Why Growth Rocket Loves ProWritingAid

This year, after many months of planning (AKA procrastinating), some friends and I finally decided to turn our shared vision into reality. Growth Rocket is designed to be an inspirational and educational resource for entrepreneurs looking to launch or grow their businesses. And it’s finally live!

Now, it’s important to know that we’re not college kids. Most of us have families, and all of us are running our own businesses. We have multiple responsibilities, and our spare time is rarer than gold dust.

With so little time to spare, you might be wondering why we launched Growth Rocket. It’s a good question and one that we regularly ask ourselves, and if it wasn’t for the fact that we’re more like family than friends, we probably wouldn’t have. But we’re a team, and together we believe we can achieve anything. So what are we trying to achieve?

Growth Rocket isn’t just a blog. We’re building a community. We want it to be a complete portal for entrepreneurs to share and learn. And we want it to be huge. We’re going to have more interviews from more entrepreneurs covering more industries than anyone else. We’re planning to create so much content that anyone, in any industry, can visit our site to find inspiration and insight.

So there’s the problem. We want to create huge amounts of content, while already working long hours and juggling family commitments. To make the project more challenging, none of us are writers or bloggers, and our school English lessons are a distant memory.

Finding Our Content

Creating our content requires us hunting down entrepreneurs. We’re looking for them almost 24/7, across every industry and in every country in the world. Often these people are hard to get hold of, they’re usually incredibly busy and their time is at least as important as our own. They nearly all represent an opportunity for great content. To maximise our chances of getting a response, we will send a personal email that mentions their company and the particular values that we think that person can share. This email needs to be perfect. Who’s going to bother responding to something that is poorly written or contains spelling mistakes?

Every email we write is checked using ProWritingAid before it’s sent because a mistake might mean the difference between getting an interview with one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world and missing out.

Often, a potential interviewee will want to check out our previous interviews before agreeing to take part. This is one of the many reasons we can’t afford any mistakes in the content we publish.

Publishing Our Content

Sometimes, we’ll be typing up an interview while the subject is on the phone answering our questions. Other times, we’ll email the questions. The interviewee will then smash out some answers while trying to launch their own start-up or between sales meetings. Often, they leave the editing and polishing to us. It’s one of the tactics we use to help convince people to answer our questions.

Our efforts are hectic and rushed. We love hacking away at a keyboard or phone, tapping furiously, outpouring some newly discovered insight. We desperately try to share the passion and energy that are key characteristics of the entrepreneurs we interview. Oh, and we can’t work without loud music playing in the office.

It’s a chaotic process, which isn’t a bad thing: there’s an energy to Growth Rocket that’s invigorating. But every interview we share contains some important messages, and it deserves to be presented in a way that is professional and easy to read. On top of that, the interviewee has sacrificed their valuable spare time to give the interview and they should be repaid with a well-written feature that shows them and their business in the best possible light.

So after the words are on the page, we take a deep breath, turn down the music and import the document into ProWritingAid’s online editor. We’ll work through spellings first, catching any errors that haven’t already been flagged by our word processor. Grammar is next. In our experience, ProWritingAid’s Grammar Tool is second to none. It absolutely kills the garbage that ships with Microsoft Word. Fragmented sentences, confused words, split infinitives, double words and passive verbs are all identified quickly and easily. The Grammar Tool is essential for anyone without a degree in English trying to write professional content.

Finally, we’ll check the Style notifications. Not being professional writers, we often write in the same style as we converse. This obviously doesn’t make for easy readability. Following most of ProWritingAid’s suggestions always results in an article that is much more enjoyable to read.

The Growth Rocket Team

Every feature we write is created in a different time and place than the last one. Some are done on the train, others in the office. We type some on our phones, while some are typed on the PC. As a collaborative project, we use a range of different tools; often our interviewees will send their replies in a variety of different file types. For some of our interviewees, English will be a second language.

Being able to copy and paste or import our articles into ProWritingAid’s online editor is an essential part of the usability of the system. It provides an easy-to-use commonality that our workflow desperately needs. Once the articles have been edited, we can easily copy them into our blog posting app and get them published. Any member of our team can perform any one of these roles from anywhere in the world.

Why We Love ProWritingAid at Growth Rocket

ProWritingAid has increased the quantity and quality of our content, tying together a team of untrained writers and interviewees who are spread across the world. The interface is uncomplicated, and the software is easy to use.

We must have managed before we started using ProWritingAid, but none of us wants to be without it again.