Writing Optimiser

Listing Details

Product Family: Website, Chrome Extension
Description: A word-choice optimizer for written text.
Target users: College students
Featured on ProductHunt

Properties Included in the Sale:

Domain
Secondary domain
All source code hosted in private GitHub repository
All intellectual property and rights associated with the website/brand

Overview

A unique concept in the domain of writing assistants. A web-based application that accepts your writing and offers innovative, superb alternatives and suggestions for the average writer. The user experience could not be simpler – just visit the website, write or paste an excerpt of text, and click the enhance button to see our optimized suggestions. But we did not just stop at building a web platform – we also developed a browser extension.

Unique Selling Point

The app's main USP is its unique yet simple concept. Paste a text and get one strong suggestion for each word that our rule-based algorithm deems weak and flags. No more fumbling with or choosing from menus of suggestions and deciding which one is the most context-fitting. Our rule-based algorithms take care of finding the perfect word.

Another extendable benefit is that we are also a browser extension alongside the core web-based application, all powered by one solid API. That means that our user retention strategy can be exponentially reinforced by allowing users to use the service on multiple websites and platforms.

Our Technology Stack

Language: OOP Python w/ Flask as backend
Database: MongoDB (hosted on mongodb.com)
API Design: REST API
Cloud Service Provider: Amazon Web Services (Using Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, S3, and Route53)
Test Domain Host: Netlify
Traffic-Facing, API, and Email Domain Host: AWS Route 53 (w/ ImprovMX as mail alias)
Frontend: HTML/CSS/JS w/ Bootstrap CSS using Jinja Templating
Analytics: Google Analytics and HotJar + internal IP tracking and text aggregation

Responsible Disclosures:
Let's not waste either of our time with unnecessary questions and/or FAQs. My real numbers aren't that great: Total traffic since launch is 4.89K (a good portion of which came from the wildly successful ProductHunt debut) as of this posting. HOWEVER, the traffic has flatlined and is minimal due to no active advertising campaign or effort applied to bring in users. Feel free to ask to see my GA account over Zoom or some other method that you prefer.

There's an (about 80%) unfinished Chrome extension that a 3rd-party developer was working on. It is possible for the existing developer to complete this extension with the new owners at a very reasonable rate. He has all the necessary requirements to complete it successfully within a few weeks of resuming the project scope.

Also included in the sale is a proof-of-concept machine learning script developed to test the possibility of using MongoDB data (including user reverts) to train a model to drastically improve the efficiency and accuracy of the app in the future. The plan was to create models that could be extrapolated into new services and generate a revenue source for me and the website.

Contact me to receive a more in-depth datasheet that looks at everything that goes on under the hood, and believe me there is quite a bit. A serious amount of engineering and months of work went into some of the features, I'd love to privately share and discuss the details and future potential if interested.  

You would be paying primarily for the underlying technology and engineering effort that went into building this fully-custom, from-scratch product. I didn't use WebFlow or some rigid framework like that. Everything was implemented in Python and designed to scale with user growth. Honestly, I am trying to recoup my development costs and move on. Feel free to make an offer, I will entertain serious ones.

How can the buyer take this project further?

Key Areas Outlined for Improvement

1 – SEO

SEO is something that I gave a little attention to at launch time for the sake of not having an empty blog section, but I did not expel much time and effort in this area overall. As I mentioned before, I was a single developer balancing many different hats and therefore my resources were geared towards the most demanding aspects of the project, such as building the algorithms, maintaining servers, developing upgrades, and performing similar duties. I do strongly believe that SEO can make a massive difference and bring in tons of organic non-paid traffic. There is an existing (albeit rather defunct) blog section on the current site with three blog posts written by me. They are not too great, but I did not want to have an empty blog section, so I quickly wrote them over the course of several days. This is a seriously ripe area for major improvement.

2 – Advertising

Overall, I have only spent approximately $500.00 on a mix of Google text ads and Instagram post ads. This was my first time ever working with ad networks promoting a product/service, and I was learning as I was going along. A proper marketing budget coupled with a well-structured advertisement strategy can create cohesive brand recognition that would work well over time with bringing users to the platform.

3 – Desktop Application Ports

One thing that I learned from the ProductHunt launch is that people want native desktop ports of the platform. There was interest in a Mac app for security/privacy benefits. This is a great opportunity to expand the platform in a new vertical, and possibly even charge for the desktop ports. Having a developer on your team who is capable of building desktop applications would make it much simpler to develop, test, and deploy these ports in a reasonable time.