Draft
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Draft was an online, distraction-free writing tool created by Nate Kontny and launched in 2011. It offered folder organization, embedded word counts, version history with side-by-side comparisons, easy sharing, and imports from Dropbox, Evernote, Box, and Google Drive, plus a human copy-editing service for serious bloggers and organizations.
02 / Draft FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Draft shut down at the end of December 2022. It was essentially a solo side project that had grown big enough to create real costs and responsibilities, but never big enough to produce meaningful financial rewards for its creator, who decided to wind it down.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Draftin.com founder Nate Kontny’s notice that he had to shut down Draft on 31 Dec 2022. Beeminder’s help page (updated 21 Feb 2024) independently states Draft closed permanently at the end of 2022 and withdrew its integration.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
The service shut down on December 31, 2022.
- 02
Users were able to export their data before the shutdown.