DRRAFT BUSINESS PLANChris Driscoll

Instructors: Marko Tandefelt, Loretta Wolozin, David Carroll, Andrew Zornoza

TABLE OF CONTENTSExecutive Summary.......................................................................................................................3What's So Different About Drraft?..................................................................................................7How It Works.................................................................................................................................8Target Audience...........................................................................................................................10The Importance of Community, and Its Design............................................................................11Top Five FAQ...............................................................................................................................12Marketing Strategy.......................................................................................................................14Revenue Projections, Assumptions.............................................................................................16Potential Downfalls, Resolutions.................................................................................................17

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARYDrraft.com is a community for professional and aspiring writers to publish, critique, and proliferate their work in a way that eschews traditional media, publishing channels, and criteria of excellence. Authors follow their compatriots, vote up what they like, and the community benefits from mutual enrichment. Designed under advisement of James Scott Bell, author of "Plot and Structure", Drraft intentionally creates a comfortable environment for serious writers of all sorts to gather in a community that upholds the values and necessities of privacy and integrity.

Readers are invited to explore the public interface, updated by the second with stories marked 'Share With the World' by their Drraft authors. We at Drraft were readers first and value the convenience of having a space that is consistently entertaining. Our nightstands are no longer littered with magazines, but polished with trophied iDevices. We understand the rush, the need to breeze a paragraph, the need to consume. That's why we imposed the 500 character limit, a carefully selected constraint that's just enough for talented writers to compose a compelling plot or construct a convincing character, and just enough for readers to get through fifteen stories on the subway to work, fueling their imagination for the day. The goal of Drraft is to eliminate the disadvantages involved in publishing stories on existing sites like writing.com. Writing.com has almost one million members, but readers are challenged to sift through piles of adolescent love stories, and writers are throwing their pieces into a haystack of less than stellar scripts. To find a good story is to find the diamond in the rough. It's the goal of Drraft to create the Cave of Wonders.

Because of these, we'll say 'inefficiencies', writers have gotten comfortable brushing the internet off as an advantageous medium to publish their work. The internet isn't new anymore, and thus we don't capitalize its name. It's potential as a workspace and dissemination platform has been proven in web applications like Twitter, Facebook, even Dropbox. It all comes down to a matter of privacy and discovery. Drraft's mission is to create a comfortable home for writers--to finally create an online workspace and social portfolio community like so many exist for Designers--by consistently pursuing a narrow focus on high quality.

Drraft offers an architecture built on more than a year of usability research with writers and professional user experience designers. It is founded on the knowledge gained through testing [explained in Appendix A] and designed to the present standards of responsive web design. Upon invitation, members are immediately capable of composing and publishing stories. Though a percentage of the community remains private, a public portfolio is generated for each member once they join. Writers can send this link

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to employers, publishers, family or friends to show off the work they've marked public. Our drrft.me account, above all our unique features, is the true competitive advantage of Drraft.

Inside the community, writers can enjoy feedback from colleagues of their caliber. They can sort stories by the writers they follow, the most popular, everyone, stories they've liked, or debut stories of new members. More importantly, we've devised a social portfolio that is powered by its members. Based on their activity within Drraft (publishing, commenting, following, liking) and the activity of the members they've invited, writers are issued a monthly amount of invites to grow Drraft's community. We hope this method will invite unforeseen members of various talents. This method is based on the successful portfolio model in Dribbble, created by Dan Cederholm, and was developed under advisement of Kyle Bragger, creator of Forrst (both notable social design networks).

The Drraft team is currently led by Chris Driscoll, Founder and Designer. Chris has multiple Addy and Webby Awards for his designs at Blitz Agency. He is responsible for the successful digital campaigns of Starbucks, Activision's Guitar Hero, Naked Juice, and FX Networks to name a few. The idea for Drraft

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emerged from his own experiences and needs as a novice writer, and the needs of the writers surrounding him. Preston Pope, Drraft's Technical Director, aided in the foundation of Sinatra, a platform for the Ruby on Rails language used worldwide by developers. He also occasions as the Sound Engineer for Def Leppard. Preston's myriad of talents gives him strength to contribute to the creative environment necessary to build innovative tools with the Drraft team.

Our Editor in Chief, BJ Fleming, is a published creative writer and product copywriter. He is a master of bending the rules and delivering fantastic stories in very few words. BJ's undergrad and MFA is in Creative Writing from USC; his professional experience in the digital publishing industry, notably Break Media, LiveStrong, and contributions to McSweeney's, has earned him the position as leader of Drraft members.

We've also developed a unique marketing strategy, detailed in the marketing section but summarize it here with the following features:

- Golden Ink for featured posts- Pro Accounts for the serious writers- Supporter Accounts for donations- Journals to access curated content from Drraft- Personal Journals to print your own content- Advertisements powered by Drraft.

Our needs are concise and focussed. In order to continue making innovative solutions for members, we need $5,000 as a minimum amount of equity in funding for server space. Server space allows us access to faster speeds and solutions for the anticipated growth. This is a preliminary estimate and once we have set up the journal printing feature, we will ask for an additional $8,000.

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WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT DRRAFT?There are over one hundred social media sites available for writers, and we've inserted ourselves into most of them to understand the experience. Though designs, and some story styles, varied, the model was consistent: Sign Up, Publish, Comment, Read. The issue problem is that everyone can do this, so publishing a story is like throwing it into a haystack of teenage breakup poetry. There is little regard for quality control. Most importantly, the writer is disregarded. The communities care little about advancing craft with critique, and are mostly concerned with entertainment. They regard quantity over quality, and suffer for it.

Drraft attempts to solve this by putting the writer at the center of the community. We care very much about getting our members exposure, and thus we've crafted both a public interface and a portfolio per member. It's also worth mentioning that Drraft is the only writing community that allows its members to "follow" other writers they enjoy, and "like" stories so that they can always come back to them and read them again. We've created a workspace that mirrors the solitude writers need provided with the support that is necessary. It's a place for writers to come together and create.

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HOW IT WORKSMembers receive an email invitation from Hello@Drraft.com. They click accept and their portfolio is already up and running, ready to share publicly published stories. The navigation, a product of almost twenty tested iterations, gives quick access to every feature. Clicking the "Me" button drops a menu with everything a writer can contribute and/or advance his/her account. The Read Stories and Writers tabs naturally link to everything in the community that the writer can conceive. The member is presented with a grid of stories or a list of writers, of whom they can choose to follow at the click of a button (based on the quick Twitter Follow architecture).

We understand reading stories in a grid can be sort of lame and dizzying, so we created a Focus Mode. Readers can click "Focus" and the rest of the site will alpha out, allowing a clean environment to read one story at a time. We also used this technique in the compose section, because there's never a reason to compose on a cluttered page. We hope we've emulated the typewriter feel as best as possible.

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We've developed a tagging system to replace literary genres. We understand a lot of what's composed on Drraft is experimental, and so locking stories down to particular categories was unfair to the writers. By checking out popular tags, writers might get inspired to write about something new. It also dimensionalizes our search engine, built around author names, story titles, and said tagging system.

If writers get lost or uncomfortable, they just need to scroll down to reveal the magic footer, with live updated Twitter Tips on how to use Drraft. Or they can follow @drrft.

Planned Features:- Community Writing Pages, Synchronous Interaction- The Brainstorm Page- The Drraft Directory, Publisher Connection- Drraft iPad App, Compose or Read on the Go!

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TARGET AUDIENCEDrraft's member target are writers of all sorts. In its initial phases, we'd like to see cross-genre interaction. Poets, novelists, biographers and the like are all welcome to join. It's important that genres vary as this is an integral step toward creative synergy and recovery, as needed. Switching roles, even reading something outside your comfort zone, can fuel creativity, and we'd like Drraft to eventually act as a preventative measure and/or prescription for writer's block.

The primary reader target are the city folks, caught in the hustle of crowded commutes and overbooked days. We'd like to provide them with engaging stories they can browse through on the subway. We think it's beneficial to start the day off with creative fuel than the sports section of the Times. Though Drraft was inspired in the experience of city life, we haven't forgotten about the rural dwellers and our friends in the mountains. It can get really lonely, and the Drraft community might be the perfect for connecting to writers outside your jurisdiction, or if you just get snowed in.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY, AND ITS DESIGNCommunity fuels creative growth. We've seen proof of this in our market analysis. Social portfolios are a daily place of inspiration, and being a part of a community centered around portfolio design has proven to increase the rate and quality of a member's contribution to the site. Positive feedback and welcoming critique are all strong players in getting community members to continue sharing with each other.

Drraft extends outside of its own architecture. We allow our members to display their emails, their twitter accounts, even their location. It's necessary for writers to initialize relationships within Drraft, but it's phenomenally important for them to externalize the community and bring it outside of the internet. One of our goals is to see our members performing off of Drraft at poetry readings.

We've designed the community to monitor malicious intent or offensive material. We've also made it easy for writers to access each other and explore a library of stories within the community. Based on an "activity" algorithm we've created, members can monitor the activity of the writers they follow - what they've posted/liked/commented - and monitor themselves. The Drraft invite system is largely based on this activity percentage. Each month, writers with a certain quota of activity within Drraft are awarded a certain number of invites to give away to writers awaiting membership. The invite system is imperfect, we know, but it is the best solution for the beginning of the community to ensure a core strength in talent. As Drraft grows, we will install a queue site for writers to apply for membership.

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TOP FIVE FAQHow do members get invited? Writers travel in packs. We're confident that sending an invite to one member means ten more that will get discovered. The best way, however, to get discovered by Drraft is to tweet a 280 character story (that's two full tweets) @drrft. These stories are always monitored and reviewed by staff and members. We understand that the model is imperfect, but it's the best solution we currently have for quality control, as well as moderated growth.

Why only 500 characters?300 was too little, and a thousand too much. We tested and chose the perfect length for talented writers to be able to compose a compelling story and for readers to stay interested. The constraintis a problem-based challenge that puts writing mettle to the test.

Why is it private to the world, and not just read only?To maintain quality, we had to sacrifice certain affordances for the public. While our mission is to get all writers comfortable in the Drraft environment, privacy is of utmost importance. Until we feel confident that Drraft's writers are totally comfortable sharing everything with the world, readers can access a keyhole into Drraft through the public interface.

I don't write stories, but I am a writer. Is Drraft for me?Tweet a sample of your style @drrft. We love seeing new styles and especially involving different genres in Drraft. Remember that Drraft is about critique and growth as well as sharing, so if we feel you're strong in either category you're already a strong candidate.

English only?Currently, we'll say yes. We understand that this is biased and some of the best pieces are written in far more romantic languages than English. Then again, it's up to the community, so all the more power to them if they bring in multiple languages. We'd love to see it happen and are working on a secure way to support it natively in the future.

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MARKETING STRATEGYOur marketing strategy has been a challenging and innovative process, as we are marketing a private community to itself, and a private community to the public. The solutions include the following:

Golden Ink: Writers can purchase sets of Golden Ink to shoot themselves into the Featured Stories list and to the top of the most popular stories, allowing them more exposure and advantage to getting more critique.

Pro Accounts: A monthly subscription to the Pro Account has many advantages. First and foremost, a 'Pro' Badge next to the writer's display name. They are also issued monthly Golden Ink cartridges to feature their stories, and are listed in the Drraft Directory, sent to publishers monthly for talent discovery. Pro Account holders also receive Drraft Journals (details below) free of charge.

Supporter Accounts: For the generous who believe in Drraft's mission statement and want to help us further our goals of creating a home for writers online. Supporters are awarded a 'Supporter' Badge next to their displayed name.

Monthly Curated Journals: What's a writing community without journals? Every month our Editor in Chief, BJ Fleming, chooses a trio of three writers to help him curate a journal of stories published on Drraft. These digital journals can be purchased by community members of by the public. They can also be offered in print.

Custom Publications: It's always pleasant to have a book of your own work displayed on the coffee table. Writers can either choose the stories they have liked from other members, or their own, and Drraft will automatically construct a book design for them. These can only be ordered in print to maintain the security and necessary control of digital publishing.

Advertisement: Every page except for the compose page within the community has dedicated space for a 200px square advertisement. These advertisements are curated by Drraft to benefit the members. We've also added "Ads Powered by Drraft" as a way to perhaps cure banner blindness and begin to trust the community advertisements. Potential advertisers would include mobile apps targeting writers and tools for writers that vary from a book that cures writers block to a quill that reads out loud.

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Pricing Guideline

Membership: FreeGolden Ink: $5 per "bottle"Pro Accounts: $10/mo., $25/3 mo., $88/ yr.Supporter Accounts: N/A (donation based)Journals: $9/journal, $60/yearly subscriptionPersonal Journals: $30 per journalAdvertisement: $10/day

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REVENUE PROJECTIONS, ASSUMPTIONSBased on the full launch member count of 120 writers, we expect expansion to 500 members in three months. The growth will initially be rapid. Each of the 120 members at launch will be given ten invites. If even 50% of those members use their invites, we'll have exceeded our expectations. During the three initial months we will be working long hours promoting Drraft through various networks. We realistically project the following growth in revenue, based on steady rates of induction, improvements to features, and discounting price inflation in the event that rates raise:

Member GeneratedLaunch Date (July 2011): $20003 mo.: $40006 mo.: $11,0001 yr.: $41,0002 yr.: $60,0005 yr.: $100,000

Reader GeneratedLaunch Date: $03 mo.: $10006 mo.: $40001 yr.: $90002 yr.: $150005 yr.: $50000

We assume that 80% of the revenue will source from readers purchasing and subscribing to journals.

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POTENTIAL DOWNFALLS, RESOLUTIONSWe imposed failsafes for a lot of downfalls that could have potentially occurred in the expansion of a community. These include automatic server expansion, a responsive API for developers to easily learn the backend, and an administrative panel for monitoring the activity of the community as a whole. We are also prepared for many more issues. Assuming our competitors adapt with similar features, we plan on reacting with our synchronous interaction architecture that's in testing right now. This will allow writers to gather together on Drraft and collaborate on one piece on a "live pad".

If the privacy of Drraft turns out to be more of a hinderance for writers and readers, we've developed the red "never press" switch in our admin panel. This takes three confirmations from the founders to switch Drraft from a private community into a fully public accessible community.

Bankruptcy. Luckily, Drraft is lightweight, and bankruptcy will hardly affect its members. We are prepared to turn off journal creation and all e-commerce in case of the Drraft Doomsday. This will keep Drraft live, but it would become more of an open-source environment. This is the last resort, of course, and we welcome advice from our much more business savvy investors to guide us through avoiding such an issue.

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APPENDIX A.The following is a usability report on the research involved in getting Drraft to its current beta state. My methods of documenting feedback were mostly by way of notebook and emails. Though I photographed some interactions with the design, the photos were not evidence enough of useful research. However, I do regret not having an audio recorder. Challenges: Research published writers' habitsDetermine focussed targetBuild a community from scratchArchitect a model for the community to extend itself.Construct a social portfolio model that contributes to creative recoveryConstruct a unique interface that compels writers to read and writeBuild a system that affords privacy and integrity, but can also be shared with the world Drraft has remained a series of rapid prototypes throughout the design process. It has only recently been formed together as one massive community architecture. It started with a very crude wireframe interface. The first tests involved a group of writers/comrades. I sat down with BJ Fleming, Editor in Chief of Break Media and Livestrong (currently Editor of Drraft), and we began with co-discovery. I showed BJ the interactive wireframe and we began to brainstorm different ways of interacting with the interface. Because I had not established constraints yet, this meeting was entirely open to grand ideas. Some notable features that were born from this discussion: Friending Writers, later evolved into Following WritersStory Categories, later evolved into Tagging StoriesResizable Compose BoxCharacter Limit The discussion spiralled and the crude website I put together was clearly not well planned. I went back to paper prototyping, this time involving a third participant, Ben Alavi, Copywriter for CitrusByte. This was especially challenging because I was in New York and BJ and Ben were both in Los Angeles. Enter the power of Skype! I made a PDF booklet for them to print out and I observed them silently while they worked through the interface. We coined our method "Paper Skyprotyping". The feedback was live and

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unprompted, and very casual. After about twenty minutes, it evolved into a workshop. I joined in on their discussion and we worked out a good flow for the website structure after about five hours and a very messy apartment (on both coasts). Results of this initial test were very good, in that it was catastrophic. The application was difficult to navigate through, and while BJ and Ben were very good sports at role-playing in a mock community, the forms of communication were lacking. They were blocked from doing certain things they wanted to do quickly, like 'like' a story or always be in touch with the same member (later introduced in the 'follow' feature). Some great notes from that discussion: Ben: "There are a lot of dead ends. I want to get everywhere on the site from anywhere."BJ: "There isn't much of a distinction from where I contribute to where I receive."BJ: "Understandably, this is very asynchronous. It'd be revolutionary if there was a synchronous portion, perhaps group writing."Ben: "I hate the categories. I shouldn't have to check one, and I know for a fact my stories would get lost in a search of the wrong category." I structured a new design, this time bringing it back to an interactive digital prototype and adding elements from BJ and Ben's test and some of my own. The navigation became the most important feature of the design because of the non-digital nature of professional writers. I'll clarify. By non-digital, I refer to the comforts of composing solely in internet cloudspace (the cloud). My limited exposure to this target was not sufficient to effectively design for them. I knew plenty of writers, but I needed to get in the trenches. This came with advice from a friend who said that, though my project can certainly be used by many writers, if I can get the die-hard typewriter-pen-paper-analogy writing enthusiasts hooked then Drraft would be golden as a sufficient writing tool. I decided to employ a focus group to discuss the general experience of writing, namely in the comforts and discomforts of the cloud. My focus group consisted of five professional writers. I was humbled by the attendance of both Dave Barry, author of "Peter and the StarCatchers", and James Scott Bell, criminal novelist and author of "Plot and Structure". I devised an early version of a mediator's script. I kicked off the conversation with a loaded prompt, inquiring, "If you were forced to write online, in what situation would you be most comfortable?" The conversation began at high speed. I inserted myself as both participant (who wouldn't want to talk to these people?) and investigator, but only contributing to the conversation to drive it further when it dulled down. My intent was to find out, without seeing an application, what features would be best to design for this audience. The full script: Loaded.

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Writing.com has almost a million members. Have you or would you use it?Init.If you were forced to write online, in what situation would you be most comfortable?Drivers.What are your thoughts on the integrity of the internet as a writing space?Would you ever share your work open sourced?Are you interested in exploring different genres of writing?Are writing groups important to your creative inspiration?How accessible are these writing groups?Do you ever seek other writers/editors for creative recovery?Besides stories, what else do you think you might share with other writers?Are you concerned with paper consumption (it has to be asked)?Final.Most of you are established. How comfortable would you be with starting inside a community with no hierarchy, but as an equal with any member? Most writers agreed that 'online' does not necessarily mean 'available to the world'. They want to write privately and optionally share their work publicly. I piggybacked on that idea and asked, "With whom would you share, and what would inspire you to share publicly?" They looked around and gestured to each other, implying unanimously that they'd share with each other. The participants went back and forth with whom they'd share their work with. Aside from each other, the majority was dedicated readers and employers. This set off an interesting tangent about editors. Editors, it was agreed, are the worst enemies of a writer. This gave me indirect feedback on my concept for an 'editing' interface in Drraft. It also meant limiting or monitoring 'comments', and adding flags. The writers at hand said that they do indeed appreciate feedback, but if they could publish without an editor they would. Answers about the integrity of the internet were also unanimous. No one trusts anyone. Fiona, a participant and poet, mentioned that there are too many ways their work could be stolen. I had replied that typically, making something like plagiarism an inconvenience online would get rid of 90% of the problem (something I learned from software engineer Ramsey Nasser), and I asked if this would make a difference. There was hesitance, so I knew this became a priority to prove in the interface. I filtered the feedback I received in the conversation by things practical to the time constraints (though the impractical was listed for possible future features), technically practical, and pertaining to the initial context of Drraft. Some important features and fixes from this discussion:

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Make Drraft a Private NetworkImpose guidelines to membersAllow choice of privacyMembers issued invites to send to prospects based on their activity in DrraftInvent a public interface as a keyhole glimpse into the community, later 'Drrft.Me'Likes, Comments, Flagging malicious or offensive content I shifted some things around in my design--adapting, reacting, and creating according to previous critique/feedback. Before moving into the next testing environment, I went over the design myself and redid a lot based on the Lidwell principles of usability that have been beat into me as a designer. The most important principle in this case was accessibility. Because I was trying to reach an audience that was not so comfortable on the internet, it had to meet many standards for a wide range of genre writers. I realized that it's 2011 and people don't compute solely in front of a laptop or desktop monitor anymore, so I made a responsive CSS design that adapts the site's design and optimizes for most mobile platforms. There was also a large focus on the 80/20 rule. I needed to rid the site of as much clutter as possible and emulate the feeling of a typewriter. I added 'Focus Mode' which gave the affordance of, well, focussing. Members can click Focus on any story in the grid and it will alpha out the rest of the site. Also, Focus Mode is automatically enabled when members click inside the 'compose' box, something I picked up from the OmmWriter app on Mac OSX. I chose fonts that were easy to read and easy to compose with by borrowing research from the iAWriter app. There was also the issue of marketing. This posed an interesting challenge. How would Drraft, a private community, be marketable to the public? As Drraft was quickly evolving into a business, I needed to devise a way to make profit without interfering too much with the original ideals of the site. Twitter TipsTwitter Invite SystemPublic Curated JournalsPro AccountsSupporter Accounts Most of the above features have not quite been implemented yet. I'm focussed on completing the beta launch of Drraft. My last test was an heuristic evaluation of the site. For this, I had usability designer Thanh Gip do an expert appraisal. I also had Aaron Druck, fellow student and UX for Yahoo, and Dongyoon Park, fellow student and UX for Microsoft, evaluate Drraft. Some important notes:

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User Control and Freedom:Some bugs with drrft.me accounts, but while still inside drraft.com things work smoothly. Load times need serious work.Consistency and Standards:Ahead of the curve, but some are concerned it might be 'too' designed for power users. Need to take a step back and watch Grandma use it.Error Prevention:Great in-app error prevention... AJAX loaded error right above the error, and the page never changes. However, no 404 error screen is a huge issue.Recognition Rather than Recall:Particular bits might need to be learned, though most of the site displays features widely known on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. It's a matter of introducing these features to writers who likely do not use these sites.Flexibility and Efficiency of Use:Everything leads to everything. Impressive navigation.Aesthetic and Minimalist Design:The design is cold... a bit rigid. The whitespace is nice, but it looks like everything is floating in this vast universe of nothing. Contain it.Help and Docs:Interesting magic footer. The twitter tips in the footer are a unique take on tutorializing the site. Well played. Drraft is at a feature freeze until the community grows. There are plans for expansion and improvement, but the member experience is integral to the implementation of future things.

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