Editorially is shutting down

Shameless plug: I&#x27;m building Penflip.com, an alternative to Editorially. It has a clean markdown writing interface and git for version control. It&#x27;s like GitHub, but for writing. I quit my job 5 months ago and have been working on this full time ever since, 100% bootstrapped. I think the space still has tons of untapped potential.<p><a href="http://www.penflip.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penflip.com</a>

If you&#x27;ve used Editorially and enjoyed it, I&#x27;d like to recommend my own application that I am currently developing called Typewrite ( <a href="https://typewrite.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typewrite.io</a> ). Though it&#x27;s only been in development for about a month an a half, it is relatively inexpensive to run and I don&#x27;t plan on shutting it down anytime soon.<p>It has live collaboration like Google Docs, and a simple interface like Byword, iA Writer, or Editorially. I&#x27;m working behind the scenes to add features and documentation and plan on releasing updates for it every so often.<p>If you are interested in seeing why I created Typewrite, please read the first blog post at: <a href="http://blog.typewrite.io/2014/simplicity-in-real-time/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.typewrite.io&#x2F;2014&#x2F;simplicity-in-real-time&#x2F;</a>

My email to mandy when i signed up:<p>&gt;It seems awesome. However earlier I had asked, How this is different than Google Docs in terms of &#x27;competition&#x27; and features.<p>Her Response: &gt;The principal difference is that we&#x27;re focused exclusively on the editorial process, while Google Docs also aims to do a lot of other things. I don&#x27;t have a feature comparison handy, but you might be interested in this article from FastCo: <a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672260/editorially-wants-to-redesign-writing-for-the-web" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcodesign.com&#x2F;1672260&#x2F;editorially-wants-to-red...</a><p>Point, I was not convinced, this or any other App of this kind, is going to stand the competition (from Google). Let alone stand out.

What was this? Can someone explain it?<p>These shutdown notices should have a required synopsis of the service so I know what I will be missing out on.

Seems strange to shut-down the business after only four months post-public launch.<p>It feels like in this space your best options are to go free and push for scale or to go after premium markets.<p>Writers tend not to have huge budgets, but professionals such as PR teams and lawyers also need heavyweight tracking&#x2F;collaboration tools and have the money to pay for a solution.

Alternatives:<p>- Draft - <a href="http://draftin.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;draftin.com&#x2F;</a> - Penflip - <a href="http://penflip.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;penflip.com&#x2F;</a> - Typewrite - <a href="https://typewrite.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typewrite.io</a> - StackEdit - <a href="https://stackedit.io/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackedit.io&#x2F;</a><p>There&#x27;s also Quip, but its focused on mobile so doesn&#x27;t fit well in this list. I did a pretty deep breakdown on two of four above (along with Editorially) earlier this year - <a href="https://zapier.com/blog/collaborative-writing-tools-editorially-draft-penflip/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zapier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;collaborative-writing-tools-editoria...</a>

Very surprising to see this happen so soon. I&#x27;m a happy user of Draft -- made by HN (and Y Combinator album) Nate Kontny. <a href="https://draftin.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;draftin.com&#x2F;</a>

There site is already in postmortem, I would have liked to seen what they had built. We learn more when we see awesome ideas that don&#x27;t gain traction, it&#x27;s often depressing though. I also see a trend of all these assets just vanishing. Even when sites opensource after failure, seldom anything comes up it. I will proffer the uncomfortable suggestions that the balley-hooed software practices, despite the back-patting, are not uncoupled and modular. In fact, we have reached the age of massive coupling in the full stack, even the deployment.

We had been using this in earnest at my company since August. It&#x27;s basically the best tool of its kind—and unlike most other tools of its kind, our copy editors loved it. The thing it was missing was team-editing features. But it had the editing process, which is the one thing keeping people with Word, down.<p>There are a lot of publishing houses that could use something like this. Editorial workflow is a big weak point as we switch from doing a lot of things in print to doing a lot of things on the Web.

Really bummed to see Editorially go. We tried a lot of different writing tools at Zapier and it was definitely the best for handling the editorial process.<p>Some potential replacements for those looking are Google Docs, Draft, Penflip, or Quip. Here&#x27;s a big write up on the differences between those tools:<p><a href="https://zapier.com/blog/collaborative-writing-tools-editorially-draft-penflip/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zapier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;collaborative-writing-tools-editoria...</a>

gosh, there&#x27;s so much i could say here; let me bullet-list:<p>b1. businesses have a need for collaborative writing<p>b2. businesses are mired in their ms-word mindset<p>b3. businesses will pay for a tool they need...<p>b4. ...unless they can get it for free from google<p>b5. i don&#x27;t care about businesses; thus ends this list<p><i></i>*<p>w1. i care about writers, individuals exercising creativity<p>w2. writers don&#x27;t write collaboratively; editors can suck it<p>w3. writers certainly won&#x27;t pay for a collaborative tool<p>w4. it&#x27;s highly doubtful writers will pay for any tool...<p>w5. ...but most especially if they can get it for free<p>w6. writers won&#x27;t even _use_ an over-engineered tool<p>w7. writers want the tool to just get out of the darn way<p>w8. writers are quite happy with a empty field to write in<p>w7. editorially was over-engineered, and is penflip too<p>w8. draft-in started just right, but is now over-engineered<p>w9. writers don&#x27;t trust storing their stuff &quot;somewhere else&quot;<p>w10. version-tracking is great, but not the be-all, end-all<p>w11. github? order-of-magnitude over-engineered for writers<p><i></i>*<p>c1. communication is pervasive (facetime, hangouts, twitter)<p>c2. collaboration doesn&#x27;t need to be built into every tool<p>c3. to the extent it is needed, use stuff like sugarbox.io<p>c4. javascript writing tools will be beer- and speech-free<p>c5. i can point to a dozen, and release my own next week<p>c6. so nobody is gonna build a business on writing tools<p>c7. html is so old-fashioned, with <a href="http://strapdownjs.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;strapdownjs.com</a>

I would be most grateful if the people involved in this did a little public post-mortem. One of the ideas near the top of my queue is related to writing, so I&#x27;d really benefit from hearing about their explorations. And I imagine there are many others that feel the same way.

So sad to hear this. This is one of my fave online tools.

This was the best collaborative writing app I&#x27;ve ever used. My heart hurts.