Your main problem is also what you are trying to sell - your simplicity. The site looks bad -- as in, it looks like the Rails 15 minute blog tutorial with a few extra things. This isnt simplicity - this is bare-bones. Simplicity is easy to use, easy to understand, and beautiful to look at. After I signed up I was immediately thrown into writing a blog post. What? What is this? Am I supposed to write a post? Is it private? Who can see it? You've thrown me into the water when I don't know how to swim, because you assume the life preserver is getting in my way.
I don't have a tumblr, but I tried them out today. I was up an running faster than your site - and they don't charge money! They didn't ask for my first or last name, all they asked for was email, password, URL -- all on one page as well.
Finally, the fact that your site is so bare-bones, but yet charges money, will cause problems. What's to stop me from building a site very similar to this in a weekend and charging $5/month? Or nothing? I feel it will be extremely hard to have a good business plan with "we have less features".
There is a huge difference between simple and lacking in features, yours falls into the latter category. Something like Tumblr (although full of features) is "simple" because at its core is the ability to do everything you need for a blog to do in a few clicks, but if you need to do more complicated things you can, that makes tumblr simple.
Yours is literally 2 features, creation of blogs and making posts. I don't see where the market for your platform is, if I want this why don't I just use HTML files on shared hosting? Same features + a custom domain, lower cost.
Tumblr also shares Brytter's feature of providing a consistent experience for readers. While you can visit an individual blog which will have it's own theme and unique elements, most Tumblr users are reading in the dashboard, do designing your theme is not a huge deal.
Tumblr and Posterous are so good, not to mention Wordpress — I really wouldn't want to get into the blogging market at the moment.
"Yes, it's true, most other blogging platforms are free. We charge money for ours because we want writers, not advertisers, to be our customers."
First off, I think this is great. If I were a more serious writer, I think I'd enjoy being on a platform, knowing that other people in the network were also serious writers. The idea of having a blog I'm committed to enough to pay a bit for is appealing to me. I think there might be a market there.
However, what people are saying is correct - the product is overly simple. Before you charge for something, people are going to need to see the advantage over starting a Wordpress blog like everybody else. If the design was elegant and the community (as mentioned above) were proven, I could see asking $9/month.
Apart from that, congrats for having launched. Take the feedback (of all kinds) in stride, listen carefully to what people are saying, and iterate like crazy.
I signed up and chose "www.brytter.com" for my blog subdomain as a joke. Brytter may have given me the ability to edit "blog.brytter.com" See http://i.imgur.com/efXdt.png
I have logged out of my account since I do not want to cause any harm. Please fix.
You aren't authorized to [save] any changes you make. I hit that page, too, but when I tried to save changes, it threw this at me: 'You are not authorized to access this page.' http://i.imgur.com/nbMLF.png
My 100% honest opinion... there isn't enough value at present to warrant a paid plan.
Your platform looks nice, but I think the business model that drives it will need to be rethought.
One of the issues here is that the problem you're attempting to address has already been solved.
The technology barrier to self-publishing is already low enough. No disrespect to non-technical people, but if you can't figure out how to set up a Tumblr blog, then there are larger issues at hand.
In other words, you can keep lowering the barrier to self-publishing, but eventually you're not left with much of an actual business. I think criticsquid's reply said it well; there's a huge difference between simplicity and lacking in features.
I think one direction you might look into is selling yourself as a discriminating/curated blog platform, much like The Deck did with their curated Ad Network for the creative industry.
At any rate, you need to add some value here. At present, I just can't (personally) see any reason why I'd choose your platform over the other options.
Work with a designer to give it the elegance that it needs and I believe you're on to something here. What you describe in the opening paragraph resonates true to almost everyone who has tried blogging only to give up after a few weeks. (I pay 7.99/mnth to host my MovaleType blog that has stale content from years ago..)
You did a great job convincing me I need something to fix it.
Increase the quality of the design by attention to detail (the colour is great.. find the right reading font, line-height, buttons, fields styles etc) and make the experience *elegant"and I think that's when you'll see adoption.
How are you better than posterous with their simplest theme? It is cool to charge, but not for something that takes no effort to do. And if it is important, you can have the most basic wordpress installation (self or company hosted option) for far less the price and far more the confidence in the platform.
I blog. I don't have much fun while doing it. So, I could possibly be a good customer.
But... I don't get how you are better. You have only stating that you are better. I would also like to see examples of your strength (I know you pointed that your blog is running on the platform, but I don't see anything useful on your blog about how you are better).
Try looking at http://www.smugmug.com/ They have a similar philosophy to you guys (in the photos space).
"please be a free member for a month, for a blogging system that features you're not gonna see until you use it."
I think that's asking too much for a blogging system where it has free and wastly used alternatives. You guys need to put up a video and/or a presentation, some visual candy so that people would know what they are about to get.
the example in the main page does not show anything that is being backed up by a blogging system. it's just text and a hyperlink.
SETT is mine... Applied to YC almost a year ago, didn't get in, been hustlin' anyway.
Right now it's in private alpha, just a group of 20 trusted people running through it. By the end of this month, it will be running on my personal blog. I'll make a post on HN about it then.
Agreed, it's interesting but I have no way to gauge it. There's no obvious publication date so for all I know it's 5 years old (and not very popular). In contrast, if it was just launched I would be much more willing to try it out in spite of there been no clear examples of successful communities.
This may very well be revolutionary but my time is limited. Google searches for "sett blog" return nothing. #sett on twitter is more nothingness. It's ironic: I am not heavily engaged in social media at all, but turns I need social proof in situations like these.
Nice job. Don't sweat the flack about your pricing model. I think it's got potential. You'll just have to work hard and find who your market is. And test different price levels along the way. Goodluck.
If you force the user to only have one page layout, please offer one that provides the best readability. Black font on grey background is not the best choice for that.
One man's great design is another man's piece of shit, so ignore design feedback -- social software lives and dies by three words... community, community, community.
Yes, but since there is no other posts on that blog we have no idea what a content populated version would look like. Nor is there a list of blogs on brytter.com
How does the history page look with multiple posts?
What does the post creation tool look like?
Possibility of LiveFyre or Discus?
Should I have to sign up to find out what the features of your new blogging platform are, aside from simplicity? You want our money and support, sell it to us.
1. Signed up, tried to create a blog called "test" - nothing happens.
2. Trying again - nothing.
3. Probably occupied already I think and try with "testing" - some red-letter angry error.
4. Changing URL to Brytter.com, clicking on "my blogs" - barely visible in the top right corner despite being logged in - getting prompted with a "which blog would you like to do write on" dropdown.
5. No "test" nor "testing" there - and no way to create a new blog.
On topic: this will probably not roll as-is. How about a $1/month fee (or even $1/year would be enough i think)? How about pay-to-read posts?
Off topic, since a blog is the "hello world" of web development for quite a few years now: how many of you have created blogging-related web apps? I 'll start with http://instablogg.com
Your main problem is also what you are trying to sell - your simplicity. The site looks bad -- as in, it looks like the Rails 15 minute blog tutorial with a few extra things. This isnt simplicity - this is bare-bones. Simplicity is easy to use, easy to understand, and beautiful to look at. After I signed up I was immediately thrown into writing a blog post. What? What is this? Am I supposed to write a post? Is it private? Who can see it? You've thrown me into the water when I don't know how to swim, because you assume the life preserver is getting in my way.
I don't have a tumblr, but I tried them out today. I was up an running faster than your site - and they don't charge money! They didn't ask for my first or last name, all they asked for was email, password, URL -- all on one page as well.
Finally, the fact that your site is so bare-bones, but yet charges money, will cause problems. What's to stop me from building a site very similar to this in a weekend and charging $5/month? Or nothing? I feel it will be extremely hard to have a good business plan with "we have less features".