Nice work, @dmitric and team. I like what you're doing with Beacon. Is Writer's Block effective for driving users to Beacon? I find tangential products like this, an interesting marketing strategy that can sometimes provide tremendous value.
@rrhoover it's effective enough (keyword is enough) at bringing in new writers to the platform and increases awareness and distribution. It's definitely a workable channel, but as you know, it takes a lot of time and effort.
Hey there,
One of the founders of Beacon here. To set things off - yes, Writersblock is an homage to various link sharing sites we all love on the internet: Reddit, HN, Linkydink... and of course Product Hunt.
Link sharing sites come and go everyday, but we were interested just how effective the daily competition was in increasing user interactions and distribution for stories. Or was it really all about community?
Writersblock was built over a weekend, and our intern @MikeOrMatt ran it over the summer. We were quite happy with the results!
If you have any questions, please holler back.
@dmitric@MikeOrMatt i'm a huge fan am closely reading / following / sharing with writerly friends - nice work!
are the results what you expected? what have you guys learned since starting it? to what extent is it about competition or community? are writers as responsive as entrepreneurs are to getting in convos?
@eriktorenberg Thanks --
The results are not what I personally expected.
I expected writers would mostly submit their own stories and try to get their own stories up to the top for the sake of competition -- like entrepreneurs who like to win on Product Hunt -- but for the most part they don't do that. Perhaps because it's not top of mind, or because they write for their own sake, or because an article doesn't have the same gravitas as a company you are putting all your waking hours into. They are definitely not as responsive in general.
We have a few power users who now compete a lot after we added a karma leader board. Most of the power users aren't upvoters or commenters, they just love to submit things. I have observed the same pattern on reddit and HN though for power users who are mostly just chasing karma. We haven't really done much with community stuff because it was a summer intern project, and almost everything is entirely automated... but it's at a point where we are now getting writer leads from it, which is nice for our core business.
Stumbled on this the other day after a reader told me they submitted my Medium post to it. Seems like a pretty cool community, but looks a little small at this point.
Hi @dmitric I just discovered Writer's Block, looks pretty interesting but I'm wondering whether you have some kind of rules / manifesto / topics you're covering or if it's completely open and anyone can submit any piece of work.
@dmitric is this still active? All I got was you've reached the end of the block on the page? Love the community idea from the description; not sure I'm getting what to do though
Product Hunt