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Why I Built Scrypter

Scrypter LogoThe year was 2008. Social media was just ramping up. Twitter was an infant and people were still wondering why Google bought YouTube. MySpace was starting to wither under News Corp and Facebook was on the rise to supplant it.

I was in the email business back then, but already looking for something else. Our email platform allowed us to schedule email deployments down to the minute. On a Monday we could tee up our correspondence to our subscribers for the week. Conceptually, we could have just sat back and just watched the mail go out. (That never happened, of course; we managed it very closely.)

Thoughts of the great American novel were bouncing around in my head as well. I had a story that I wanted to get out to the public, and I began to wonder if the web, the Internet, the cloud, the whatever-we-call-it-these-days could be used to deliver it.

What if I could write my story – even create videos for parts of it – and deploy it on a schedule? What if I could use social media accounts as characters in my story? I could let the characters tell the story via posts, and if I could schedule the posts, they could tell the story in real-time.

Over the years I held on to my idea, and even started writing that book. The book is only half-written, but it’s coming along. (I’ll probably finish it by 2020.) In any case, I circled back and saw platforms out there that came close to the tool I envisioned to tell my story on social media. They came close, but they missed the mark (and, as it happens, the Mark).

In 2012, I asked for help building a deployment platform for stories. Two friends volunteered, and a third joined us soon after. The market for authors who want to deploy stories as scheduled media posts was not very big. The market for marketers who want to schedule brand media posts is much, much bigger. So, while we didn’t completely pivot the idea, we did nudge it a little.

This move puts us in competition with some big players. We believe that those other companies are missing the mark with their scheduling functionality. It’s our aim to fix that.

(To be honest, I would have been happy if one of them copied our interface idea. I really just wanted this thing to exist because I think it’s a better way. Since they didn’t, we had no choice but build it ourselves.)

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