Bite-Sized Edits Now Leaner; Aims to Be Stickier
I kept thinking of Hugh McGuire as I read ReWork by the guys from 37Signals. Rework is about launching a business and doing great work. It is about handling meetings and hiring. It is essentially about being and thinking like the partners at 37Signals. At its core that means doing less.
McGuire — a friend — started developing BookOven in 2008. It was ambitious and sprawling and primarily a secret. Ultimately, the target was the inefficiencies/friction in the book making process. Authors submit their manuscripts and then wait two years for their book to hit the shelves. McGuire took aim at that fat and positioned BookOven to be the Bowflex work out machine for the publishing business.
Over the past couple of weeks, the communications from the BookOven office have shifted and narrowed. McGuire is now pushing BiteSizedEdits.com. This was originally part of the BookOven platform but they have spun it off as its own URL. If BookOven was an all-in-one workout machine, Bite-Sized Edits is a simple barbell. It focuses on one thing and it does it well.
The idea with Bite-Sized Edits is to crowdsource copy-editing and proof reading. The premise being if it takes one person 24 hours to edit a text, then 24 people will take one hour.
The less-is-better mantra would be poseur-ville if it didn’t actually work. It works in this case. The simplicity of Bite-Sized Edits is deceptive. The dev team has built-in an “escalation ladder” for user engagement that you barely notice (as it should be). Visitors to the site can now edit text without having to login, making drive-by edits now possible on the iPhone. If users have more time and are interested in a certain subject, they can zero in on a type of material using the subject tags. As a member, users can add texts and the member profiles allow you to recognize fellow contributors and become fans of participating writers.
From the outside it seems they have struck a good balance between the low-requirement engagement needed to propagate the service with the higher level social re-enforcement needed to build a strong community. The question remains will it work? McGuire essentially has the problem every community builder has — driving frequency. McGuire needs to find the secret recipe that keeps users coming back — all without piling on features that would betray the less-is-better ethos.
1 Comment