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Product
Macawls edited this page 2026-01-09 00:42:22 +00:00
Target Audience
Developer Creators - developers who monetize themselves/personal brand:
- Developer advocates / DevRel
- Tech educators (course creators, tutorial writers)
- "Build in public" founders
- Devs who share learnings on Twitter/YouTube/blogs
These people have money (or will), care about their brand, and are technical enough to appreciate WriteKit's approach.
Competitive Advantage
Go + SQLite stack:
- Run hundreds of blogs on minimal infrastructure
- Single binary deployment (vs Ghost's Node + MySQL + Nginx complexity)
- Self-hosting is trivial: download, run, done
- Edge-ready (Cloudflare Workers, Fly.io)
- Can price lower than competitors due to efficiency
| Ghost (Node) | WriteKit (Go) |
|---|---|
| 1GB+ RAM minimum | 64-128MB |
| Complex self-host | Single binary |
| $9/mo minimum | Can go lower |
Positioning vs Competitors
- Ghost: Heavy, creator-focused, expensive infrastructure
- Hashnode: Bloated, community-focused
- Medium: No ownership, algorithm-dependent
- Hugo/Jekyll: Static-only, no UI, developer-only
- WriteKit: Lightweight, developer-first, tinkerable, owns your data
Business Model (TBD)
Current thinking: Freemium with product-led growth
Free tier:
- Blog with subdomain (you.writekit.dev)
- "Powered by WriteKit" badge (organic marketing)
- Core features: posts, comments, reactions, basic analytics
Premium tier (~$5/mo):
- Custom domain
- Remove "Powered by WriteKit" badge
- Advanced analytics
- Custom CSS (not sure yet)
- Newsletter/subscribers (future)
Growth strategy: Free users with badge = marketing. Same playbook as Carrd, Notion, Substack, Webflow.
Lessons from Ghost (John O'Nolan)
- Don't charge too little ($5/mo customers are problematic)
- Be opinionated: "Ghost is unapologetically a publishing platform, not a generic CMS"
- Build audience before launch (Ghost had 30k email signups before writing code)
- Non-profit structure aligned incentives with users
- Magic link auth > over-engineered OAuth
- Steady growth > exponential growth is fine
Origin Story
Built because:
- Working with clients, CMS systems are annoying - can't tinker
- Built an SSG from scratch for a client - realized there's a better way
- Developer-first approach: control, simplicity, data ownership
What's Missing
- OG image generation
- Newsletter/email (future)
Next Steps
- Launch free tier with "Powered by WriteKit" badge
- Get 10-20 developer creators to try it
- Learn from real users
- Figure out pricing based on feedback