I know the founders from our co-working space, they were an early 500 Startups company. Happy to invite them to AMA! Thoughts @rrhoover?
Essentially, you pick an editor, submit a blog posts/essay/college paper, get edits back fast.
Hey @Tbizi! I love Kibin's origin story, perhaps you could share it here to start?
Also: think we could get TechCrunch to have their CMS automatically post to Kibin? They're just a treasure trove of typos :)
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Haha @ TechCrunch idea :-)
Regarding Kibin's story...
We started out because I was applying to law school and was looking for more than just simple editing for grammar/punctuation. I needed to know if I was presenting myself the way I wanted to be perceived.
I couldn't find a service online that I felt could do this and friends were difficult to pin down. In short, I needed lots of feedback in addition to grammar, punctuation, etc.
In the end, I found a niche law school forum and ended up trading personal statements with another applicant to provide feedback for one another.
I had my applications good to go, but I ditched law school aspirations to start Kibin. It began as a peer-to-peer marketplace to facilitate the experience I had on the law school forum. This is the idea we entered the 500Startups accelerator program with.
We soon found this peer-to-peer marketplace had many challenges, some of which included quality control, monetization, and delivering help in a timely manner.
We eventually repositioned ourselves as a more traditional editing service that maintains our core beliefs that editing is far more than just grammar and punctuation changes/fixes (note: admittedly, Kibin still does a mediocre job of communicating this value upfront).
We've stayed true to our core belief that 99% of people need help and guidance on how to make their writing better, not just correct. This isn't an easy system to scale as it takes a very specific editor to fit this culture (e.g. there are plenty of fantastic editors, but few of which that make great Kibin editors).
Thanks for the question John!
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I was at your demo day for 500. This is a great idea, and something I may use regularly. I also agree with Bogomil, pricing shouldn't trigger an email opt-in. This erodes my trust.
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