What you'll do

• You'll be the first writer to work alongside the Readwise product & growth teams owning a series of recurring publications, copywriting, and ad hoc writing projects reaching hundreds of thousands of avid readers
• Your primary responsibility will be leading Readwise’s soon-to-be released recurring publications including:
  • Weekly Wisereads — A fun, personality-laden weekly newsletter sharing the most highlighted documents in Readwise during the past week to be sent to hundreds of thousands of avid readers
  • Weekly Release Notes — A weekly post (also fun & personality-laden) describing new features shipped, bugs fixed, and pro tips for users
  • Monthly Product Updates — A monthly newsletter describing the same new features and bug fixes publicized in the Weekly Release Notes
  • Cross-Posting — In addition to writing the content itself, you’ll work with our team to ensure each piece of writing is cross-posted across our various channels from our blog to Twitter to Reddit to Discord (we know many writers abhor the promotion step so we can work with you to have someone else take more of a lead here)
• Your secondary responsibility will be taking ownership of various ad hoc writing projects as they arise which might include:
  • Lifecycle communications — Copywriting templated emails and other communications sent to users as in collaboration with our product & customer success teams
  • Landing pages — Copywriting various landing pages from the main page to comparison pages to long-tail landing pages in collaboration with our product team
  • Public Relations — Composing various public announcements that we have to prepare from time to time
  • Blog posts — We don’t currently use our blog as a proper publication, but we hope to develop this channel together with you over time (one of the many ways this role will evolve from part-time to full-time)
• The users of Readwise are… well, readers — and we’d like to think they’re not just any readers but elite, high expectation readers™️
  • Therefore, everything we write must be exceptional or it will tarnish the Readwise brand
  • For this reason, we’re seeking an exceptionally talented writer
  • This means if you do not have a demonstrated track record of writing for a startup AND a portfolio of lucid prose, you are probably not the right fit for us at this time
  • We fully recognize this strict filter may disqualify genuinely qualified individuals, but given the stage of our company, we sometimes need to rely on such Draconian heuristics
  • It should be further noted that as part of finding the right fit, this role will begin with a fully paid trial project followed by a fully paid one-month trial
  • Assuming the trials work out well for both parties, the role will become permanent
• Based on the currently projected workload this role will start out as part-time based on an hourly arrangement, but we want to stress that we value high-quality writing and are more than happy to pay a competitive hourly rate for the right talent
  • After the trial project and one-month trial period, we anticipate roughly 20 hours per week through a combination of recurring and project-based writing
  • But we hope and expect that the role becomes full-time over time

Who you are

• Brand Ambassador — Because you’ll be representing our brand through the written word (again, the users of Readwise are elite readers), the right cultural fit is even more important than usual for this writer role
• Readwise/Reader Power User — One of the few perks of B2C/consumer is that our team actually uses (and typically loves) the product we make in contrast to working in B2B/enterprise saas where few people on the team truly care about some alphabet soup like ERM, ETL, or ERP. If you’re not a genuine Readwise/Reader user, it will be difficult to produce the kind of writing we’re looking for.
• Clear Writer — You’re a demonstrated verbalist who can adopt the “beginner’s mind” of a new user to explain new concepts in terms they’re likely to grasp while avoiding cliches like the plague and run-on sentences like this one
• Voracious Reader — You’re an avid reader yourself of blog posts, newsletters, Twitter threads, and self-improvement books enabling you to speak fluently to our typical user (see Readwise/Reader Power User above)
• Very Online — You actively participate in online forums such as Twitter, Reddit, and Substack enabling you to extend memes and popular culture into your writing. For example, you should know what is a wordcel and, if you are one, let us know the wordcel’s complement in your email to us.
• Growth Mindset — You know your abilities are not fixed at birth, but that you’re able to grow and learn how to do new things (that’s why you read, right?)
• Reliable — You’re the kind of person who follows through on commitments and shows up to appointments on time
• Prompt Whisperer (BONUS) — It’s not a dealbreaker if you’re not a prompt whisperer, but it would be viewed as a huge bonus if you’re really good at prompt engineering. We now use GPT and LLMs throughout Readwise/Reader and given how quickly this technology is moving, we constantly need the wordcels on our team to conjure magical prompts.

How to apply