Well, that's a good question, and one I bet a lot of people wonder about. I would expect there to be a bit more info about who's behind it, or even where the money for the gift cards is coming from. Some of you might know this already, but the company that is backing Fictish is WordHippo. That's actually how I discovered the platform! I suck at piemantle and was looking up synonyms for words (T-T).

But who is WordHippo really? After a bit of digging, I found out the company behind it is Kat IP Pty Ltd, which a couple of company checker websites told me was founded in 2013. WordHippo itself was made in 2008, so I'm assuming they were doing it for the love of the game for a while before they started getting advertising money and had to actually make a company.

The interesting thing about where WordHippo is located is that it's located in a building that seems to be mainly used as an art gallery. Ok so their address is 177 William St, Darlinghurst New South Wales 2010, Australia, but the King Street Gallery actually has 177-185. There's also a for lease sign on the building next to it in the 2024 Google Maps photos that says "Creative Offices Plug and Play". I had to look this up, but imagine that instead of having to buy an entire office building with all the remodeling and furniture and tech needed, you could just walk into a building that already has all that, and just have a space within the space ready.

Other than that, I got an estimate of how many people work for WordHippo, and this could be completely wrong because it's a random website's approximation, but the number was "Total employees 2 (Modeled)". I also had to look this up too, and I still don't fully get it, but I think it has to do with freelance work? Another site said over 100, so somewhere between 2 and 100 employees, I guess. Based on the office space, my guess is there are very few in person employees, but freelancers might also be working on upkeep because it is a huge thesaurus with an actual app as well.

I'm hopeful about Fictish, but I worry about the small numbers in the community and the lack of actual advertisement. According to my nerd research, when I just discovered Fictish, this is not the first website of its kind. There was a 2011 article talking about 7 different collaborative writing sites, but all of them have been deleted. They were Folding story, Ficly, Fabulate (WHICH HAS A SIMILAR LOGO ACTUALLY), Wikistory, One Million Monkeys Typing, StoryMash, and Novlet. Folding story is more like Storium (if anyone is familiar), Fabulate was a site working towards making 1 book 500 words at a time (lasted ~7 months before being deleted without a trace of the WIP manuscript), and wikistory was kinda like that old Tumblr feature where when you reblogged something it let you change the original post. But the others are all varying levels of like Fictish. I think the closest one to Fictish is StoryMash?

I would love for this to gain more traction, and I'm happy with what it is for being just in a beta state, but I wish there was more of a way for us to contact those behind the scenes, especially when it comes to suggestions or donations because the discussion forums aren't super clear on where to access them from. +61 (03) 9690 3455 or +61-2-6173-8499 are the contact numbers I'm coming up with, but I've found no email. The number for the Gallery itself is +61 2 9360 9727, so pretty likely one of the numbers is real.

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(I'm not able to post links I fear. Probably a scam prevention tactic, but if you search "Kat IP Pty Lt" you can find most of the sites I used)