The Backstory on Ghacklabs — A New Platform For Journalists, Bloggers and Founders to Get Free PR.

This is not some well-written thought out answer or some amazing story. It’s about how we accidentally created a new platform called Ghacklabs.

Everything all starts with a story, so here’s ours … and it starts with as you may expect, “writing.”

I was doing some blogging, and some of the articles that I wrote took a real long time to get quotes from people.

As an example, I wrote “30 Founders Share Content Marketing Tips” and this article alone, took me around one month to put together.

Things like, finding people to get quotes for, finding their contact details, emailing people, waiting for them to respond, compiling the article, and letting people know that the article is live.

Like, that’s a real long process to do something simple … so this got me thinking.

I thought wouldn’t it be cool to create a “Facebook Group.” A place for people to post up stuff that they’re writing about, and get quotes from people.

The Facebook Group, was actually our MVP (way before we even knew that).

And, you could also use it as a way to get hear different opinions about topics that you’re writing about before you publish it. Like this …

Another way to look at it is kind of like “crowdsourcing content” and at the same time, getting “feedback and input.”

So, I invited about 100 people to the group and didn’t market the group that much as the group was an experiment. I thought that it would be kind of cool to co-create content.

The group tripled in size organically. Then, some other people started to post to the group.

Now, it wasn’t just me writing, other people were using it too. I thought, I may have something here. Yay!

Talked to some friends, and told them about what I was thinking about creating Ghacklabs into a platform. And, I’ll probably never forget this, one friend said:

“Yo dude, that’s fucking cool!”

Ghacklabs it’s like a mashup of 3 platforms, rolling them up into one.

• Reddit: Votes and comments.
• Quora: Sharing knowledge and making friends.
• HARO (Help A Reporter Out): Getting quotes from people — but instead of an email newsletter, we decided to “get rid of emails” and make it into a platform, so you could “see” how many people have commented for a quote. It does what HARO does, but in real — time, and without the emails.

Here’s what it looks like.

The platform softly launched 3 weeks ago, under the radar as we’re still doing bug testing, getting feedback from people etc.

Today, is an exciting day for us. The first quote using people from Ghacklabs was published today by Staring At Phones.

Journalists and bloggers can “post up” stories that they’re writing about and get “quotes” from people. Here’s what the post looks like on the platform.

And, people can comment on the link, for a chance to be mentioned in the article.

Heres a screenshot of part of the article that went live today, using quotes from Ghacklabs.

If you’ve enjoyed this story, please show us some “green heart love” by clicking on the heart. (It actually means a lot to us)

P.S. Feel free to check out our tech blog, give Ghacklabs a try (it’s free), send me an email to say hi luke@ghacklabs.com, or tweet to me @iamwormify