Hello, from James, Anna, Jono, Abby and Blaine.
We have some important news to share — Poetica’s technology has been acquired by Condé Nast, where our team will continue to develop our rich editorial tools as part of Condé Nast’s copilot platform. This does mean, however, that we’ll be discontinuing the public Poetica service.
Read on to learn more about what the future holds, why we’ve made this decision and how we’ll handle the shutdown. First, though:
- You will be able to download a complete archive of all of your drafts.
- Thank you to all of our loyal users and friends who have supported us along the way.
Our goal with Poetica has always been to support writers and editors in their work. There’s an immense well of creativity that was – and still is – held back by inferior tools. We’ve pushed the boundaries of what’s possible, and we’re proud of what we’ve built so far. Our technology and design enable the sort of collaboration that a few short years ago was only accessible to those who could climb the steep learning curve of arcane tools like git.
Up until now, though, we’ve been a small five-person team. We’ve tackled the dual problems of creating a humane, intuitive, and collaborative way to interact with text, on any device and any content platform; and the parallel challenge of creating a viable business model. Unfortunately, these goals were often at odds with each-other, competing for our limited time and attention.
That’s why we’re so excited to announce that we’re joining Ed Cudahy and the talented copilot team at Condé Nast. We’re eager for the opportunity to deliver the best possible editorial experience to Condé Nast’s unparalleled editorial teams, so that they can focus on doing what they’ve always done best – delivering great writing to nearly 150 million readers across the globe.
What will happen to Poetica?
- We’ll keep the Poetica service running for the next three months. The service will be live until June 1st, 2016. After June 1st, poetica.com will be unavailable.
- Any drafts that were created on Poetica will be downloadable in ODT format (compatible with Word, Google Docs, etc) until June 1st.
- A full backup of your drafts, including all edits, and so on, will be available in a raw JSON format until June 1st.
- We’re working on preparing those archives, and our users will receive an email in the coming weeks with details on how to download their drafts.
- While Condé Nast has acquired the Poetica software, they have not acquired any of Poetica’s users’ data. No names, email addresses, drafts, or any other data will be transferred to Condé Nast, and we will carefully destroy any records and backups soon after Poetica is shut down.
- It’s worth noting that we will not be maintaining a public archive of Poetica drafts. While we deeply value the preservation of the web’s history in the face of constant change, Poetica was never a publishing platform, and our users have an expectation of privacy around their drafts that would be broken by maintaining an archive.
Thank you!
Any project worth doing is rarely completed in a vacuum, and there are a lot of people who along the way helped us out in one way or another; some just a little, and some a lot. We’re grateful to everyone who’s been involved, but there are a few people we’d like to offer our deepest gratitude for their efforts:
Thank you to Maureen, Poetica’s muse. Ben, Andy, Aanand, Steffen, and Tom for helping us get started in style. Guy for his icons and Basil for the invaluable user experience insights. Bailey, Léa, Tasneem, and Sophie for the fantastic marketing and social media support. Jesse in particular deserves a special mention for the relentless support and advice he’s given us all the way through, even whilst getting Kaia’s and his startup off the ground. To all our investors, thank you for believing in us, offering advice when we needed it, and trusting us to create something brilliant and useful. And, of course, a huge thank you to all of our users for seeing the potential in what we’d made and taking a punt on us.