Site search: A lot of bloggers have last few posts on their front page and rest is hard to find again. A search feature lets you discover all the content regardless of time.
Discover users: Agree. We will focus on the tool first and network later. Will remove that.
The idea here is to simplify personal blog setup, writing, and discovering efficiently.
If you start a blog on wordpress, you need to host it, configure via admin panels, go through options, install plugins. Select templates, then try to edit parts of it and fail.
Here you get one site that works, without any setup. Content is not dispersed. A visitor can efficiently find content.
I will revise the message to make it more clear.
I agree with the problem, not with the ssolution (and i dont have any to propose neither)
Edit: paul graham solved it just by showing his complete list of articles (no other info aside title. No dates, no tags, just title): http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
But about what you list of diferencials:
- Try without login to prove it is easier to use Great! You will just have to make sure it is indeed easier to use.
- Edit and format posts 10x faster than your current editor Good value proposition. But only the easy photo inserting and editing (with resizing) lives up to it. It indeed looks great. But (3) Add Topics and (4) Publish your page on social networks look like commodities on blog platforms (and not related to the value proposition of being easier to edit).
- Built-in site search with relevant results. "Your posts will never get buried in the archives again." Is that a problem? For who?? One do not enter at a personal blog to search for something. And why add another value proposition?
- Discover users with similar interests Again: why add another value proposition? And hint: you won't solve this problem. You won't get a critical mass of "interesting people" for a looong time. And until then, having this feature will just disappoint your users and make they feel this is a pretentious amateur site no one cares about. Instead, why not make this feature as a tool to discover interesting people posting interesting things on Twitter/FB/LinkedIn/Medium? And make the posts on your platform to be "related to:" posts on those bigger platforms.
So my personal advice would be: cut the search feature and decide if you will focus on being really easier to edit or if you will focus on having a killer discovery feature (allowing people to answer or at least point out to other posts on other platforms).