It’s a struggle for me to make something innovative. Often it seems like everything good has already been done. There’s already at least 20 competitors doing what I want to do.

Draft is a software project I’ve been working on to help people write better. So far I’ve been incredibly blessed to receive more positive feedback on this creation than anything else I’ve ever personally produced.

But before this I was getting stuck on some project management software I was making.

Clayton Christensen is the famous author of business books like Innovators Solution. Clayton advises wannabe innovators to focus on the jobs people are trying to hire products for. He describes a fast food company that figured out how to finally improve their product development when they stopped worrying about “market research” and instead spent time figuring out what jobs people were hiring their milkshakes...

Two big Draft announcements today.

Draft (http://draftin.com) documents can now easily be published to Wordpress and Tumblr from inside Draft. Go to Settings -> Places to Publish. You’ll then get a Publish button next to your documents.

But I couldn’t stop there.

Bookmarklets and browser extensions like Instapaper, Evernote’s Clearly, and Readability make reading anything on the web simple, focused, and gorgeous. Why can’t writing be that way?

So here’s a Chrome extension that lets you.

Any webpage that you can write on, you can now use Draft with. Your blog, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, even comment boxes on websites like Reddit and Hacker News.

Just place your cursor in the box you want to write in, click the Chrome Draft extension, and Draft will open up in a new Chrome Tab. Choose an already written document or something new to write in Draft (any text from the original text...

I know a lot of people who are stuck. Stuck in a job or a position. Or they want to start a business, but never seem to get past the vague idea. They want a promotion, but are too scared to ask.

I launched a new product a couple weeks ago called Draft to help people write better. A ninth grader was the first person to email me after news about Draft was published.

It was a simple proposition: Can he interview me over Skype or email for his blog. It would just be 5 questions. And he seemed to already have used my product: “Just used Draft. It is the coolest thing in the whole world. No more Google Docs for school projects. :)”

Flattery works. But I am insanely impressed that a ninth grade kid has the audacity to email people he doesn’t know to get their help improving the asset he’s created. That’s just not something most people do.

I was at a crowded concert this last weekend...

I can’t code. I can’t design. I can’t dance. I can’t get in shape. I can’t draw. I can’t give speeches. I can’t write. I can’t invent.

When I was 15 I had a friend named Patrick. We met in driver’s ed.

If you looked at him, you’d probably expect to find him in a moshpit, or playing insanely loud punk music. You’d be right. But the guy had the voice of an angel and sang in his high school choir.

One night, Collin and I pick him up from choir practice.
Collin was our 16 year old friend who we often made drive us around. Poor Collin :)

As we were driving to who knows where (some cafe to play chess and drink coffee or to Taco Bell) a song came on the radio that I liked. And I sang it a little.

That weird looking, punk rock, 15 year old kid gave me some advice that has helped shape every single thing I’ve accomplished since.

He warned me that, as I sang, I was trying to imitate...

I’ve been working on a new way to help people write better. It’s ready.

Too many inconvenient things get in the way of good writing.

Version control is overly complicated. Writers are forced to learn git to get collaborative edits on their documents? Git’s great. But not for writing. Collaborators end up copying my work into Microsoft Word to send me their own version. Yuck.

Finding previous versions of work is difficult. Google Docs and iCloud store arbitrary fragments making it impossible to find an old cohesive draft.

I don’t have enough friends to help copy-edit my work. My wife has a job and other important things to do. :)

And on and on.

I wanted to find solutions. I created Draft.

Version Control

With Draft, your collaborator works on their own copy without interfering with your master. You get to accept or ignore each individual change they make.

Uber for

I started figure skating when I was 4 or 5. It was my Mom’s idea. She wanted something of her own to do with the kids.

The first thing you learn when you’re taking skating lessons is how to fall. My sister would even stick a pillow in the back of her pants to cushion herself.

Nothing cushioned the fall she took on her chin. Blood on the ice. Stitches.

Almost two years ago I went through Y Combinator a second time (S2011). We built some pretty cool technology to help companies brand their own versions of popular games. Games like Bejeweled. Imagine if a company like The Gap let you play their version of Bejeweled, but instead of jewels they were Gap logos, and pictures of models wearing the latest shirts, and you could even win a prize.

We had people playing an average of two hours a day. I was pretty damn excited and hopeful.

But we weren’t getting enough repeat business. The...

Being good developers and designers, we typically define reusable features like a navigation bar or a footer and include them in multiple pages of our design. In PHP we might use “includes”. In a web application framework like Ruby on Rails, we have our “layouts” and our “partials”. But too often, we prematurely reach for those tools.

Having a layout saves me a lot of time. Especially if I have to refactor something. Imagine having a navigation bar on each page but then needing to add another link in it. If the navigation wasn’t in some kind of resuable layout, I’d be opening up dozens of files just to edit the same thing over and over. 

Saving time is great for me, but is that optimization actually solving a problem my customer has?

Maybe a user is in the middle of a task, struggling to write a very important document. Do they really need to be able to logoff from this page right...

I want my actions to be more data-driven. I want to make Dave McClure, Steve Blank, and Eric Ries proud. Easier said than done.

Analytics is still a pain in the ass.

How can I tell if people are using my product, Draft? (Draft is the tool I’m working on to help people become better writers.)

I could look at user retention. Once people start using Draft, do they come back to use it again?

There’s some great software to help study how users return to your product. They use a method called cohort analysis, which breaks up users into groups of people who “activate” or sign-up at the same time and then you track their progress as a group. Do users that signup in January after one month use your app more than those users who signed up in December after their first month? They do? Awesome, those features and things you did in February might be onto something.

To use these analytics...

One constant I’ve recognized in my writing is how much feedback I like to have. I’ll write an email, and I’ll send a draft to a colleague to see if it’s right. I’ll write an application to something, and get feedback from friends to see if it makes sense. I’ll write a blog post, and send it to my wife.

But being a solo entrepreneur and working alone at home, I often find myself stuck, not being able to get a friend to look at my work.

My wife can only take so much.

At the same time, I’ve gotten hooked on how simple it is to order a cab on Uber. Click a button, and a bunch of steps happen I don’t need to worry about.

So now, Draft, the version control for writing tool I’m making, has a magic “Share with an Editor” button. One click, and you can send whatever you’re working on (Christmas letter, cold email to a potential customer, blog post, etc.) to a staff of folks who can review...

It’s tough to get people to open your mail. Snail or digital.

A few years ago I blogged about a restaurant in my neighborhood that sends out these crazy handwritten pieces of mail. Not just the letter itself, but the entire envelope is covered in handwriting about my birthday. It’s impossible not to open up that type of letter :)

I recently noticed a new trend around this time of year. Making a piece of mail look like it’s been sent from the taxman.

Good old Form 854-A, in bold print. This must be something important I need for my taxes this year?

Opening it up.

Nope. It’s just a renewal form for a magazine subscription.

Sneaky bastards.