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A newsletter version of Pocket: decent or dumb idea?

by Chris

A friend of mine asked for a product that:

  1. is a Chrome plug-in so she can click the icon to save an article to read later

  2. the product would send her a daily/weekly digest of the articles she saved at a time she selects so she can actually catch up on her reading

I know Pocket does some of this, but it seems like they don’t do the newsletter part of the product.

In terms of pricing, I was thinking I could do something like 4 newsletters per month and a max of 100 articles saved per month, and if you want more newsletter or articles saved per mont than you could subscribe for $4.99/mo or something.

Is this worth building? Would you/people you know be interested in signing up for a beta if I can build it?

Chris's avatarChris
on June 15, 2019
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  1. 2

    This was discussed on Hacker News about a month ago, and then (coincidentally) someone launched a similar product on Hacker News the next day. Links:

    People seemed excited about it. I recommend reading through the comments and seeing what people say. I think there's demand. I could see myself using it, although I'm not sure I'd pay for it. Only if it was really good, and somehow actually got me to read the articles I saved to it.

    Some foreseeable challenges to overcome with an idea like this:

    • low price point, which means you need thousands of customers, which means that sales is no longer a viable strategy and that it'll probably take a long time to reach profitability
    • B2C but no inherently viral component, making distribution difficult
    • no obvious singular persona for who would use this, making marketing slightly more difficult
    • simple to build, no anti-competitive moat, so you might need to work on brand recognition and WoM growth, which run counter to a paid product
    csallen's avatar csallen
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    7 years ago
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    1. 1

      Thanks @csallen! This is why I love IH, getting real feedback about whether bootstrapping a project makes sense.

      It seems like LinkDrop does this really well and it might not make sense to pursue it.

      I have been thinking about pivoting this to something to curb impulse buying (e.g. save an item to be bought later. Get a reminder in a week to see if you still want it. If you do, buy it. If not, encourage them to save or donate the money). Might go down that route instead.

      Thanks again!

      Chris's avatar Chris
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      7 years ago
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  2. 1

    Have you seen Stoop? not sure if that is kinda what you're going for.

    https://www.stoop.website/

    sircharleswatson's avatar sircharleswatson
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    7 years ago
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    1. 2

      Thanks! This is great!

      Chris's avatar Chris
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      7 years ago
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  3. 1

    Depends on the privacy model. The only reason I use pocket is that mozilla owns it at the moment and is focusing on not collecting people's data

    BarbarianGrunge's avatar BarbarianGrunge
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    7 years ago
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