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Who Are You and What Is Your Background?
My name is Alex Cabal. I’m a software developer who runs Scribophile, one of the web’s largest writing communities.
What Is Your Business and When Did You Start It?
Scribophile is an online writing community where members can post their work in progress and get feedback from other writers on how to improve it. We have discussion forums where members can discuss the writing craft, and lots of programs to help writers learn, get inspired, and stay motivated. Right now we’re averaging about 2.7 million words of feedback written on our members’ posts each month, and we’ve helped thousands of writers get published over the years. I launched it about 17 years ago and we’ve been going strong since.
Members can sign up for free with a limited Basic account, and we offer a subscription for Premium memberships which allow members to post more writing and unlock various other site features.
What Was Your Professional Situation Right Before Starting the Membership Site?
When I was in college I worked various software engineering internships. I had the idea of Scribophile around then, but didn’t have time to work on it. After I graduated I spent about a year and a half working as a software engineer. I loved creating software, but I didn’t feel excited about my job or the city I was living in, so I quit and decided to travel for a while and develop Scribophile. After launching it, it immediately gained traction and it’s been my full-time job ever since.
How did you get the idea to start this particular membership business?
I’ve always been interested in literature and publishing, even though I’m not a writer myself. In college, I even took a minor in English while majoring in computer science.
I had the idea for Scribophile in college, and around that time the Web 2.0 era was just dawning. Websites were starting to transition from the old style of plain static pages to the new style of highly interactive web apps that we’re now so familiar with. Facebook was only just taking off – it was still limited to students at certain universities – and I thought I could explore this new concept of “social media” with a website of my own, by combining the new Web 2.0 philosophy, social networks, and writing.
After college, I worked for about a year, then left that job to develop and launch Scribophile while traveling. I was one of the first digital nomads – nobody was doing that yet!
At the time, most social networks were free and either supported by ads or not making money at all. Those years were a graveyard of failed social networks. I wanted to make Scribophile different by charging for membership from day one.
What Was the Major Challenge You Faced in Starting or Scaling It and How Did You Overcome It?
The major challenge of any small business is marketing, and that was my biggest challenge too. In particular, the big challenge was bootstrapping a community. Nobody wants to join an empty community, so how do you start one ex nihilo?
When I launched Scribophile, SEO wasn’t a major industry yet and SEO-based content marketing didn’t exist at the level it does now. Social media was also in its infancy; Twitter had just launched a year earlier and for all we knew it could have gone out of business next year. Facebook had just opened up to the general public and the news feed was either still in development or very rudimentary. You could buy Google ads, but as a recent college grad who had quit his job, buying ads was out of my budget.
In those days people were meeting and talking in classic web forums – like the one we have at Scribophile – and their own personal blogs. So to market Scribophile I would post in those forums, and invite writing/literature bloggers in to the site to see how they liked it.
In a lot of ways, it was easier to market than it might be today because today hobbyist personal blogs are basically dead and the ones that remain you’d have to pay to get featured on; social media is tricky to crack; and content marketing leaves you at the mercy of Google and spendy competitors who can essentially pay until they outrank you. I think I got lucky that Scribophile started in an era that was smaller, less cynical, and less personality-focused than it is today, and that I was able to build a good word-of-mouth reputation in the larger writing community.
To overcome the challenge of creating the community, I recruited a lot of my friends, who were our earliest members and who put a ton of effort into helping Scribophile feel like it was already a busy place to be, even though we had just launched. As real writers started trickling in, we eventually got to a critical mass where members invited their friends, and word of mouth started building.
What Was Growth Like Over the First Couple of Years?
Scribophile has seen fairly steady growth since we launched, with modest growth year over year. As a solo entrepreneur who hasn’t taken investment, I’m satisfied with a modest and steady growth rate. Without investors, I don’t feel pressure to explode into hypergrowth or work 80 hour weeks just to make the numbers on a spreadsheet go up. It’s a nice, low-pressure situation.
What Was Your Specific Strategy for Growing It and How Did You Implement That?
For Scribophile, at first, there wasn’t much of a grand plan, because seventeen years ago I was young, fresh out of college, and inexperienced, there wasn’t the hustle culture or discussion of entrepreneurship you see today, and the internet was very different. I worked hard to make what I thought was a really good community that people would find useful and that they enjoyed being a part of.
About seven years ago we started focusing on creating high-quality educational blog posts that focus on aspects of the writing craft. Those have been very popular and they bring in a lot of traffic.
Beyond that, a good social network markets itself, because people find it useful and want to invite their friends to join them. The best marketing you can get is from your own customers. I think communities benefit more from word-of-mouth than direct advertising for this reason. Word of mouth is the most powerful strategy you can develop, but what will or won’t become popular is hard to predict.
How Much Money Is the Business Making Now and What Is the Revenue Mix?
Scribophile has been self-sustaining from its first year. I’m able to draw a modest salary. 100% of the revenue is from subscriptions. Much of my day-to-day work is automated by now, so I have free time to do other things.
A lot of entrepreneurship content you see nowadays is about grinding, working 80 hour weeks, constantly hustling, and lots of time on social media, even if you’re already making a decent living – but that never made sense to me. Who cares if the numbers in a spreadsheet keep going up faster if you don’t have time to do anything with them?
If You Were Advising Someone on Starting a Similar Company Today, What Would You Tell Them Is the Key Area to Focus On and Which Strategy Should They Use to Address It?
Focus on something that interests you and that you have some background in. You could spend years grinding at some random startup for the chance to hit the unicorn jackpot – but even if you do (and statistics are against you), that was time that could have been spent on something with a more modest return, but that you enjoyed more. If you like what you’re doing, you’re going to be passionate about it, and a passionate founder helps create word of mouth.
Having said that, I think marketing is the biggest problem any small business faces. Before you launch you should have a marketing plan in mind or partner with someone with marketing skills. Lots of software developers dream of starting their own business but don’t realize that the product is only half the battle – marketing the product is just as important. A great product with no marketing plan is more likely to fail, and a mediocre or even poor product can be successful if it’s marketed well.
I lucked in to launching Scribophile in a less cynical and more diverse internet, but these days consumers are overwhelmed with subscriptions, social media is constantly changing and tricky to get traction in, and content marketing is about to get torpedoed by AI. Posting to Product Hunt and calling it a day isn’t going to cut it anymore. Planning how you’re going to tell people about your product is just as important as actually launching.
With the growth of AI, I think the broad direction the consumer-facing business will go in is an even greater focus on individual personalities that people feel a connection with. Building a personal brand with your name and face on social media is already a powerful way to market your product online, and lots of people have made lots of money by curating a personal following and then launching products to their audience. I think we’re going to see much more of that once AI destroys search results and content marketing.
What’s Next for You?
At Scribophile, we just launched weekly writing challenges, where writers get a creative writing prompt and have a week to submit an entry. It’s a fun way to nurture a regular writing habit – which is one of the most important ways of developing as a writer – and I think it’ll be an exciting way to bring the community even closer together.
We’re also working on expanding into more educational material, including self-paced classes backed by live sessions with talented writing coaches. Those are still in the planning stages.
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