The Citationsy Story: A service I loved was sold and became unbearable, so I built my own
How Citationsy came to be
Writing essays was the part I liked most about my time at University. Mainly because it meant I got to use iA Writer. The clean, sophisticated look of the app filled me with joy and made writing a truly fun experience. I pitied my friends struggling away with Word, their screen filled with toolbars. While they fiddled around with settings and strange copy-paste behaviour and tried to figure out how to add footnotes, I was happily typing away into a screen filled with beautiful typography and the best kind of interface there is: one that doesn’t demand your attention, shining the spotlight to where your focus should ultimately be — your work.
The other app that helped me with my essays was RefME. I would paste a link, or an ISBN, or the title of an article, and it generated the citation for it automatically. It wasn’t always perfect, but it worked most of the time. When I was done with my essay I’d grab all the references, and paste them into my document.
To this day I have no idea how to write a reference by hand in a specific style format, because I shouldn’t have to.
They even had an app that would let me scan the barcodes on the back of books to add them to my project.
I was even more delighted when I discovered that they were based in London (European Startups for the win!) and founded the company when they themselves were students. It felt good to be using something made by people just a couple years older than me who were doing their best to solve a problem in an elegant way.
Fast forward 3 years and I’m done with my Bachelor’s degree and have moved to Stockholm to work at a startup. One day, an email from RefME lands in my inbox. RefME becoming CiteThisForMe on February 28th. Apparently, RefME had been sold to an American text-book company and was being folded into CiteThisForMe, an existing web tool for reference creation.
Who knows, I thought. Maybe this won’t be that bad, maybe more resources will help them make an even better product. Either way, I was glad the founders were getting a nice exit.
The next time I had to write an essay I fired up CiteThisForMe and started adding references. It was a bit annoying that my user account didn’t transfer over, but I liked that fact that I didn’t even have to create an account at all to use CiteThisForMe. The new auto-citation engine (the thing that analyses a link and find’s out what the date of publication is and who wrote the article and so on) had some difficulty finding the correct author and publisher for an article from The New Yorker, forcing me to add it manually.
They also didn’t keep RefME’s mobile app, which means I had to type in the ISBNs from books manually. No big deal, most of the time I read ebooks anyway and there’s no barcode to scan.
The interface is decidedly worse than RefME’s. It injects major annoyance and frustration right at the end of the long process of writing, when all you want to do is add your bibliography and be done. Instead, I found myself navigating my way through popups, countdowns, and ads, while running out of patience.
Friends who I’d originally recommended RefME to contacted me with similar grievances, angry that their references from the last three years had vanished — in the middle of the semester, no less.
In addition to all of the above they added said countdown, after which the citations collected get deleted unless you pay for a premium account. The timer counts down from 604782 seconds, which means you can’t at a glance know when it will end and your references will be deleted.
It seems that Chegg, the company behind CiteThisForMe, bought RefME purely to remove them as a competitor. They now own not only RefME but CitationMachine, BibMe, and EasyBib. The purchased the companies behind them and plastered their websites with ads and popups for their textbook business and a grammar correction tool.
Out of this frustration grew Citationsy.
I thought to myself, how hard can it be to make a reference management tool? I built a rough prototype in PHP over a weekend, purchased the domain (my girlfriend came up with the name) and hosted it on a $5 droplet on DigitalOcean. Over the next week I added more features (the first version could only cite websites, I’ve since added books, journal articles and podcasts).
I tried to build something that felt like a cool breeze after the intrusive chaos that is CiteThisForMe. A clean, simple webapp with just a couple functions that work really well and chain together to solve complex problems. I wanted it to make other people feel about citing the way iA Writer made me feel about writing.
I thought long and hard about how to price Citationsy. Obviously I could make it free, hope for a large number of users and at some point sell the company to someone, but that would likely require outside investment. I could make it a free service supported by ads, but I hate ads.
In the end I decided on what I think is the simplest pricing structure: Citationsy is free to use for everyone, forever. There is a Pro version for $20/year that offers a couple additional features (like Word export), but the base version is enough for most use cases.
Paying for things has a huge benefit: You know what’s what. There’s no weird business model in the background based on selling you textbooks, or giving your personal data to a marketing company, or trying to sell you text corretion software you don’t need.
I’m still figuring out how to market Citationsy and find customers for a niche product like mine. SEO seems futile, seeing as Chegg completely dominates the search results for any keywords related to reference management and citations. Once the new semester starts I plan on printing a couple thousand flyers and distributing them to different universities in Europe.
I created Citationsy with the simple idea of creating a tool that brings people joy doing academic work, a tool that they could use with ease.
With this idea in mind, I’d be happy to hear from you, dear reader, if you have any thoughts. Any feedback, ideas for how to market Citationsy, or on the process of reference management.
Update, January 2020:
Citationsy has been going pretty well, overall. It now has almost 200.000 users, and is beloved by many. The premium upgrade (“Citationsy Pro”) costs $49/year and offers a couple bonus features.
We recently updated our website, it’s worth checking out: https://citationsy.com
