I always found it a bit ironic that I had less time to blog here as I started working full-time on a blogging startup. Well, my time spent on Skribit is starting to pay off. Today, Skribit finally goes out of what we’ve internally been considering our public beta — so it’s our official launch day. We have been laying low on the marketing and press front, except for my ramblings here, and now we are ready to tell more people about it. That being said, TechCrunch just wrote about Skribit (thanks Daniel!). This is the first step on our so-called “Customer Acquisition Plan”, as MBA as that sounds.
Skribit has always been in an interesting position due to our low burn rate. While I do work full-time on Skribit, I don’t take much in the way of salary as this blog has been paying for my rent and basic living expenses for a while now. You’ll see me playing and testing out different forms of advertising on this blog’s sidebar as I try to find a good combination of revenue streams.
Alright so what’s big in this Skribit release? While this is mostly a polishing-things-up update for those of you that have seen Skribit before, we’re also pretty excited about signup and login via Twitter. Big props to our Ruby on Rails intern Alex Coomans for that feature. Alex is finishing up high school and applying to colleges now; hopefully my letters of recommendation with help with that.
We’re happy about the launch and want people to take full advantage of some of the extra functionality only present in our Pro accounts, so we’re giving out some Pro accounts. Select the Pro account plan, sign up and you’ll be taken to a payments page where you can enter in promotional code “PSTAM” to redeem the account. At the time of this posting it’ll say the price is $1 — I’m going to need to hack in a fix but it should say $0 a bit later.
Thoughts?
Update 12-23-09: I wrote a follow up post on the Skribit blog called Thoughts on a Successful Launch.
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Congratulations Paul. Doesn’t seem like its been two years.
Just visited Skribit’s homepage and I must complain about the introductory video you’ve posted there. The idea is good, a female presence of course, BUT the video is very short and she’s talking very fast- the presentation does not look complete at all. This video is not on par with the rest of the Skribit site…
Thanks for the comment Vassilis – as for the video it was not something done for our homepage, we picked it up from a video blog named Pop Siren, part of Revision 3, that covered us on their own in mid-2008 if I recall correctly. Getting a high-quality screencast for our homepage is something on my to-do list.
Best,
Paul
Congratulations and good luck on the official launch, Paul!
Hey Paul
First up congrats on “going live”. I am really happy to see that you are doing this well with Skribit (and also with this website).
I just signed up for the Pro account (I didn’t use the promo code as I think all your hard work deserves some money and I am happy to support your effort) and will be using Skribit in the new year.
Well done!
Glad things are starting to take shape over at Skribit, Paul. Getting on Techcrunch must have pulled in a reasonable number of new accounts!
I’ve had the side-tab thing on my blog for a good while now, though I’d struggled getting people to use it. Any tips on this boss?
Congrats Paul! Skribit’s background image has a remarkable way of focusing my attention to the page content. Nice hack.
Congrats, Paul! I remember Skribit back when it was just started, and happy to help with all of its success!
Congrats Paul!
Congratulations Paul! Can’t wait to see how skribit grows.
Yay. Just signed up for a pro account. Looking forward to using it. :)
Looks cool! I’ll have to give it a go for a site that I write for, user feedback knows best!
huge congrats Paul! exciting!
“Internal Server Error”
Getting some traffic huh? :)
actually it’s not the site traffic that’s doing that – we handled 20,000 pageviews no problem yesterday… it’s the new users that are installing the widgets. which could be a lot more requests.. and it’s leading our database server to have a toasty 6.0+ load
Think I fixed that.. *crosses fingers*
Congrats on the big launch, Paul!
Good Work on the launch Paul! Being a long-time reader, so congratulations! One problem I had though was I tried signing up for a pro account (I already hold an account) but the $1 caught me as I’m in Australia, and it requires a US address.
Yeah we notice this US-only payments issue until the launch.. never had any paid international users before then haha. Let me know your username and I’ll upgrade you for free.. we’re still trying to work out that payments issue!
Username is ‘timhoward’. Thanks mate.
They’re a year long. The manual over-ride I did for your account bypasses that so ignore what it says! If you have any other concerns just hit me up.
Finally skribit is released. Yet to test it on my blog, so not sure if the feature that i want is in it. I want to see if user asks any question then is it checks if the question is already asked or not ? This feature will be good addition if it’s not there.
Congrats on the roll-out of beta release! Much success to skribit in 2010!
Paul, are the pro memberships for a year or a month, because mine says it’s going to end at the end of this month?
Keep rolling
Reading @Stammy’s Skribit Exits Beta, Gets TechCrunched — PaulStamatiou.com http://bt.io/CBAz
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
busy at Skribit HQ.. it’s launch day! no shortage of blog posts to read http://bit.ly/4VDF8V http://bit.ly/8C0iQ4 http://bit.ly/72jhH4
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Reading @Stammy’s Skribit Exits Beta, Gets TechCrunched — PaulStamatiou.com http://bt.io/CBDb
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Skribit Exits Beta, Gets TechCrunched http://ff.im/-d3GIy
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Cool! Skribit Exits Beta, Gets TechCrunched http://bit.ly/7ws7wI – Have you made any suggestions on my blog? http://j.mp/Z7H
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Question: how did you get the word out to TechCrunch? Did you already have a prior relationship with them? More details about your pitch to them, how long they took to respond etc. would help!
Thanks and good luck!
This comment was originally posted on Skribit Blog
Hey Zak, thanks for stopping by. As for pitching/talking with TechCrunch, I have had a prior relationship with one of their writers (Daniel Brusilovsky) as I have been blogging for 4+ years on my own blog and naturally run into and gotten to know them. Skribit was also mentioned on TechCrunch way back when in November 2007:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/11/startup-weekends-most-recent-startup-skribit/
and I had been mentioned on there when my Yahoo! intern project was launched:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/01/yodel-anecdotal-the-yahoo-corporate-blog/
so they knew a bit about me and were happy to hear my startup launch pitch. I can’t comment on what the process of getting on TechCrunch is like otherwise.
This comment was originally posted on Skribit Blog
giving TC an exclusive on a product launch that lots of people would be interested in is an elitist, suck-up strategy that maintains a chain reaction of bullying contrary to the meritocratic philosophy that many entrepreneurs profess to hold. good luck with that.
This comment was originally posted on Skribit Blog
More on that philosophy here http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/we_will_respect_your_embargoes.php
This comment was originally posted on Skribit Blog
Marshall, thanks for stopping by – been reading you since your TechCrunch days!
I agree with your stance that a launch should be open for everyone to get the scoop on at the same time. That being said we wanted to spread the press out (and I went to TC first because I had a personal connection there, vs cold-emailing/pitching many others), most importantly as we were worried our site could not handle all the traffic from several large blogs all on the same day, and that if we caught a bug (like the ones we did catch as mentioned in this post, also we caught a Twitter overload error and display a graceful message instead of just failing), we didn’t want it to ruin the experiences.
This comment was originally posted on Skribit Blog
Hey! Congrats!! I’m gonna launch my startup soon and would really love to see more posts regarding this topic from you!!!
Best wishes,
Emil Hajric.
This comment was originally posted on Skribit Blog
Skribit Exits Beta, Gets TechCrunched http://bit.ly/6Tu1Iv (via feedly)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@twitter Wht do u think? The #cure for #writers block for your blog? skribit? http://bit.ly/4VDF8V http://bit.ly/8C0iQ4 http://bit.ly/72jhH4
This comment was originally posted on Twitter