If you’ve ever gone through editing hell trying to read and assimilate feedback using Google Docs or Microsoft Word’s track changes feature, you’ll immediately fall in love with Draft, just like I did. The program’s so user-friendly and nice to look at that I’m trying to think of ways to get every writer and editor I work with to use it, so let me describe it for a second before we talk about the guy who made it. (Right now it takes two to tango, so if you collaborate on writing with me, make sure to read ’til the end for a special bonus.)

Draft is this amazing (and free) program that lets you write text on a clean, grey screen, and then share it with an editor. When they give you feedback, you can actually see it. Their deletions show up with pink highlights. New text is highlighted in green. Here’s an example from my own writing, edited by the amazing Maartje Gorte, who I sometimes hire as a freelance editor when I really want a piece to shine. As you can see, her changes are in green, and the deletions are in red.

I can easily accept or reject the changes. Comments aren’t stored in tiny bubbles or blocks of text far off the screen, making it virtually impossible to edit other people’s work or assimilate any changes they’ve made (*cough*  Microsoft Word *cough), nor are they written over an original draft like in  Google Docs. Changes and comments are startlingly  easy to see. You can accept or ignore each individual change. You can even look at multiple versions side by side. Here’s an example from the Draft website.

Draft founder Nate Kontny describes it as version control for writers. What’s version control? It’s tech-speak for keeping old copies (electronically), and with Draft you can use it without having to learn a word of code. It’s just a way to record various changes you’ve made, so you can go back to the second version if you have a sudden change of heart, for example.

There’s also a character count, some analytics, options to help with everything from to-do lists to transcribing interviews, a Chrome extension, and more. You can sync your Draft document with cloud services, publish it in multiple locations, and mark major versions of your old work so you can find ’em and compare changes over time.

Additionally, you can pay a small amount of money to get your post proofread by a professional ($4-5 for 15 minutes or $12 to $15 for 45 minutes…depending on whether you decide to support Draft by subscribing to Draft Yearly, which is $39.99/year.)

It’s always fun to talk to people who make things you use, so I was thrilled to be able to get Nate on Skype to ask him some questions about Draft. He definitely defies the stereotypes of both programmers and grammarians. I would describe him first and foremost as experimental.

Here’s an example. For fun, Nate used to host a reality cooking show where he’d experiment with complicated recipes with friends. “We’d pick things we weren’t familiar with that we knew we didn’t have the right equipment for. We were going to improvise,” Nate said. In one episode, they cooked Indian food and struggled with whether to buy cardamom seeds or pods, and other steps in the process. “It turned out really kind of terrible,” he explains. “It was actually kind of hilarious.” Another episode actually made it onto the show Next Food Network Star as an example of what not to do. “We had managed to light our sushi rice on fire,” he explains. Apparently playing video games while boiling vinegar as part of the ginger pickling process is inadvisable.

Luckily, Nate is better at programming than he is at experimental cooking. He created Draft for himself, first and foremost. The need came largely from wanting his wife Lynette to easily edit the writing he did for his blog, Ninjas and Robots. “I’d email her a link and she’d end up copying and pasting the stuff into Word, and then do track changes in Word and send me the Word document back. Then I’d have to deal with Word and paste it back into the blog,” he recalls. So he created Draft to give her tools to edit his work more easily.

Then he started sending it to friends at tech accelerator Y Combinator, where he’d previously worked on two projects–one focused on social predictions and one on branded games. He also showed Draft to friends on the tech team he worked on as a software engineer for Obama’s re-election campaign.

Next, he started pulling together paid editors so people could pay a small fee to have someone proofread their work. He was recently struck by the realization that many students have never read an entire draft of their own papers, something a teacher friend pointed out to him. “How many people who write blog posts never actually read through it to see if there’s mistakes or poor wording?” he wondered. A quick fix is having a friend look at your draft, or paying to have an editor look at text directly in Draft. The next iteration for this would be an editing option that’s more in-depth. “The editing service we have is a lot like Hoover Taxi; a lot of grammar fixes, a friend’s eye, a quick glance… I’m looking at something that’s the next level, that’s uber black…”

Other features he’s considering adding include an option to take someone’s email or post and edit it in Draft and show them the edits you make, without the owner of the document using Draft first, as well as easier ways to import text into Word. Draft becoming more mainstream could really revolutionize the writing and editing process as we know it, and I’m really crossing my fingers in hopes that it will establish itself as a service for writing alongside Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

Until then, individuals can work within Draft to improve their own writing, following Nate’s example. Writing isn’t exactly something that’s always considered important for software developers. “Looking at my own career, writing hasn’t been a focus for my employers, so it’s been on me to work hard and try to improve,” Nate explains. But he enjoys writing on his blog and for Fast Company Labs, and just wants to get better. “I don’t want to waste people’s time when they’re reading my site,” he explains. “I get a lot out of trying to make posts insanely inspirational or trying to teach something I’ve learned. I want to get better at it so people don’t ignore it and can get more out of it.”

Check out Nate’s great writing on his blog,  http://ninjasandrobots.com/, and start using Draft for your own version control or collaborative projects right here: https://draftin.com/. If you’ve used Draft in the past or just started using it, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

And here’s the bonus I promised…. I really want more people to play with Draft with me, but right now it takes two to tango. I’d have to send documents in Draft for others to edit, or someone has to send me their file in Draft. So if you’re one of my writers who I edit, or if I write for you and you’d like to switch from Microsoft Word or Google Docs to Draft…I will send you a bag of jellybeans. (I was going to send chocolate, but it’s melty season, even here in Minneapolis.) Obviously, I can’t send jellybeans to the whole world forever, so this is a limited time offer for the first five Draftees. (See what I did there?) Drop me a line in the comments, on Twitter or vie email if you want to be one of the lucky five.