In 2009, I wanted to write. I was home with two tiny children and was doing some local freelance writing and editing, but I was pretty sure I had more to say. I needed motivation in the form of constraints: a topic, a deadline, a word count. And an audience. Social media was young, and I felt pretty sure that I could do my most honest writing if I could write things that real people would read while maintaining my privacy via a screen name. I didn’t want to start a blog and have to promote it to people I knew in real life. I began to think about a website (I didn’t really think in terms of apps yet) that could offer this structure. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, newborn in my arms, I thought of the name: Typetrigger. I got out of bed and registered the domain, then got to learning how such a thing could be built.

A year later, in August of 2010, with the help of some marvelous collaborators, we launched Typetrigger. One problem: I wanted the community to trust that someone real was behind the whole scheme, so I wrote as myself and got to know a bunch of writers by real names and pseudonyms. Even writing as myself, the premise worked, and I was writing and connecting with others. I didn’t have to start a blog and tell my friends about it. Needless to say (?) I wasn’t a tech bro and didn’t have a big strategy for building the user base or monetizing the operation, but we have kept it going, and a number of members have been with us from the start.

In 2021 we relaunched, this time with a mobile app as well. At the same time, we introduced umeume, which provides a list of ingredients and invites users to make up and share recipe ideas.

Both Typetrigger and umeume invite people to be scrappy and get their ideas out before they are perfected. We don’t expected highly edited work or picture-perfect dishes; we want people to be in the process of generative exploration together.

October 2010 | Can the Internet Make You a Better Writer? (Paul Constant, The Stranger)