Bruno
Helping you find your next intellectual rabbit hole
I started working on Bruno (https://www.trybruno.xyz/) because I wanted to give myself a consistent stream of essays and podcasts that would send me down new rabbit holes and make me lose track of time (a great feeling).
The internet is tailor-made for exactly this – I’ve learned more from the internet than from my $60k/year college education.
But parsing the signal from the noise is too difficult, especially in the age of generative AI.
It’s so difficult that I believe most people don’t even try.
Even if you do try, staying up to date is impossible.
How many newsletter writers or podcast hosts do you love to follow because they changed the way you think about the world? Now fast forward one year – what percentage of those posts did you actually sink your teeth into?
We miss out on potentially transformative ideas because we get notification fatigue. We know there are plenty of worthwhile ideas out there, but where do we find them? When should we pay attention? What questions should we even be asking ourselves in the first place?
Bruno does the dirty discovery work for you. The app uses a “give-to-get” model to aggregate high-quality thinking and then predicts which ideas are both aligned with as well as anomalous to your interests you’d find most interesting.
Each week, you can submit links to three things you find interesting, and by doing so, you get access to recommendations for the next 4 weeks. The recommendation system will try to predict ideas you’d find interesting but you didn’t know you hadn’t yet discovered (your next intellectual rabbit hole).
I wanted to build a product that solved a pain point I was experiencing because it would guarantee that I would maintain the enthusiasm and passion required to grind through all of the lulls, disappointments, and problems that seem impossible to solve – especially when this is a solo side project that's not (yet) paying the bills.
That's where I'm at so far, and I really do love using the product I built.
The downside to this, however, is that you need to go out and find other users who also experience this pain point. While I'm convinced there is a sizable initial market for my product, finding that initial cohort of users passionate about the problem you're solving is easier said than done. It's arguably just as hard as writing the code for your MVP.
Does anyone else have a product in this phase of the lifecycle? What has/hasn't worked for you?
OR, does the pain point I laid out above resonate? If so, let's chat.
4 Comments
Did you think already about how to commercialize the idea? What will be the source of income?
Great question!
The idea would be that there is a large cohort of users who don't have the time/desire to contribute to the database but would be willing to pay (probably a monthly subscription) to access weekly recommendations. So "free" users are those contributing links to essays/podcasts weekly to build up the database (and also receive recommendations because they are active contributors). Non-contributors would have to pay.
I find this model compelling because those willing to contribute help ensure a high density of quality content (there is intentional friction) – no garbage in equals no garbage out.
I imagine the ratio would be something like 10/90 or 20/80 in terms of contributors/consumers.
Need to validate the idea before building out a subscription tier.
Makes a lot of sense.
Probably, you would also need to have some kind of a scoring system. An abuser could submit a lot of low-quality articles just to get the better ones.
What comes to my mind is that if you would get access to 4 articles for submitting only let's say 2 articles, then the person could actually submit the received articles to get access to more and more content.
+1 on the scoring system. Something I've thought about, but haven't handled yet.
The second issue is totally valid as well. I have some validation that prevents users from submitting the same link twice, but need to add validation that prevents users from submitting links that were recommended to them.
Great callouts! Appreciate the feedback.