbrempel Thanks for the hunt and the great description, Nick! I don't think I could have said it any better myself, but wanted to point out that thanks to the Product Hunt community almost all posts get locked fairly quickly, so we'll be playing with the view count a bit. We plan to eventually make this setting user-defined, and allowing for posts to be locked after any combination of view count, comments, or a (forthcoming) feature: feedback highlights.
@anandp29 We're working on ways for people to share a collection of chapters and link them together. I've posted a few chapters of a book I'm writing, but right now it works best for posts/short-stories.
Hey everyone 👋
I wanted to let you know that we decided to shut down Only Rough Drafts for the time being.
While we are still very hopeful that a community for only the first / rough drafts of writing will provide a ton of value for writers, our team is focusing on some other problems to solve at the moment.
Thanks for all the support and please don't hesitate to get in touch if you're interested in working on this idea!
Report
Get @playswithfood, has there been anymore more movement on this? I've made a tool for myself for writing rough drafts, but have a community around them feels like it would be really cool!
Product Hunt
LongShorts Stories
PrivacyAngel
LongShorts Stories
PrivacyAngel
Instant Vitals
LongShorts Stories
Appcues
LongShorts Stories
Link Texting
LongShorts Stories