Rate My Startup - Slap A Story

http://www.slapastory.com/

by sbarski • 18 years ago

16 38 18 years ago

Slap a Story is a place for people who like to read and write. Submit your original short story (heck, you can do it anonymously) for everyone to read and discuss. As well as rate and comment on stories submitted by others.

Please rate/review our site. Your feedback is much appreciated.

Ilia12• 18 years ago

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

sbarski4• 18 years ago

My friend and I have been developing a brand spanking new site for avid readers and writers. It is called Slap a Story and as of today can be accessed at slapastory.com.

In short you can post short stories and make them popular by voting them up, you can also discuss stories written by other people.

Please rate/review our site. Your feedback is much appreciated.

qhoxie• 18 years ago

I like the idea pretty well and I think the interface is well-executed. The markup is a bit heavy, but that should not be top of your list.

Ilia12• 18 years ago

Thanks qhoxie, the site is still in beta and design is always under question..

infactitsme2• 18 years ago

Awesomenessssssssssssssssssssss

Ilia12• 18 years ago

Thanks again.

infactitsme2• 18 years ago

i just fuckin LOVE this SITEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Ilia12• 18 years ago

Thanks for that... you are too excited... any feedback that we can actually use?

Tlogmer• 18 years ago

You've got a grammatical error in the first sentence -- "people like you and I" should be "people like you and me" -- me is the direct object.

sbarski4• 18 years ago

Good point. Thank you!

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

I question whether this is a "startup" or a "hobby with a small revenue stream". The site looks nice, no doubt about that...I think you've executed well (aside from some typos--"sing up" on the story page under the comment box, for example), so I'm not saying you're building an amateurish site. Just that I can't imagine how this can make enough money to support more than one or two people.

I could, of course, be wrong.

Ilia12• 18 years ago

You are right, at the moment we are trying to build a mini community of writers. Mostly this was a request from a few friends of mine that are avid writers. We just want to see how far this can go. Any exposure for them is good. Maybe we can even get publishers on board.

You never know until you try it.

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

I've done NaNoWriMo once, and plan to do it again this year, I think. And a big part of that experience is the "shared misery", or "in the trenches together", vibe that the whole project engenders. November is coming up fast...you might consider sending a note to the fine folks who run that project, asking how you could make your site work well for NaNoWriMo participants. The worst they can say is "no" (or maybe the worst they could do is re-implement your idea themselves...they do seem to be hackers themselves, but that's an unlikely scenario).

It could give you a huge influx of users for the month of November...and some of them would stick around. I no longer write much fiction outside of that month (I do so much technical writing for my startup that I don't seem to have the drive for it outside of work), but I know a lot of the participants are frequent writers.

Getting publishers involved somehow would also be a good direction. Many print-only publishers are trying to figure out how to deal with this new-fangled (less than twenty years old...clearly unproven!) web thing...perhaps you can help them. I don't immediately see the connection, but perhaps user-created and user-edited books are the wave of the future. Somehow applying the reddit/digg model to fiction seems at least an amusing thought exercise.

marketer• 18 years ago

I have a couple comments on the UGC aspects of this site. I honestly don't know how large the 'story' market is, but I've had some experience with UGC sites.

1. You expect a LOT from your users. Writing a story takes a long, long time. It's much less difficult than pressing an up button or making a quick edit. Why will people want to submit stories to the site? Are any of you prolific story writers?

2. Your people are story writers. Where do you find them? This is more of a marketing problem.

sbarski4• 18 years ago

You are right. Writing is a lengthy and demanding process.

We do need to market this properly and find people who are interested in writing stories.

Going by the amount of blogs/literary sites and forums that are out there - we reckon that these people do exist in certain numbers. We just have to find find and convince them that our platform is right for them.

comatose_kid2• 18 years ago

How about becoming the twitter of stories? Limit it to 140 words or something (analogous to the 4K compos from the Amiga demo scene).

rksprst2• 18 years ago

I like your idea. However, I don't like the fact that simply by submitting something I automatically grant you a license to do whatever you want with it. In fact, I was going to submit a short story but will not after reading your terms and conditions.

I think that to make the site successful you need high quality stories that people want to read and vote up. I am not sure that authors would be willing to post on your site knowing that they are then granting you a license for their work.

sbarski4• 18 years ago

If you read the last paragraph in our T&C you will see that we do not assert any ownership over your content (story). It still belongs to you and you can do with it whatever you like.

What we want, however, is to be able to use user-submitted content for any possible advertising or promotion purposes. This is kind of what facebook does except not as evil. We reckon that the user will benefit from this too (as it will show off his story to more people if we link to it in an ad).

We will make all of that clearer in our T&C. Thank you!

rksprst2• 18 years ago

I did read that last paragraph where you say that I still have ownership over my content. However, I am still granting you a license to do whatever you want with the story. Meaning you can go and sell the top stories to publishers legally. I don't like this. I would make it so that you can only use it for promotions with prior written consent from the author and the only license I grant you is to display it on your site.

ashishb4u• 18 years ago

wow.. this can go a long way... Feedback: Man i need search on stories and users...

ashish1• 18 years ago

wow.. this can go a long way... Feedback: Man i need search on stories and users...

Ilia12• 18 years ago

Thanks, search is coming... but you can filter by user by clicking on the username in the user "cloud"

unalone2• 18 years ago

"Slap a Story is a place for people like you and I; for people who like to read and write."

Change to:

"Slap a Story is a place for people like you and me: people who like to read and write."

I mean, writing sites need some self-respect.

I'm a bit anal about writing sites online: I think they're all barking up the wrong tree, yours included. I think that we have places for people who want to write silly texts: forums games are ideal. This site doesn't do anything to solve that. But I'll ignore that and focus on the actual site.

You've got a good text-to-image ratio. No pictures associated with stories. That's good, because I hate sites that think visuals have anything to do with writing.

I don't like how your numbers clip off on the side. I don't know why you need ranking to begin with.

I can't say much more: it's ripping features off of Digg, visual quirks off of several sites, and it has a tag cloud. Beyond the concept, the site has a pretty standard layout. I can't criticize that other than to say that it does nothing whatsoever for me, and it's entirely undistinguished.

Please, though: for the sake of pretending to respect the medium, style your stories up a bit. Make them look nice. Use different line spacing for paragraphs, use a font that actually looks nice. When your medium is text, not doing anything to style text is just silly.

Hope that helps. Feel free to respond if you think I'm being unfair.

Ilia12• 18 years ago

Firstly, thank you for your honest feedback. Writing sites do need self respect, and this is the reason that we have developed this site. I am personally a developer and an avid reader. Although it may seems like a ripping of Digg - digg doesn't have a fiction category or any sub-categories that we have included. In terms of layout we didn't want to get too creative, but we do want to make it as simple on the eyes as possible - so our priority at the moment is to style the stories.

Again thank you for your feedback.

unalone2• 18 years ago

Absolutely. Well, I'm working on a site for writers at the moment, and it focuses on a completely radical angle. When it's done I'll tell you, and I'm hoping you tell me if it's got flaws as well. We writers ought to stick together. :-)

maxklein• 18 years ago

I like the site, so I have no criticism. I'll just give you some ideas you can possibly use to promote the site:

1. When people write a story, add a very prominent field with space for email addresses of friends and family who will be interested in reading the story. You may want to use the google API to get contact information from the persons friends, allowing an automatic sending to ticked friends

2. Add a photo or avatar of the user beside the story. On the fp, add a bunch of faces of recently logged in users. It will instantly feel more like a community, and if you encourage people to use their real photo, things will stay very civil

3. Make a weekly competition. Make it prominent on the frontpage, and make the payment amount very small. For example, $10 by paypal. This is just $40 a month. Encourage people to invite their friends to come and vote for them. The best story each week wins the $10 and so on.

4. Find your target audience. Post on forums that do the same stuff

5. Allow people to write serials. For example, for a long time I used to write the fictional account of a soldier at war. I did this over years. Each entry was a short story, but together they formed a long narrative. Such long running narratives build fans

6. Allow pictures in stories

7. Here we will become a bit unethical - search usenet for an obscure but funny story. Add it to your site. Link it from reddit and digg. Alternatively, search scribd or any other document site for the most popular documents of all time that are stories. Addd to your site and do stumbleupon on that

8. Add a 'whacky' category where strange stuff is added. This stuff is more likely to be linked to than the serious stuff you want, but will drive traffic to your main site

9. Don't let your users drop off. If I sign up once, I have to get regular notifications about something, so I get invested in the site

10. Everybody just wants to have fun. You're entertainment first, don't forget that.

Ilia12• 18 years ago

Wow, this is fantastic, we are working on some of the ideas you mention, the others we will need to add to our list.

Thanks heaps and keep them coming.

psyklic• 18 years ago

What about having users write a quick, one-sentence grab-your-attention hook to display under each story, rather than just displaying the first few lines?

swombat• 18 years ago

The fact that the stories are published on the web is a huge downside actually.

Have you looked at Critters? http://critters.org/ It's focused on helping people improve their writing, and as a model has functioned for well over 10 years. Very successful, on the whole.

One of the key selling points of sending stories to Critters is that you get critiques back which help you improve your writing. The other key point is that they're not published on the web. They're only published privately to members. This means that after improving your story further, you can actually still submit it to magazines for "real" publication.

I would not submit my best stories to your site, for the simple reason that I would hope to be able to send them to a magazine some day, and putting them on your site is akin to publishing them for free (magazines will not republish stories).

Perhaps if you offered some small symbolic payment (e.g. $50) for the best stories and featured those in a monthly magazine (online), that would motivate many more writers to submit their best work. There's a huge difference in the writer's mind between a paid publication and a free one, and the former is far more attractive.

Otherwise, if I'm gonna publish my stories for free, why not just put them on my own blog or start a blog for my stories?

louislouis• 18 years ago

awesome idea and site.

Only recommendation I can think of is... have the votes collect into points for authors. So then you can show 'top writers' and have competitions etc.

Ilia12• 18 years ago

Definitely will be in the next release.

MickeyOne• 18 years ago

Interesting idea, although am not sure about the colors even though the site looks clean enough.

coglethorpe2• 18 years ago

I like this idea, mostly because it's one I had earlier and never had the time to implement. :-) From a cursory glance, the site looks good.

I do see the point that others have about who the site might target. Serious writers might steer away from the site in favor of workshop style sites, leaving you with prolific, but possibly weak writers. I have a feeling that might be a rather young demographic and I wonder how well the site would monetize. Still, I wish you the best with the venture and will check back.

coglethorpe2• 18 years ago

I'll say this: the site was good enough to get me to come back for a second look. I do agree with an earlier poster who said the stories need better layout. They were a bit hard to read as they look now.

Rate My Startup - Slap A Story

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