A Letter To The Pillowfort Community
The Kickstarter that weâve spent the last several weeks preparing for is launching tomorrow morning. Iâve been working on Pillowfort for over three years now, which seems like a very long time. I distinctly remember the moment that I first had the idea for Pillowfort: I was talking to a friend back in 2013 and she told me about how sheâd been part of a forum for fiction writers that had been close-knit and supportive, but that the forum had eventually shut down and she hadnât found any online communities since to match what that group had meant to her. And it reminded me of the amazing times Iâd had on LiveJournal and other websites before theyâd started changing into something else and the user-base migrated elsewhere, and how much I missed those unique experiences.
Thus Pillowfort started out as a simple passion project: to make the kind of site that would bring back the sense of community and togetherness that earlier social media experiences had brought me, while still keeping the ease of communication and global sharing that the newer sites enabled. To simply make the kind of blogging site that I was yearning for. But it was an ambitious project for one person; I worked on it on my own for a few months, sometimes wondering if sinking so many hours into this pie-in-the-sky dream was worth it. I ultimately decided to set up an âofficialâ Tumblr account for Pillowfort and make a little introductory post describing my ideas for the site, accompanied by some screencaps of the site demo, and see if people would be interested in what I was working on. I added some tags that seemed relevant and threw the post into the ether, telling myself that if nobody responded to it then that was that, and Iâd move onto something else.
I checked the post the next morning to see that it had somehow, inconceivably, collected thousands of notes overnight, purely by being shared among people who saw the post and had connected with the idea. Over the next week the post would gather around 35,000 notes and be mentioned on other websites. It was far more than I could have anticipated. At that point I knew that I had something real, that thousands of other people wanted as much as I did, and it would be a shame to let such an opportunity go.
A lot is riding on this Kickstarter. Up until now the project has mostly been worked on by volunteers; even I as the site founder have had to find the time to work on Pillowfort in my free time, but itâs become increasingly clear over the last year that if Pillowfort is to truly grow into its potential, weâre going to need a committed and consistent staff that can put in the hours to develop the site as quickly as our growing base of users want it to. As proud as I am of the progress thatâs already been made, the site is still very much in its infancy; thereâs so much more that I want to do with Pillowfort, but to make it happen weâre simply going to need the funds so that I and my developers can afford to work on the site at least part time. Iâve made the decision not to seek out VC investments because I want the primary focus for expanding the site in the near future to be on how we can make the site the best possible version of itself, not on maximizing revenue to pay back our investors. Iâve seen the other social media sites weâve all used start to make decisions that were geared more towards increasing earnings instead of improving user experience, and the dream for Pillowfort is to create a social media site that can stay focused on being user-friendly and efficient. It might be a naive dream, who knows, but Iâm determined to try it.
If you canât contribute to the Kickstarter but still want to help us out, the best thing you can do for us is to share the link to the Kickstarter on your other social media accountsâ just spread the word, tell others how much you like the site, and that will help us a great deal. The fact that has always buoyed me most when working on this project got frustrating was that Pillowfort is something most people seem to really want, and thatâs probably the biggest blessing we could have asked for. Thank you, to all of you who have supported us this far; Iâm so encouraged by how far the site has already come and I hope that I can realize the rest of this dream with your help.
- Julia
Pillowfort.io Founder
Read this post on Pillowfort.io.