SUDOWRITE

Amit Gupta and James Yu are serious about two things, building software and writing science fiction. Gupta is a serial entrepreneur and Y Combinator alum.

Yu is an engineer who worked at Google and Zynga. They kept hitting the same wall with AI writing tools.

The tools were fine for blog posts and ads, but useless the second you tried to write a story. So in 2020 they built Sudowrite for themselves and for other novelists.

It runs on the same large language models as everyone else, but tuned for character, plot, and prose instead of SEO.

Sudowrite is a subscription tool for people writing fiction. You pay a monthly fee and get an AI co-writer that actually understands stories.

It can describe a scene using all five senses, brainstorm where the plot goes next, or rewrite a paragraph in a different tone. Pricing is based on how many AI words you use each month.

So the customers are novelists, screenwriters, and hobbyists, and they pay monthly to get unstuck and write faster.

The core is a suite of AI tools aimed at fiction. Write continues your story in your voice.

Describe expands a plain noun into rich sensory detail. Brainstorm throws out ideas when you are stuck on plot or names.

Story Bible keeps track of your characters and world so the AI stays consistent. Story Engine is the big one, helping writers turn an outline into draft chapters.

Together they act like a tireless co-writer who never judges your first draft.

Sudowrite grew by going where no one else wanted to go. Everyone else chased marketers and businesses, because that is where the money is.

Sudowrite went after fiction writers, a passionate and underserved crowd. Word spread through writing communities, author newsletters, and YouTube reviews from novelists.

Its Story Engine feature, which helps generate long-form fiction from an outline, got a lot of attention. The bet was that a tool made only for fiction would beat a general tool every time, for the people who write fiction.

Half the writing world hates the entire idea. Many novelists see AI writing fiction as a threat to the craft and to their income.

Sudowrite has caught real backlash from authors who think tools like it are trained on stolen books and will flood the market with machine-made novels. On the other side, free tools like ChatGPT got good enough to write decent fiction too.

So Sudowrite is squeezed. It has to win over a skeptical audience while out-running giants that give the basic version away.

Sudowrite raised about $3 million in 2021 in an all-angel round, which is unusual and tells you something. Instead of one big venture fund, the cap table is a who's who of people who build and use creative tools.

It included the founders of Medium, Twitter, Gumroad, Rotten Tomatoes, and WordPress. It also pulled in working Hollywood writers, the kind who actually make a living telling stories.

That mix gave Sudowrite credibility with the exact creative crowd it was trying to win.