Inkspired

Inkspired is a platform for readers, writers, and creators. We help them to publish their original stories in form of books, novels, interactive stories, or even webcomics. The platform also helps these authors to develop their own audiences, using matchmaking algorithms with the right readers but also training all writers in how to become better at writing, promoting, and publishing overall. We are committed to helping authors and creators get their online writing career kickstarted, make money by doing the things they love, and become part of a global community of half-million people with thousands of stories in many interactive formats, genres, and languages.

If scaled globally, many emerging writers that did not have the tools or audience before, now have the real chance to gain new skills, learn, and start new careers online which will potentially impact their income and living standards. It's about making online publishing more democratic.

For authors of narrative-based storytelling, developing audiences is more challenging, and most do not have the capability, community, or tools to do it. There are authors that have talent and quality, but they tend to forget the 10x rule: for every hour put into creating content, you need 10 to promote it. This is where Inkspired comes in, helping authors to become better at writing, promoting, and, therefore, selling directly in a growing global community.

Millions of authors publish new original content every day, gathering thousands of followers. The creator economy alone sees more than 500 million active people creating pieces of multimedia content every month, with more than 100 million of content being produced in the narrative space, in a market worth $900 billion.

Given the potential of great stories hitting the market on bigger platforms like Netflix, Disney+, blockbuster movies, or even published books, we can assume that millions of dollars are lost in opportunities of stories that are left untold. In 2020, Just in the US, creators sold over $200 million just on Amazon Publishing.

Inkspired is a platform and a marketplace for all authors of narrative. It will help them to publish and monetize their stories in a community of half a million readers by reaching new audiences while validating the idea of their stories; therefore, becoming better at writing and selling their own content. Readers, on the other hand, can try thousands of stories in multiple interactive formats, genres, and languages; discover new amazing authors, and support their work. As a platform, we make sure both, creators' work and readers match.

Writing, reading, and publishing on Inkspired are for free. If you are a writer, you just need to sign up, click on "create a new story", choose a story title, and start writing your first chapter. As an author, you can choose to publish your story or book chapter by chapter (and schedule new releases) or publish it in one go. As a reader, you can immediately access a catalog of thousands of stories with the possibility of filtering by genre, language, and story type. You can choose any story to start reading for free and add them to your library to receive updates of new future chapter releases on that story.

We are serving emerging writers with an integrated solution for writing, training, publishing, and giving them tools to make money from their content. The population most underserved is LATAM were making money (and receiving money) online is still hard or seeing as something challenging. The reality is that LATAM does not have the same opportunities for making a living on the internet as North Americans or Europeans do. Most of the tools to do it either do not support Latin American countries or they are not even in Spanish (or Portuguese).

That being said, first, we help all writers (especially LATAM writers) with all the tools to craft their stories in different formats: book series, webcomics, interactive stories, microstories, blogs, and "universes". This is where we believe we have a strong offering.

Secondly, we allow them to publish their content/stories in the community (and beyond) for free and help them self-promote them with internal campaigns that increase their visibility within specific readers that are interested in the genres of subgenres of the published stories.

Third, we provide diverse ways to our authors to make money out of their stories, starting with a standard one-off, or having a "membership" where readers have to subscribe with monthly payments (like Patreon), making pre-sales, or even launch crowdfunding campaigns: the best part is that since we are targeting LATAM mostly, with more than 70% of our user base coming from there, we accept local payments in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia; and we also pay the creators locally. As you may know, e-commerce in LATAM is challenging because most people don't have credit cards to buy online or receive payments directly. Local payments include debit cards, cash, local e-wallets, and even payments in installments. We make everything possible to help them sell and earn as easily as you would do in first-world countries.

Forth, our next steps are working on perfecting a matchmaking algorithm: content to consumers. Not only to keep people even more engaged in-platform, but to prompt them to purchase more, and make our creators thrive! We want to track views per unique readers in our language markets and genres to predict an estimated earning for them and provide key insights of small tweaks they can do to earn more money or reach a bigger audience.

Finally, our vision is to produce and have creators producing amazing original series in unique storytelling formats (being "interactive storytelling" the path we chose). We want their readers to be able to *explore the stories*, not only read or watch them. We want the creators to become the next best-sellers, and Inkspired to become a media company owning its own original stories that could find a way to be majorly produced by other industry giants like Disney, HBO, or Netflix.

As Inkspired, we provide people with cutting-edge technology to learn new media skills and start careers online for free. Authoring skills, in today's world governed by social media, means obtaining the tools to reach millions of people outside of their own country's borders. This is a huge opportunity for discovering great talents in corners of all-around LATAM/Caribe; people that never had the tools or audience to ever get the chance to get started.

Build audiences and make a living online is something that is not learned inside the formal educational system and is aligned with the work of the future.

We have selected growth because we have an established user base growing around 20% every month on average at the international level. Even though it is true we have had an approach of community-first by growing our authors and readers, our revenue streams have helped us to be financially sustainable by covering the costs of our operations. At this stage, we are looking to scale deeper and faster across more communities, especially focused on LATAM/Caribe, to help people to catch up faster with what will be the work of the future.

Empowering authors to make them successful creators, plus curation of content for readers. High-quality content is usually hard to find in massive content platforms, and that's why we try to matchmake the best recommendations for every reader. But on the writer's side, finding talent and potential in a vast ocean of authors is also a challenge, and we rely on data, traction, trends, and growth of each piece of content created, to track potential great authors. Our solution is innovative because it helps us find talent faster, and help them grow even faster finding the right audience for them. With great authors, there is great content and happy readers supporting these emerging authors with views and purchases. It closes the loop of the work of the future, helping authors to potentially take this side hobby as a job and grow their sales exponentially by catering to millions of readers without borders.

Inkspired is a digital online platform, and it acts as a global community. The technology that powers the platform is similar to other known social networks. However, the beauty of Inkspired is how we use advanced algorithms to help authors write better fiction and then connect their content to readers that may want to read it. To do this, we use some sort of AI: algorithms that are learning over time based on the actions and behaviours of the users in the platform, so we can provide more accurate insights every time. Furthermore, the business model we use to help authors start earning money from their content is different from the conventional "one-off" sale approach (like Amazon selling eBooks) for online content. We use dynamic views per unique user, plus memberships that allow readers to subscribe (and therefore be a Patreon) to their favorite writers. We also have a marketplace where authors can help other authors with professional services.

The evidence we have is the traction we have got, with more than 20 authors already selling on our platform, and more than half a million users adopting it as a tool to write and publish their stories online. The following link, Alexa from Amazon, can show a glimpse of our growth and traction.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo...

A potential risk (that we are already mitigating) could be presented in the form of copyrights, as there could be authors from other platforms trying to plagiarism content from Inkspired or vice versa. We have made plagiarism hard on 2 fronts: when publishing and when reading. Copy/paste is disabled from the reader's view in the website and the mobile app, so we have made it harder for someone just to steal the content. From the writer's editor, we have introduced internal plagiarism scores that checks all content being published against our own database, but also other famous titles. If the score ranks high, then we take preventive action. If a story infringing copyright is published, then we act just like every other social network like Youtube or Facebook work: we have the community report button mechanism where we take immediate action upon complaints that can be verified, but also our own "weekly" automated revisions that allow us to keep scanning content that is in our catalog.

Current number of people: 650,000

In one year: 2 million.

In 5 years: 25 million.

Goal #1 - Create a more open environment for LATAM/Caribe creators and authors to access the work of the future. 

We will try to achieve this by creating world-class writing/publishing tools at affordable prices, and provide platforms to build up audiences, sell online, and receive money, equally easy to first-world countries. Throughout the creator's economy (work of the future) we want to open up opportunities for LATAM/Caribean people to develop new skills and create new sources of income from a channel where most LATAM/Caribbean people don't know how to do: the internet. We want to scale this in the region, working hard at user growth and looking for fundraising to help us accelerate it.

Goal #2 - Help to develop these creators' and authors' potential to achieve their career goals.

Providing them easy-to-use high-quality tools is not enough assurance that they will thrive. Inkspired wants to make sure to develop these talents with the use of data and a knowledge base in the form of tutorials, coaching, and video training courses. We will create high-quality courses where our authors/creators can learn from how to improve their writing to how to market their content online, and everything in between. Most of our users have a great talent for storytelling, but some don't catalyze opportunities by not knowing how to promote their content. This is a core part of our value proposition, since developing our author/creators' skills will see them thrive on Inkspired, but also outside of it.

We have some revenue and profit already. But a few of the metrics we are using so far when measuring "engagement" are:

- Retention rate of users, churn.
- Average reading time per user.
- Average actions per user.
- Average frequency of content creation per creator.
- Average reaction score for new releases every day.
- Average interaction per content unit (stories/micro stories etc...)
- Monthly growth of active users and published content.
- Story performance involves views growth per day, comments, reviews' ratings, likes, percentage of reading progress per chapter per user, average reading completion of the full story, sales ratio (for commercial stories), follows, and followers.

To help us segment the level of engagement of users we created a Loyalty Rewards Program where users accumulate credits (like points) whenever they do specific actions. And while users see it as fun and games, this system not only prompts users to interact more because they can exchange those credits for benets (gamification), but it also helps us know how many users go from one level to another, and who exactly are the most active users: it helps us to set an "activity" score of the user. We have got 10 levels: 29% staying in Level 1, 36% from Level 2 - 4, 27% from Level 5-7, and 8% from Level 8-10. This is especially helpful to know which user groups are more likely to upgrade to premium, buy a self-publishing service, purchase stories or become ambassadors.

We are a small and compact team of 3 at the moment.

1 person working full-time, 1 working part-time, and 1 contractor. Although, we are very proud to count with 50+ ambassadors (volunteers) who are independently organized in quarterly programs who help us keep building and growing our community organically.

Galo A. Vargas - 3x Start-Up Founder. 15 years of experience in Web/App development, and 12 years as a Designer. BSc in Business Informatics Engineering (2009, ECU/CHILE) and a MSc in Interaction Design (2015, Australia). Author of fantasy book series. Worked as a product manager in the News Media area of EL UNIVERSO (the most prominent newspaper in Ecuador). With that know-how about Publishing and Designing for content, decided to start a venture to help himself publish his own book and stories, and then opening it up to help thousands of other emerging writers to do the same.

Ricardo Viteri - Mobile developer with 10 years of experience. Have created dozens of mobile apps for iOS and Android for clients in the US, UK, Hungary, and Ecuador; and now is the Mobile Lead of the Inkspired Writer app in iOS/Android.

Jackeline Vivian Vargas - 7 years of experience as a Journalist for newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and nowadays acting as Head of Content on Inkspired (In the Spanish language market). More than 7 years of experience in social media marketing, and online writing.

The Inkspired team has built a solution that is open and fit for anyone, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or gender. We empower all creators alike, providing them equal opportunities to thrive online. Since the very beginning of Inkspired, we are proud to serve our users in a way that they feel included at all times: be it with language translations (we have 7 languages in the platform, with 3 official languages in English, Spanish and Portuguese), and even the ability to provide feedback and feel part of the growth of our community and solution.

Also, at the core of our product development, has always been to design interfaces for accessibility, trying to reach everyone.

By applying to the TPrize Challenge, we want to create bigger awareness and broader reach for Inkspired to keep building a stronger and better-connected community of writers and readers in the LATAM/Caribe Region and beyond. Ultimately, with the help of funding and mentorship, be in the capacity to lead in the region and provide millions of people the opportunity to get immersed in the work of the future and be able to provide them additional sources of income from their craft on the internet.

Inkspired is not only about creative stories, novels, and book series. It's about empowering talented people and help them reach new audiences. With the help of PRIZE challenge, we hope to strengthen our network and skills, especially in keys areas like scaling and expansion, sales, and fundraising: areas that will help us tackle all risk barriers we have identified before in growth, technological and conversions. As community builders, we have learned that we are stronger when we stand together than divided.

We deeply believe that the opportunity to get into the finals of the TPRIZE challenge will bring to us will help Inkspired make the necessary connections and acquire the necessary knowledge and inspiration to reach a new level. Invaluable assets like these can only serve as beneficial to our own entrepreneurial communities back home, mentor other aspiring entrepreneurs and their very early-stage ventures, and for sure provide a bigger and better platform for all emerging authors and creators in our region and then the world.

We need help in accelerating and scaling. Inkspired has proven traction in adoption, engagement, stickiness, and conversion. We have been growing fast with user acquisition and also being able to validate our business model through revenue. That being said, we need help in the form of guidance/mentorship and funding to accelerate the product's adoption and growth, and with the comes the challenge of scaling it to be able to expand to other regions, where we will need further resources. TPRIZE's platform offers us a shot at having a greater opportunity to achieve this.

We do not have specific organizations in mind but in general, we would love to partner with organizations related to the creation of multimedia content: narrative content in text, video, and audio; in a way that can help us co-produce original exclusive stories for the platform, or parties that are interested in buying the rights of the stories from our authors.

Another type of organization we would like to partner with would be companies specialized in digital marketing and growth hacking, or universities willing to adopt our solution as a tool for their creative writing students.