Most of Writewith got built in the last 6 weeks, but it’s been a few years in coming.
One of us cofounders, Martin Goldman, started out wanting to solve a big problem — the student newspaper at SUNY Binghamton, Pipe Dream, would sometimes accidentally publish the wrong versions of articles. At the end of a hard night at the copy desks, editors would lose track of which Word document drafts on their computer desktops were the final drafts.
Martin was a computer science major, he just happens to passionately hate stuff like improper punctuation and grammar. So he went into the newsroom and built the staff a system where they could write and edit stories and coordinate their responsibilities all in one place. It worked so well that beyond solving the “wrong-version-got-published” problem, it helped the entire organization work together better. Then he started wondering if other college papers had the same needs.
Around the same time, I was the student business manager at The Stanford Daily. Like Pipe Dream — and most other college papers, as I discovered — our newsroom emailed drafts of stories between staffers, kept track of assignments on a whiteboard in the office, etc…. I had just spent a couple years as a reporter and an editor at the paper, so I was personally inspired to purchase something to stop the pain. After a lot of looking, it became clear to me that the companies building collaboration software for groups did not offer anything cheap and easy for us to use.
There was a hole in the market. Martin started getting other college papers interested in his system. I started thinking that once I finished my job at The Daily (it’s a one-year position), I should go and start a company to try and solve the problem.
To make a long story short, Martin then got a job on the tech side of a major Wall Street bank. Meanwhile, I convinced my childhood friend and genius, Phil Kast, to start a company with me. A short while later, I finally met Martin peddling his wares at a college media convention (not part of his day job) and we joined forces. Phil and I took on side projects to pay the bills while we looked for funding so we could all work full-time.
Note: there are more details about this period that I’ll talk about in later posts. (Like how I tried to start the company as a nonprofit, called Unimedia, where we would use our software to connect student reporters across newsrooms, and so break big stories and become a next-generation Associated Press. Yeah, I’ll leave that stuff for later.)
After initially raising a little money — as the attempted non-profit — from The Stanford Daily, the Associated Collegiate Press and the California College Media Association, we eventually got funding — as a for-profit — from the Canadian University Press, friends and family, and Y Combinator. Turns out that getting nonprofit funding generally requires strong connections to wealthy benefactors, which we didn’t have; turns out that investors in tech startups want to see a chance of a big monetary win in return for taking such a big risk. Lessons learned.
We took the money and iterated on Martin’s system (and we got him to quit his Wall Street job). Over the last few months we did a private beta with 15 or so college papers around the US and Canada. It has been going well… but about 6 weeks ago, we were like “you know, now that we see which features work and don’t work for all these different sizes and types of papers. Maybe the features that do work would be useful for all sorts of groups that need to write together.”
So we built.
(And yes, I wrote this blog post in Writewith and published it from there to here.)
