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It feels to me that they did build this for a certain type of person. One who likes writing without distractions. One who likes to brainstorm. One who appreciates simplicity.

I assume that the initial product was built around the "seasoned and experienced authors" who initially populated the site. And the founder, Dustin Curtis.

It seems that this was built for a very small group of people. But like many products that start out with a small number of people who love it... this could also be appreciated and used by others.

I am not a serious writer, but I hate writing in square spaces ui because its distracting. I might not have been able to articulate this because I'm not a serious writer - But in hind sight I realize that I usually write in word and then paste into squarespace. Svbtle eliminates this process - it makes writing simpler.

So yes. Built for a specific sub set. But with features that everyone can appreciate.




To me that still feels too general: "seasoned and experienced authors" could be a 45 year-old erotica writer who sells books on Amazon, or it could be a 23 year-old tech news blogger who's been posting since age 15.

For example, imagine if the blog post / homepage looked something like this:

"Blogging built for developers"

-"Having trouble building a technical audience?"

-"Want to properly format your posts with syntax highlighting?"

-"Need support for code snippets?"

"Then this platform is for you"


I'll add that the original "selling" point of Svbtle was its "drafts first" approach (that I really appreciate).

There's also a few references in the announcement post today mentioning writers' identity (free custom domain support, full name on everything) that could appeal to some people turned off by Medium's "nice article you just read now here's something else by someone completely different" approach.

Basically, what I see today is a side project growing up. Hard to see that as a bad thing.


Yes, the identity aspect is interesting. Medium seems to be focused on pleasing readers. The whole site is designed to read one article to the next. Often from different authors. This might make reading easier, but might not be best for writers.

Svbtle does have that aspect (it calls itself "a new kind of magazine"), but seems to put a lot of energy into pleasing the writers.


Wait is there custom domain support? If so I'm in! I can't seem to find info anywhere.


I've taken to using Draft for all my writing and then just export the post or whatever to submit it to my blog that's self-hosted on Wordpress.

Using Wordpress to simply serve up my content and manage comments has been working so far. I'm in between being locked in and lazy so I haven't bothered moving to something like Ghost.




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