Right now it's in private alpha, just a group of 20 trusted people running through it. By the end of this month, it will be running on my personal blog. I'll make a post on HN about it then.
This may very well be revolutionary but my time is limited. Google searches for "sett blog" return nothing. #sett on twitter is more nothingness. It's ironic: I am not heavily engaged in social media at all, but turns I need social proof in situations like these.
Yours is literally 2 features, creation of blogs and making posts. I don't see where the market for your platform is, if I want this why don't I just use HTML files on shared hosting? Same features + a custom domain, lower cost.
Tumblr and Posterous are so good, not to mention Wordpress — I really wouldn't want to get into the blogging market at the moment.
Because 99% of people don't know how to do this?
btw signup page shot http://i.imgur.com/kJyus.png on ff10
and flashblock covers up some button on your blog http://i.imgur.com/xUaiz.png
How does the history page look with multiple posts? What does the post creation tool look like? Possibility of LiveFyre or Discus?
Should I have to sign up to find out what the features of your new blogging platform are, aside from simplicity? You want our money and support, sell it to us.
"Yes, it's true, most other blogging platforms are free. We charge money for ours because we want writers, not advertisers, to be our customers."
First off, I think this is great. If I were a more serious writer, I think I'd enjoy being on a platform, knowing that other people in the network were also serious writers. The idea of having a blog I'm committed to enough to pay a bit for is appealing to me. I think there might be a market there.
However, what people are saying is correct - the product is overly simple. Before you charge for something, people are going to need to see the advantage over starting a Wordpress blog like everybody else. If the design was elegant and the community (as mentioned above) were proven, I could see asking $9/month.
Apart from that, congrats for having launched. Take the feedback (of all kinds) in stride, listen carefully to what people are saying, and iterate like crazy.
or at least a feed.
I have logged out of my account since I do not want to cause any harm. Please fix.
1. Make it easy for one small class of people.
2. Convert people who dont blog than people who have a blog already.
Your main problem is also what you are trying to sell - your simplicity. The site looks bad -- as in, it looks like the Rails 15 minute blog tutorial with a few extra things. This isnt simplicity - this is bare-bones. Simplicity is easy to use, easy to understand, and beautiful to look at. After I signed up I was immediately thrown into writing a blog post. What? What is this? Am I supposed to write a post? Is it private? Who can see it? You've thrown me into the water when I don't know how to swim, because you assume the life preserver is getting in my way.
I don't have a tumblr, but I tried them out today. I was up an running faster than your site - and they don't charge money! They didn't ask for my first or last name, all they asked for was email, password, URL -- all on one page as well.
Finally, the fact that your site is so bare-bones, but yet charges money, will cause problems. What's to stop me from building a site very similar to this in a weekend and charging $5/month? Or nothing? I feel it will be extremely hard to have a good business plan with "we have less features".
Your platform looks nice, but I think the business model that drives it will need to be rethought.
One of the issues here is that the problem you're attempting to address has already been solved.
The technology barrier to self-publishing is already low enough. No disrespect to non-technical people, but if you can't figure out how to set up a Tumblr blog, then there are larger issues at hand.
In other words, you can keep lowering the barrier to self-publishing, but eventually you're not left with much of an actual business. I think criticsquid's reply said it well; there's a huge difference between simplicity and lacking in features.
I think one direction you might look into is selling yourself as a discriminating/curated blog platform, much like The Deck did with their curated Ad Network for the creative industry.
At any rate, you need to add some value here. At present, I just can't (personally) see any reason why I'd choose your platform over the other options.
You did a great job convincing me I need something to fix it.
Increase the quality of the design by attention to detail (the colour is great.. find the right reading font, line-height, buttons, fields styles etc) and make the experience *elegant"and I think that's when you'll see adoption.
But... I don't get how you are better. You have only stating that you are better. I would also like to see examples of your strength (I know you pointed that your blog is running on the platform, but I don't see anything useful on your blog about how you are better).
Try looking at http://www.smugmug.com/ They have a similar philosophy to you guys (in the photos space).
I think that's asking too much for a blogging system where it has free and wastly used alternatives. You guys need to put up a video and/or a presentation, some visual candy so that people would know what they are about to get.
the example in the main page does not show anything that is being backed up by a blogging system. it's just text and a hyperlink.
What would be interesting is a blog platform that can do more to make the reading experience more pleasurable, like really nice fontography and so on.
2. Trying again - nothing.
3. Probably occupied already I think and try with "testing" - some red-letter angry error.
4. Changing URL to Brytter.com, clicking on "my blogs" - barely visible in the top right corner despite being logged in - getting prompted with a "which blog would you like to do write on" dropdown.
5. No "test" nor "testing" there - and no way to create a new blog.
I think you just forgot the V and the P in MVP.
Off topic, since a blog is the "hello world" of web development for quite a few years now: how many of you have created blogging-related web apps? I 'll start with http://instablogg.com
