If you’re a publisher looking for submissions (whether they’re stories, essays, videos, or whatever), what’s the best way to manage the process? It sounds relatively straightforward, but once those submissions start piling up, trying to track and sort them can turn into a headache. It’s a problem that Submittable, part of the latest class of startups incubated by Y Combinator, may have solved.
Co-founder Michael FitzGerald says there have been a few submission-management products designed for academia, but none for a broader customer base. In fact, he says Submittable’s biggest competitor is Gmail. That’s certainly the case at TechCrunch, where we manage guest column submissions through an unwieldy mix of email, Google Docs, spreadsheets, and Asana. (If you’ve submitted a guest column to TechCrunch and it seems to have disappeared into a black hole: I’m sorry, we’re working on it.)
FitzGerald adds that no one has taken Submittable’s approach — software-as-a-service, file agnostic, and with simple pricing. Another point of comparison might be form-building service Wufoo, except that Wufoo is more about collecting data than tracking content.
