
Show HN: Proseful – A simple blogging platform - sutherland
https://proseful.com
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andrew_
Looks similar to [https://write.as/](https://write.as/), which was featured on
HN many moons ago. I'm left to wonder if the mass exodus from Medium will
spawn more of these types of smaller platforms.

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newscracker
And, IMO, yet another blogging platform (similar to write.as) that charges
quite a lot for paid subscriptions. I can't get why personal blogs that need
custom domains and a few different flairs need such a service that costs a lot
more than most email services cost (I know write.as has a basic plan at $1 per
month, but it seems limited).

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thebaer
Customers find these services valuable enough to pay their prices, and
services optimize for that audience. But what would be your ideal price for a
personal blog?

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newscracker
Most personal blogs don’t usually have a lot of content on a continuous basis.
People starts blogs with enthusiasm, then life catches up (or writer’s block
or distractions). They usually don’t get a lot of traffic either (including
from search engines). Of course, there are many personal blogs where people
put a lot of effort to write often and grow the audience. But that’s a
minuscule percentage. With that perspective, and considering that most
personal blogs are primarily text and don’t use too many large images or
embedded videos (storage is not a big concern), I’d say that $10 or €10 a year
would be sort of ok. I’m just throwing this pseudorandom figure to get it
close to what some of the cheapest domains cost and how much some of the
cheapest paid email services cost. This is not intended to be a (de)valuation
of the software behind the platform and the effort to maintain the platform.

WordPress (wordpress.com) provides a custom domain and an ad free blog for
less than $20 (AFAIK) a year.

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thebaer
> This is not intended to be a (de)valuation of the software behind the
> platform and the effort to maintain the platform.

That's the rub. If you were running the service, just speaking practically,
how many customers would you need at $10 / €10 per year to pay for the
servers? How about to pay your salary? What if you wanted to hire one
additional employee?

(Also, WordPress.com shows you ads unless you pay at least $36 / year -- and
they're large enough that they could reduce the price to whatever they want,
unlike a bootstrapped service starting from $0.)

But there's also the valid point you mention, which is that many people have
no more than a passing interest in blogging, and thus might not value a
blogging platform at more than the price you suggested. We see this happen
with Write.as. But then it might actually make more sense for platforms to
charge more -- think about if you were just starting out a workout routine.
Would you be more willing to go to the gym regularly if you were paying just
$1 per month for a membership, or $40 per month? An investment in the tool
helps you invest in the habit.

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newscracker
I hadn’t realized earlier that you’re the founder of Write.as. I completely
get the cost factors for small, bootstrapped platforms and also how larger
players can have loss leaders in their offerings. Pricing is experimental, in
my view. A seller ought to try different pricing to capture more income from
different segments of users who have different valuations and needs (this may
not be very easy to do).

In the case of Write.as, I see some points that seem weird to me.

One is the character limit in the pricing tables. I don’t know if anyone is
going to look at that and decide which option to go for. The 100000 character
limit in the lowest tier would probably be around 15000 words or so. That’s a
very high limit for most blog posts, and is in the long form article
territory. So I don’t think that anyone looking only at character count for a
blog would need anything more.

The other part is not having a price tier between $12 a year and $60 a year.
That’s a big gap if you’re focusing on personal blogs.

Lastly, on the point of the gym membership comparison, I’ve heard this logic
of commitment being tied to loss aversion. But I’ve practically seen it work
badly (not as expected at all), and resulting in more loss aversion that
prevents people from signing up for anything with a larger commitment next
time. That’s just been my observation.

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julesjanssen
The blogs don't seem to have an RSS feed. I might be old-fashioned but I think
that's one of the first requirements of a blog platform no?

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sutherland
I didn't get around to RSS for the MVP, but it's definitely going in–I want it
for my personal blog. Consider me old-fashioned too.

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azhenley
This looks nice. Are you planning on keeping it as individualized blogs or
will you be going the Medium/Blogger route and trying to get readers to make
an account and read other blogs?

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sutherland
Thanks! Individual blogs for now. I'd like to focus on making a great
blogging/writing experience first.

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azhenley
I actually hope you _don 't_ go the route of Medium! Good luck, I'll show this
to a few of my friends who have been looking for a new blogging platform.

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sutherland
Much appreciated!

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spython
Any connection to [http://prose.io/](http://prose.io/) ?

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catchmeifyoucan
Can I host it myself? I'd pay a few bucks for that.

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kfk
How does it work with SEO? Can you still show up in google if you target a
specific topic?

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lohszvu
How is this different from blogger?

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quickthrower2
Or Ghost?

This looks more modern than blogger

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sutherland
Versus Ghost: Over time, I think Proseful will steadily set itself apart due
to different ideas, opinions and target audience. Since I've kept it basic for
the MVP, there's not much at the moment. Open-source Ghost is targeting a much
different type of user, as is hosted Ghost with a price point starting at
$29-36/month.

