David T. Kim

I went from $3k in the bank to $1M pre-seed in 30 days. In June 2024, I left ProtoPie to start my own thing. No backup plan. No job lined up. Just a gut feeling I couldn’t shake. Turned down VC offers that didn’t fit. Got ghosted more times than I’ll ever admit. Then something clicked. I remembered I’d published one of the first hit web novels in the world. Fantasy meets sports genre, before anyone was doing it. That weird intersection of web storytelling and software suddenly made sense. That became the seed. In October, Sanju Lokuhitige and I got into Jason Calacanis’s Founder University Cohort 9. Learned a ton from Kelly Schricker and Lukas Durand’s team. That same month, I met Andre Charoo of Maple VC in Vancouver. By December, I had $3k in the bank. That month felt like it lasted a year. Then in January, Andre decided to lead our pre-seed. First check in. No product. Just belief. One of the real ones. From there it was chaos. Flew to SF straight out of surgery (do not recommend). Shaad Khan gave unconditional support. Met Sandhya Venkatachalam, Andrea Wang, Suzanne Xie and the Neo crew. Ran into Robin Chan at Blue Bottle. Accidental pitch. Easily my worst. I’m pretty sure I was still half asleep from anaesthesia. Neo and Afore Capital actually gave us an offer. Didn’t land due to timing (I still owe you that coffee Anamitra Banerji). Rejections piled up. Part of the game. But less than 30 days later, we closed $1M in pre seed. Big thanks to Sandhya at Axiom Partners and Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures. You believed before there was much to believe in. Along the way, founders showed up for us out of nothing but generosity: Trevor West, Lewis Z. Liu, Trân Lê, Henry Shi, Sam Blumenthal and others. Last year we also built and launched an editor. Went hard on it, learned a lot, but ultimately killed it to go all in on comp. That decision changed everything. Now we’re building something wild. A tool to help authors create the next Harry Potter, Pikachu, and Lord of the Rings. Not fanfic. Originals. Fresh IP for a new generation. We’re finally ready to show you what we’ve been cooking. Stay close. This is just the beginning.

Drop your WIP in one sentence without using the genre. I'll go first, a cartographer discovers the world she's mapping doesn't want to be found. Your turn.

Writers don't need another app telling them to write more. They need someone to remember what they already wrote. Every character.🧝‍♀️ Every location. ⛰️ Every rule they set up 200 pages ago that they forgot about by page 300. That's the gap nobody was filling. So we did. discord.gg/QFAcdfxf

@readswithravi I'm a lil in emotions today x.com/runicstave/sta…

Read what pulls you in, not what you feel obligated to finish.

22K views on a single post. Writers signing up every day without us spending a dollar on ads. A published author just joined our community. 400+ writers in a Discord that I check before my email every morning. A community member published their first novel after 8 years and the whole server celebrated like it was their own. Two writing events done and people asking for the next one before we even announce it. A year ago this was just an idea between me and my cofounders. Now writers I've never met are helping each other finish books in a server we built. I don't have some big announcement. I just wanted to stop for a second and say this is working. And I don't take that for granted. #writers #writerscommunity #DiscordAçılsın

@hildadoolittles wha??

@runicstave yes.

“How many pages a day” is a silly question. Not only does it depend on the prose but also the font and formatting!

@Mary_ork having ideas is easy, finishing them is the challenge

Do you have what it takes to write your own book?

@subnsm same 😭i usually just start writing again and share it in a small writer community, getting feedback there really helps

@inkandseerah detective mode with zero accuracy

me suspecting every character in a murder mystery book and then saying "I knew it" once the murderer is revealed.

@therutholarrie Happy new week guys✨📝

Happy new week, amazing writers! ✨📚

@hildadoolittles anything wrong with blue check?

@runicstave begone blue check!

"How many pages do you read a day?" is the wrong question. One page of Cormac McCarthy will ruin you for an hour. One page of Diary of a Wimpy Kid takes 30 seconds. Same "page." Completely different experience. Stop measuring reading in pages. Start measuring it in what it did to your brain.

@CaffeinatedLiha that quiet moment hits different

Finishing a good book in the middle of the night >>>>>

@notryance writing is private, building readers is public

Gaining a readership's harder than writing a first draft.

@Pro__Author yeah, sometimes they take the story somewhere I didn’t plan

Do your characters ever talk back to you while you're writing them?

@bluewmist what you consume shapes how you think

When you stop reading books, you start losing verbal dexterity, depth of thought and imagination. A closed book is a closed mind. Don't EVER stop reading.

@inkandseerah books hit different when you can talk about them

Reading is fun but having a bookbestie to speak about it is even better 🥹

@gemizom deep ✨

@runicstave And when all was said and done, Nat walked straight on... On to the the abyss, not caring about anything else, but to have nothing else beyond the silence it brings

writers📝Drop a line, a scene, or a moment that feels like it belongs to a story. no explanation let others decode it.✨

@kiragriffoo x.com/runicstave/sta…

you’re a writer, an Author , or someone who loves books, feel free to say hi!