Last Thursday, WriteMinds met the Blair Academy English department.  This marks WriteMinds’ first public introduction, and it is fitting that it was before an audience of educators; a group of people whose mission it is to help students cultivate writing skills.  WriteMinds exists to make writing on the computer more enjoyable and sensible, as well as help stimulate better writing habits. 

Blair is a small, very tightly knit environment.  The teaching staff is, more or less, on-duty 24/7.  Their free time is limited and, on this day, they were gearing up for Spring Break.  They were very generous to squeeze us into their day.  I arrived at our meeting, accompanied by my brother, Robby (who helped take pictures during and add his perspective after the presentation), and immediately got started.  I was very well prepared thanks to a long and thoughtful development process, as well as presentation materials provided by Clay Parker Jones and Kevin Panke.  I explained how WriteMinds began, described in a previous post, and how it evolved to our final product.  I discussed Microsoft Word and Blackboard, what they are designed to do, and their limitations at the level of composition.  These all-in-one programs sacrifice comfort and positive reinforcement of the writing process.  Word is a formatting-focussed program, which distracts from the composition process.  Blackboard is good for forum communication and file sharing, but does not allow for easy one-on-one editing and drafting collaboration.  These basic, foundational points were met with quiet agreement.  I had their attention, but what did WriteMinds have to offer?  Word and Blackboard work perfectly well.  Enter WriteMinds feature breakdown!

 

No major spoilers.  Sorry!  I wish I could go into more detail, but, generally, this is what they liked:

1) The reduced-stimuli aesthetic of Writeminds: the teachers agreed that getting rid of visual clutter is important to composition, and they were happy to see we were encouraging writers to hide distractions during composition. 

2) They loved how WriteMinds handles editing and document versioning. 

3) They loved how easy it is to create notes, end/footnotes, and citations.

4) They LOVED the possibilities of how WriteMinds would allow them to participate in their students’ composition process (and students with their peers’).

 

The most exciting part of my discussion with Blair, was the amount of feedback from the room.  It is frequently said that if a presentation does not lead to a room full of questions and comments, it was a failure.  If questions and comments are the measure of success, WriteMinds was a hit.  The feeling in the room was that of inspiration, curiosity, and excitement for something new (and, we’d like to think, better).  There was outspoken interest in trying WriteMinds, upon Beta release.  It was a pleasure to sit in a room full of people, who think about, and teach the English language on a daily basis, reflect and expand upon the core beliefs, observations, and assertions that make up WriteMinds as a product, and as a concept.  It will be a brilliant day when we return with the Beta and show them how WriteMinds does everything we said it would. 

 

Thank you Blair Academy English department, for your time.  I hope every audience we present to is as engaging.        

  

 

Yesterday, I posted this (from businessinsider.com) on Twitter and, yeah…smart people, cut it out!  I mean, do what you feel you need to do to make your way.  I am not here to judge or get righteous, but don’t check your intellectual independence at the door.  Too many times young people are so eager to get established that they forfeit the part of their brain that says “Hey!  I could do this on my own!” or “Hey!  I have a good idea that might just be good enough to build a company around!”  Not everyone is meant to go indie, but more folks should give it a try.  Things get more interesting when individuals share their imaginations with the world.  To end with a quote from the article that inspired this brief post, “Whenever I see a brilliant kid decide to join Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or Google, I think to myself: a startup just died, and as a result our world is a little less wealthy, innovative, and interesting.”

 

We received an early prototype of WriteMinds, and seeing our idea come to life led me to some reflection.  I already posted on the basic back-story for WriteMinds, but there were many considerations that enabled us to create this piece of awesomeness, my own self-awareness being the first.   

Who am I?  I am a psychology major with an entrepreneurial spirit and occasional creative streak, and a professional background in independent music/entertainment and psych/social work.  I am a very unrefined manifestation of generalism.     

 

Who am I not?  I am not a tech person.  I am not a web person.  I am not a finance person.  I do not have an advanced education in business.  

 

I am confident in my ability to piece together the necessities to see my concept to reality, but I have some gaps to fill.  I function very much on instinct.  Good instincts are a blessing, but they are worthless if not balanced with information from professionals.  If I became frustrated by what I did not know, WriteMinds would not exist at all.  Not everyone chooses a path of concentrated knowledge.  I certainly did not.  With all of the information available, it is not uncommon to find it difficult to choose a professional path.  Sometimes, it can be hard to isolate your true passions in our stimuli-saturated society.  This information chaos can make it hard to figure out what discipline best suits you, but that is no excuse to be undisciplined. 

Even if you cannot define yourself by a specific professional community, be a professional.  In my case, I had to take my brain and my motivation, and transform them into a professional hustle.  Anyone with a brain and the proper motivation can get things done.  Know your limits, but do not be limited by them.             

 

Visit Clay and give us your thoughts/opinions/ideas on our homepage design.  We will unveil all of the details of WriteMinds very soon.  In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the teasers.  It will be worth the wait.  

I will be submitting a new post of my own in the upcoming week.   

 

One day I woke up with an idea that it would be interesting to create a space/community where writers would collaborate on projects, and post their works.  There are some collaborative tools available, but I wanted to make a website designed exclusively for that possibility.  I really wanted to see what would happen if writers had the opportunity to create things with other writers from all around the world.  The idea had a bit more complexity to it, but that was the basic premise.  I got excited and got on the phone with my brother (Robby), and my friend Ryan, and we worked out some more details.  We all got excited together, but our combined knowledge of web stuff was extremely humble, and none of us had any programming knowledge at all.  I started posting on Facebook that I was looking for some web brilliance.  I also sent out emails, made phone calls, and contacted acquaintances via AIM, in search of any possible lead.  Two of the quickest, and best, references came from my friend, Johanna.  As a guy looking to put together a startup (startup = no money), I needed a person, or team, with the desire (or guts) to take a risk.  The second reference provided to me by Johanna ended up being the right fit.I contacted Hustlewood, LLC’s Clay Parker Jones, and we began our discussion. 

 

After fumbling through all of the things I wanted this site to do, and a conversation or two with all of Hustlewood, they decided we might be onto something, and they got to work.  Over the course of a year, we exchanged many emails and phonecalls, and set up a basecamp to figure out how this thing was really going to function. 

 

What we started with, and what we ultimately created, are worlds apart.  The first sitemap Hustlewood presented to me looked cool, and was precisely on point with where this idea began, but along the way it became clear that the collaborative aspect of this project was only part of a much bigger (or smaller, depending on your perspective) picture.  When Ryan, Robby and I traveled out to Chicago to meet with Clay and work together, in person, we were presented with a modified, more practical concept.  We set out, initially, to bring something interesting to the writers of the world, and we were going to do that, but what if we could make writing better?  We cannot, and will not, try to replace pen and paper, but the options available, software or web, could certainly use a fresh perspective.  What came out of this was WriteMinds (site under construction). 

 

We took the collective authorship idea and reduced it to an option, rather than an overriding concept (it was, admittedly, gimmicky to begin with).  Instead, WriteMinds provides for a better writing experience.  Writing on word sucks.  Writing on a blog template sucks.  Writing on a white screen screaming at your face sucks.  It doesn’t have to.  A lot of the platforms that exist for us have too many options, or not enough.  With WriteMinds, we feel we are bridging the gap by offering a focused, writer-friendly workspace.  I am excited to write on it.  Visit Clay’s blog, referenced in my first post, for some more specific details on WriteMinds.  

 

I will be using this blog to discuss Millions of Minds and our
flagship product, WriteMinds, and all relevant subject matter.
Millions of Minds is a company comprised of a group of people
dedicated to making things on the internet better. WriteMinds is a
web application that will make writing better. This is my first time
using Posterous, so this is a test post. I will have an official
first post coming soon. To learn a little more about WriteMinds check
out exitcreative.