@stewfortier | Hacker News

Ah, there should be a slider on the pricing page that lets you slide between plans. In hindsight, I can see how that might not be clear. Let me know if you still don't see it.

We do have some writers for whom English is a second language. We also have a handful of collaborators who have experience working with those folks. So far, those writers tend to be up front that English is their second language and so the contributors who jump into their work tend to self-select based on if they feel qualified to help. For now, this sort of emergent pairing of writers and contributors tends to give us more flexibility in what we can handle (as you noted, there's a lot of nuance within just this one use case).

And the tutor / tutorial model is certainly interesting (we've thought about it in a different context: hiring a writing coach), our general sense was that it is different enough from our core draft-level editing service that it's out of scope for the foreseeable future. I do agree there are certain things you can do live that are much harder (or impossible) to do asynchronously in doc comments.

That's good to know, thank you. Our background isn't in academia, so this wasn't necessarily on our radar. Will keep it in mind as we further develop our content policy.

This is really good feedback. Thank you.

That's certainly a possibility, but I'm not sure Foster would necessarily be the best tool for a use case like that. Our contributors tend not to directly re-write specific content. Most of the input happens at the idea level. A lot of GPT-3 tools like Wordtune would likely be more helpful in finding new language to express the same idea.

We were wondering who that other bidder was… ;)

To clarify, the product lets you request collaborators you’ve enjoyed working with in the past to help with future drafts. I agree it’s rewarding and helpful to form longer-term bonds with the right collaborators.

On pricing, that’s helpful feedback. We’ve found that the writers who get the most value out of Foster tend to be ones that write regularly. The monthly pricing helps us self-select for those customers and we’ve found it created a self-fulfilling mechanism for encouraging writers to submit more work (and often to write more: https://twitter.com/liuxi/status/1511191555796729862).

But it’s not perfect and I can imagine a world where we can support work on a more one-off basis.

We’ve found a lot of our more experienced writers end up finding it useful for that same reason, too: https://twitter.com/tomcritchlow/status/1535404631123173376?...

Human feedback loops can adjust nicely to pretty much anyone’s skill level.

Very cool. We plan on working with more writing platforms in the future, but at least within our early pool of users Google Docs was the most popular text editing / writing platform.

Whoa, this is cool ;)

We think this can get really big if we find a way to reach people who don’t currently work with an editor but would benefit immensely if they did. We believe most online writers fit into this category.

Can you elaborate more on why you don’t think having writing that performs better justifies the cost?

Example: you pay for our $99/month plan and over six months you write a 1,000-word post each month and submitted it on HN. If one of them ended up on the home page, you don’t think it would generate at least ~$600 in value for the author?

Ah, sorry to hear that. That sounds like a crappy editor; I can see why you'd be skeptical.

Awesome! We hear this same thing from a lot of small teams. We're excited to help in any way we can. If you have any questions or requests, you can reach me directly at stew at foster dot co.

Long-term, I think our moat has more to do with network effects and less to do with technical barriers to entry. I think our success hinges more on our ability to create incentives that attract & retain the highest-quality contributors so that we reliably create an incomparable experience for writers.

Yep, we had assumed what we're building might be most helpful for smaller companies with one content or marketing person, but in our conversations with larger companies it turned out that almost everyone feels understaffed and that Foster could be helpful in at least filling in some gaps.

As we got into the weeds of what it'd take to build for a few large customers first, it seemed that we'd have a lot of custom functionality and servicing required that wouldn't necessarily generalize to other customers.

Our theory is that if we can build a product that works on the individual atomic unit of writing (the draft) then we'll be able to move upmarket – whereas the inverse may not be as likely. On some basic level, a team just produces a higher volume of drafts than an individual.

Focusing on individual writers and individual drafts allows us to stay much more focused on the atomic experience for now.

Yep, you got it. This is one key reason we're focused on a human editing / collaboration experience. It seems likely that the GPT-3 space will get commoditized fairly quickly and the type of support we provide isn't within striking distance of the machines... yet ;)

Sure thing, hopefully this answer above sheds some more light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31851445

For now, I'll just say it's a possibility we find very interesting :)

Specifically, we think it'd be cool for contributors (editors) to earn more than just money and reputation by editing on Foster. It'd be exciting for them to have a direct say in things like what types of writing we want to collectively support, new ways we might support writers, and how we generally build a passionate contributor community. We want to do anything to make it rewarding and worthwhile to be a contributor and DAOs offer some intriguing new ideas and tools for how we might do that.

We've experimented a lot here. In our latest iteration, a fixed "bounty" gets assigned to a draft. Contributors have access to a feed of drafts that fit their skillsets & interests. The writer can then indicate how helpful each contributor was and the bounty is split pro-rata amongst those contributors.

We had originally assumed that editors would not like this sort of variability, but two things have ended up happening: 1) their per-hour rate ends up being the same on Foster given that the work comes directly to them (no selling themselves, doing onboarding calls, etc.) and 2) they strongly value the freedom to select drafts that intrinsically interest them. It also leads to a much better experience for the writer since there tends to be more of a missionary spirit, rather than a purely mercenary one.

Cool! I always find it exciting when other people have experienced how transformative great editing is.

I agree that most non-writers tend to think of editing as either an afterthought, unnecessary, or only something that professionals do. It makes positioning here really tough.

One thing we've experimented with isn't selling editing per se, but trying to counter-position ourselves to the publishing into the void problem. Like, "hey - you're probably busting your ass writing and publishing a bunch, but nothing is happening. That's because silence is a crappy teacher. There's a better way to write..."

Most of the writers who have used Foster were not working with an editor before they joined, but once they submit their first draft they often say they can't believe they ever wrote without getting feedback first.

I think if we can figure out positioning this in a new way and if we deliver a genuinely new editing experience (the input you get reliably goes far beyond catching grammar errors), it will unlock a ton of latent demand and be big. If not, I agree with you that selling editing is hard to scale.

Yep, that's the key insight we've built this around. Our contributors tend to focus on ideation and developmental feedback where the core of an idea or story can be refined or, in some cases, re-imagined entirely.

We think Grammarly and other tools will continue to be helpful for proofreading and adding some final polish.