Ever since I left Australia, I’ve been in Da Nang, Vietnam.
Back when I came here in November, I knew that it was going to be a good place to get my head down and work.
I’d heard all kinds of thoughts from people who’d come to the city to work on their business projects, but I didn’t expect the extent of how common this is here, making friends with those who were staying in the city longer-term in my first month.
And the second time I came back, after Australia, I was comfortable. It was at this point I met Luca.
Most days, I work from the picnic benches on the edge of my hostel, in one of the most expat/tourist-heavy corners of the city. I can’t remember how, but I got talking amongst a group at the table across. Luca was one of them, and I can’t remember how, but we bonded very quickly.
We’re similar people, I guess. Both intelligent, building things online, with a taste for creative and artistic pursuits.
We got on, at the risk of sounding cliché, like a house on fire.
After a few weeks of hanging out, Luca was talking about how he wanted to build software or a similar tool, seeing as his current freelance web development project was coming to an end.
We discussed a couple of thoughts, with little reaction from me, until he said (and again I’m doing this from memory, so accept some paraphrasing):
And I want to build something for writers. I can never find tools to help me practice. You know, it would be something that helps people to learn from the Classics, the writing that has endured.
And after we fleshed out the idea a little more, I replied…
That’s money.
So since then, we’ve been building proselab.io. It’s a website with passages from Classic prose, mainly from a storytelling and worldbuilding perspective, where you can re-write the segments, based on challenging prompts.
To put my above quote into harsh perspective, we’ve not generated revenue yet. But our user base has grown since releasing a minimum viable product (MVP).
And we’re closing it on the 7th, before we launch for real a week later. If you want to join now, you get free Core (which means unlimited analyses of your own writing efforts), and you can play a founding part in making the app look and play how we all want it to turn out.
Head to https://proselab.io to try it out!
I’m going to be running more of the marketing side of the operations within ProseLab, leveraging my experience with growing PARAZETTEL for the last three years, with Luca managing more of the technical, app-building side of things.
However, with the power of AI for coding, and Luca’s prowess in writing already, it’s a joint project on almost all fronts.
So we’ll see where it goes! I’m excited. For a while, I was wondering whether I was falling for sunk cost fallacy with PARAZETTEL, seeing as revenue’s been somewhat hard to come by whilst travelling (even if the business structure and potential is so much better now).
With ProseLab, I can run two projects in tandem, giving me much more variety and potential with everyday work, as well as opportunities in the future.