Blogmutt, the crowdsourced blog-writing service, hasn’t been chasing too much publicity just yet, mostly because we are still in closed beta and don’t really want to take on too many more customers.
Our first customers are in now, and they tell us they really like it, but we want to be sure we’ll be able to make our future customers as happy as our current customers, so to do that we have to go a little bit slowly. For every customer we have now, we have more than 10 people on our waiting list now.
All that said, we were very happy to be quoted by Inc. Magazine in a story about market potential. The story was about how people who think they have a big idea can find out if they actually do have a big idea. The writer put us in the same paragraph with one of our spiritual godfathers, Eric Ries. Well, here’s the whole paragraph so you can see for yourself:
There is actually a name for this kind of company-building approach, Minimum Viable Product or MVP, which was coined by entrepreneur and influential blogger Eric Ries. An MVP approach would be, for example, launching a minimalist website where customers are actually prompted to pay for your product or service before it even exists as a way to guarantee the market potential. That’s how Scott Yates tested the idea behind his new company, BlogMutt.com, a site that offers to supply content for company blogs. “It was only when we had real businesses pull out their credit card and sign up for $79—before we even had a site working—that we knew we were on to something,” he says.
It’s a true story. We got lots of great feedback from folks before we started. We were the highest vote getter when applying to the Founder Showcase. We had plenty of people telling us that they’d be willing to spend $79 a month for a blog writing service, but we just didn’t know for sure. Once we had that MVP, or maybe even a wee bit before as the story points out, and people actually did sign up, well, we thought we may be on to something.
So, it may be a few weeks before your spot in line comes up, but if you’d like to try it for yourself be sure to sign up for our beta trial on our home page. And if you are a writer — either an aspiring writer looking for a chance to write for real or a seasoned writer who hates content farms and is looking for some quick, hassle free work to fill in the gaps — check out our writer application information.
And if you have an idea for a business, do what Eric Ries says and ask a customer to actually pay you for a product. If you do that, and they like it, you’ll know you have something real.