Literarily Product Proposal

Literarily was created by Carl Stockmeyer on December 31, 2025

Introduction

Literarily will foster a collaborative writing community by enabling users to contribute to community stories

Product Description

Market Analysis

GitHub and shared docs

Target Audience

Writers of all ages and experience levels

Marketing Strategy

Posting on my social media

Sponsoring writing and reading influencer posts focusing on those with college age and younger audiences more likely to adopt new products and ideas

Revenue Projections

operating costs

Cost of site hosting
Cost of domain
Cost of compute and data server

revenue streams

Memberships for premium features
Patreon sponsorships

Summary

Literarily Product Requirements Document

Introduction

Product Overview

Stakeholder Analysis

Stakeholders plus user scenarios

In-Scope

User Stories

Functional Requirements

user profile

See how many words you’ve written
See how many upvotes you’ve gotten
Create unique accounts
See list of all your submissions and link to them
Users must provide birthdate to access or post “adult” flagged content, otherwise it is optional
Profile has spots to put link to their IG, YouTube, TikTok, blog, etc for people to connect
Place to our favorite genres (make list to autopopulate or free text entry
Ability to choose an avatar photo

safety

Able to report posts that are hateful or otherwise
All members must agree to code of ethics outlining disallowed behavior and how content can be used
AI reviews submissions for appropriateness and consistency with policies before allowing it
Flagging of mature content by AI when submitting but hateful content will be blocked

voting

Ability to up and down vote
The submission to the end of a story that receives the most upvotes becomes the main branch
If a branch higher in the story body gets at least 15 upvotes and at least twice as many upvotes as downvotes, it will trigger a prompt for all viewers of the story to vote on whether to make that branch the new main branch

story types

Stories types can be short form, long form, or “beginner”
Short form only allows submissions up to 250 words
Long form submissions must be 750-1250 words
Beginner stories are for newer and younger members and are always short form

branching

submitting chunks to end of story

Able to select specific stories or “random” for which story you want to submit for

merging

new stories

Labeling new story if it will contain mature content. This determines if AI allows mature (but not hateful) content to be posted to the story and who can view it

landing/home page

story page

about page

wall of fame page

analytics

Posts by time of day (when is most popular)
Total users over time
Total engagements with pages
Total posts over time

Non-Functional Requirements

Nodejs backend
MongoDB Atlas for nosql database
Framework???

Out-of-Scope

Technical Architecture

Success Metrics

Assumptions and Conatraints

Messaging/Marketing

Release Planning

High-level roadmap

Open Issues

Change History

Purchase Domain
Select Site thematic elements
Enable open blogging by any user to add to a story anonymously. The story will be a post and the comments on it will be the additions. Limit posts to 250 characters each.
Create secure User Login page. Backend required to store, verify, and manage credentials.
Create User Profile page to add socials and edit information. Posts will now be tagged with their username.
Disallow users from adding to story if they were the last posters (commenter)
Create voting system on submitted posts.
(Promote product to friends and family)
Create governance policy.
Create Acceptable Use policy based on governance and make all users accept it, log if they have had this interaction or reject and redirect their login until they do.
Create a system for users to flag posts that violate acceptable use policy
Create automated systems for reviewing new posts to ensure that they adhere to the policy, possibly an LLM solution.
(Add to resume)
Enable branching and move away from “blog” style. Ensure users still can’t post to a story branch if they were the last poster on that story.
Limit the number of branches a user can start on the same story.
Enable branch merging to create new main branch.
(Promote product to small influencers)
Verify scalability.
(promote product to successively greater audiences)