OnlyRoughDrafts.com is Closing

Rough Draft the app is alive and as strong as ever!

So there's no risk of misunderstanding OnlyRoughDrafts.com the site and Rough Draft the app are two separate things. Only OnlyRoughDrafts.com is closing on 9/17/2016, and that's what this post is about.

For me, it’s tough to know if a rough draft is worth traveling the road of revising until I see it on paper. Before the ideas are written down, they are like a cloud that can patch itself whenever a hole is poked. Kind of like that sentence when it was just an idea in my head, but when it got on paper it was kind so shi… Anyways, we made Rough Draft to help writers with this and are happy to be able to say we've helped hundreds of thousands of writers with just that.

And we recently just reached many more thanks to another feature in the app store!

We made OnlyRoughDrafts.com to try and help with the next test of writing, judging if we only like our draft cause we made it. We made it because when we talked to writers we heard things like this:

We wanted to make someplace for writers to be able to share their rough drafts. A place that was comfortable, because the context of it being a rough draft was clear, so we quickly threw OnlyRoughDrafts.com together. We wanted to support Rough Draft writers in getting their ideas out and make it comfortable sharing a draft with a friend, so that draft would hopefully make its way to the world.

This is what it looked like in all it's messy glory

OnlyRoughDrafts.com showed some promise, with some great writers getting involved to share their early drafts, and others coming to share their thoughts. Maybe we didn’t do enough to continue to grow the community. Truthfully, it was a side project that we wanted to see if it could be thrown in the deep end and swim. It couldn’t.

[TK: GIF of being thrown in the deep end and not swimming]
(probably better off not googling for that…)

Over the months we’ve seen the small community slowly wander away. We’ve seen fewer posts and less feedback. We built OnlyRoughDrafts hoping to give greater value to Rough Draft writers. Now we’ve found time spent on OnlyRoughDrafts.com would be better spent giving value to writers directly within Rough Draft.

We’re thinking of a few new small ways that you might be able to share your rough drafts with the context that strikethroughs can give. Until we release that, or Medium lets us add strikethroughs here😉, you can continue to share your rough drafts with all their strikethoughs by copying and pasting into most email apps.

Thanks for continuing to be with us through our revising of Rough Draft. Hopefully, you won’t mind our cutting out this section in this revision. If you do, please do get in touch! We’d love to know more about what you’re looking for in sharing your rough drafts and how we might you to continue sharing your rough drafts.

For now, this chapter of OnlyRoughDrafts is finishing, with the full focus of our Rough Draft development resources being focused back on the Mac and iOS apps.

OnlyRoughDrafts.com will be shutting down on September 16, 2016. If you need to back up any content from the site, please do it before then. And just to be clear again, Rough Draft will be living on with no end in sight!