Introducing Beegit - a better way to work together on content

Content is king.

Bill Gates said as much in the 1990’s, well before the content kingdom was dominated by a flurry of options for people and brands to skip the middle man and instantly publish their own content.

Today, almost everyone is a publisher through their website, blog or social media, igniting a need for great content.

But while there has been a revolution in content display options, the way content is created has plodded along with evolutionary steps that are little more than improvements to Microsoft Word. Managing the creation, collaboration, editing and storage of content gets crammed into half solutions that focus on someone writing in a silo and then sharing their work one file at a time. Collaboration is a buzzy term, but it usually means people email or share one file back and forth, confused about which version is right and where the project as a whole stands.

There are at least 10,000 ways to share your content, but at Beegit we got stuck on one question: Why isn’t there a better way for people to work together to create great content?

We were not alone in our dissatisfaction.

When I met JD Eaton and Kris Ciccarello, my partners at Beegit, we all had our own scars from very different journeys in content.

Mine came from handling content assets at a magazine that was moving toward becoming an outsourced content marketing arm for brands. I quickly learned that there are no fewer than 1 million ways for projects to go off track or end up with clients working on the wrong version. A few of the usual suspects: emailed changes that got lost in an inbox; Different versions of the same file on a shared public or cloud drive with the wrong one labeled “current”; conflicting suggestions in Word’s track changes, forcing a project manager to make a call on which one to take and creating an infinite loop of confusion.

We rolled through every cloud solution we could find and even kicked around some heavy, six-figure CMS options that scared the creativity right out of our content team. None of it worked.

When I brought this problem to JD, who spent nearly a decade in the ad agency world, he cringed and shared stories about production time lost trying to implement conflicting suggestions from different contacts at the same client and questions about who was working on what in the project.

Kris, who spent years as an executive in the software business and shipped software successfully hundreds of times, sang the same tune. Time and time again, productivity on high pressure software jobs was held up by constant modifications to the content.

So when we started kicking around the idea of Beegit, we talked to the people in each of our industries and realized what people wanted didn’t exist. But what they wanted in a collaborative word processor was not at all unreasonable. The basics were the same across almost everyone who worked on content:

• A shared online text editor that autosaves work
• Project-wide visibility to see who is working on what
• Simple, useful version control
• A productive writer’s room that put creating copy first
• An easy way to add and remove contributors
• The ability to write from anywhere and review work on any device
• A promise that content would never be overwritten or lost
• Text formatting that was ready for web and print

So we took those requirements and started to build a better way.

So with Beegit, we started where every marketing, web, journalism and communications project starts: With the content. We built it to be a light system that gave content pros a place to write, edit and share while automating the benefits of useful version control that lets you see who made what changes. With Git handling the version control under the covers, teams can feel safe knowing their work will never be lost or written over. We added in autosave to keep every keystroke safe. Because content goes into many different outlets, we built our editor with text formatting for print and web.

Our focus was to make everything intuitive so we could revolutionize the way content teams work together by eliminating confusion and helping creators focus on their craft without getting bogged down by technology.

As we rollout our closed beta, we’re proud of what we’ve built so far. We’re adding a steady stream of sign ups every day from all over the world (you can reserve your spot in our upcoming open beta by signing up at Beegit. We’ve been pleasantly surprised at the number of people who have found us and shared their excitement about getting their content under control. We know we haven’t solved all the problems teams have with their content, but we’re iterating fast and getting better every day.

Today, there’s a better way to work together on content. We’d love to have you try it out with your team and tell us what you think.

by Mike Cottrill

Co-founder and CEO of Beegit. Content marketer and recovering journalist. All blog posts planned and made fresh in Cleveland, Ohio.