A New Adventure

Two weeks ago I launched my first startup. It is a big moment for me because ever since I left Sun a year ago I have wanted to do so, even though I didn’t have a concrete idea. I mean, I had a few, but none of them seemed to be the right one.

While writing a blog post a few months ago, I realized how bad my English really is. It’s not disastrous, but far away from being a pleasing experience for any native speaker. I wished then that there was a service where I could upload my draft and it would be proofread and edited by a skilled editor in a reasonable time, for a reasonable cost. If I am putting such an effort into writing and publishing content, I should also care about how it is presented.

After some time Mira, a cousin of my wife, returned back to Prague from the US and decided to stay here permanently. I knew she was always crazy about spotting English mistakes in restaurants and everywhere else, had the proper certificates and was going to have a period of free time while looking for a new job. It seemed like a good opportunity, so we’ve put our heads together and decided to try it – to build an online English proofreading service.

Our goal is to build a simple yet useful service that will help bloggers, website makers, students, you name it, to polish their content. To make them feel better and more confident about how they represent themselves to the outside.

We are not raising any capital for this. No angels, no investors, just pure bootstrapping. And because I am too busy at my daily job, I decided to get it done by somebody else. Sounds crazy I know, I should do it all myself for free in the evenings. But because when I want anything I want it RIGHT NOW, I decided to outsource it. What a good idea that was! Implementation was done by a Prague startup called Inmite and the design by Martin Cohen, and both Michal from Inmite and Martin did a really good job. Of course there was so much additional work around it that I spent long nights doing analysis, wireframes, discussions, setups, fixes, etc., sleeping just few hours a day. But, after all, the advice from experienced entrepreneurs to release early and often seems to make sense.

Now we are out of private beta and available to everybody. We are not done yet, many things will come, many things will change, but we are out and we are serving our customers. We want to hear what’s bad, what should be different, and we will listen. We promised to ourselves to take personal care of everything, and to make your writing as good as if it was our own.

And yes, I am eating my own dog food and this blog post has been checked by Korekt.me.