Simily isn’t going to make it
You should think about it.
As a creator and builder myself, I refrain from putting down other creators and builders, but I just wanted to put my $0.02 into the well of others chatting about the new writing spot. I hope someone at Simily sees this and considers it feedback.
Related: I Earned $142,000 Per Year Writing for Medium — Then I Quit
I know Simily isn’t going to make it because
none of the incentives are aligned
and their software is simply bad. Let me explain …
I’m not a professional writer, but I build platforms for tens of thousands of writers. You might have used a couple of them if you’ve been on Medium for some years now. Aside from my own platforms, I also built big parts of the one on which you’re reading this story right now.
Given my experiences with platform building, the following are my thoughts on the potential of Simily.
The Main Problems With Simily
Readers have to pay from the start to read a small number of stories (after their 5 free), which means views will be highly limited given my experience with readers being reluctant to pay for content; Medium is the outlier thanks to their vast library of content built over years; it was long before Medium started charging readers and paying writers — there’s a good reason for that. Readers have to pay to follow writers, which means the growth of writers is limited.
Their tech stack is poor. How do I know? I’m fairly certain they have less than a couple thousand weekly active users, or even visitors. Yet, their platform already crashed with sustained 504 errors because they couldn’t handle the load. When it is working, it takes 12 seconds for their site to load.
Google says 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load
This isn’t good. Most bare-bone servers today should be able to easily handle a few thousand visitors, even with surges.