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Interesting concept. I’m sure the service will be valuable to people who need it and can afford it. The pricing page has a notice saying “Use the code FIRSTDRA

Interesting concept. I’m sure the service will be valuable to people who need it and can afford it. The pricing page has a notice saying “Use the code FIRSTDRAFT for a free month of the Hobbyist or Basic plan,” but the only plan described on the page when I access it is the Hobbyist plan at $55/month for up to 500 words. Is information about other plans also supposed to appear on that page? Also, how are you and your contributors dealing with people who are writing in English as a second language? Such writers can benefit from the same kind of higher-level feedback on content, organization, audience awareness, etc. as native-speaker writers, but they also need help with grammar, word choice, cultural assumptions, etc. It’s difficult to provide higher-level support to nonnative writers without also dealing with grammatical and vocabulary issues, but the latter issues can take a lot of the editor’s time. Knowledge of the writer’s first language is also often helpful for identifying the reasons for grammar and vocabulary issues. Are you making any effort to match your editors to writers based on the editors’ knowledge of non-English languages? One more point (added later): Have you looked into the one-on-one tutorial model for supporting writers that is used in high-school and university writing centers? Writing centers in educational contexts are typically focused on making people better writers, not just fixing specific texts. This is usually done by the tutor and writer discussing the writer’s text together, with the tutor asking questions as often as making suggestions. While it’s possible to do tutorials through comments on online documents, it’s much more productive to do it interactively. You might want to look into offering video tutorials between the writer and editor in addition to the Google Docs integration.

stewfortier 4y ago
Ah, there should be a slider on the pricing page that lets you slide between plans. In hindsight, I can see how that might not be clear. Let me know if you still don't see it. We do have some writers for whom English is a second language. We also have a handful of collaborators who have experience working with those folks. So far, those writers tend to be up front that English is their second language and so the contributors who jump into their work tend to self-select based on if they feel qualified to help. For now, this sort of emergent pairing of writers and contributors tends to give us more flexibility in what we can handle (as you noted, there's a lot of nuance within just this one use case). And the tutor / tutorial model is certainly interesting (we've thought about it in a different context: hiring a writing coach), our general sense was that it is different enough from our core draft-level editing service that it's out of scope for the foreseeable future. I do agree there are certain things you can do live that are much harder (or impossible) to do asynchronously in doc comments.
- tkgally 4y ago
  > there should be a slider on the pricing page Oh, I see. I actually did drag that slider a bit to the right the first time I accessed the page, but not far enough to go to the next plan, so I didn’t understand the purpose of the slider. If you get similar reactions to mine, or if your access data reveals that many human visitors to the page do not touch the slider, you might want to rethink your interface. Boxes displaying all of the plans side-by-side (vertically on mobile) would have been fine for me. Thanks for your responses to my other questions. I wish you the best of success.

stewfortier 4y ago

Ah, there should be a slider on the pricing page that lets you slide between plans. In hindsight, I can see how that might not be clear. Let me know if you still don't see it. We do have some writers for whom English is a second language. We also have a handful of collaborators who have experience working with those folks. So far, those writers tend to be up front that English is their second language and so the contributors who jump into their work tend to self-select based on if they feel qualified to help. For now, this sort of emergent pairing of writers and contributors tends to give us more flexibility in what we can handle (as you noted, there's a lot of nuance within just this one use case). And the tutor / tutorial model is certainly interesting (we've thought about it in a different context: hiring a writing coach), our general sense was that it is different enough from our core draft-level editing service that it's out of scope for the foreseeable future. I do agree there are certain things you can do live that are much harder (or impossible) to do asynchronously in doc comments.

tkgally 4y ago
> there should be a slider on the pricing page Oh, I see. I actually did drag that slider a bit to the right the first time I accessed the page, but not far enough to go to the next plan, so I didn’t understand the purpose of the slider. If you get similar reactions to mine, or if your access data reveals that many human visitors to the page do not touch the slider, you might want to rethink your interface. Boxes displaying all of the plans side-by-side (vertically on mobile) would have been fine for me. Thanks for your responses to my other questions. I wish you the best of success.