Oku

Around 2 weeks ago I launched oku.io, a platform where you can organize all your favorite feeds and content sources in one clean, distraction-free board. Now, I built it as a scrappy tool to solve my own problem at first, didn't really make any market research. After talking to some friends, I decided to turn it into a real product and release it for people to use.

I got decent feedback in the first few days, a few paying users as well, which were nice signals for such a new product that's also not selling anything 'click-baity' (pass me the word) like make money schemes or 10x your revenue with this tool type of things.

Then something happened in the last few days that I really didn't expect. Flipboard launched Surf, and Bluesky announced Attie, both products that live in a very similar space (custom feeds, cleaner reading experience, etc.) of Oku.

A few years ago I would've felt crushed and possibly blaimed my usually unlucky timing (both those products have been in the works for a while, but I didn't know because, again, I didn't do any market research), but after being in this space for a while, it actually felt great to see large companies building to tackle the same problem. It helped me push away the fear that it was too-niche of a product, and motivated me to keep building.

2 weeks ago ago I launched oku.io, a product I initially built a (really) scrappy version of, just to adapt to my own needs and fix my own problems. After talking to a bunch of people I decided to turn it into an actual product, and launched it 10 days ago.

It's been an interesting 10 days. On the bright side, over 1000 people visited the website, 100 signed up and a few also converted to the premium plans, which is always good validation to see so early and with no real marketing other than posting on a couple subreddits and HN.

On the slightly darker side, this turned something I used daily without thinking too much about how it was working (since it was fine as long as it was just me, and the fundamentals worked), into something I now have to maintain and make work properly for people to use. And with a product handling so many sources and APIs, it's not that easy. Regardless, using it myself makes it way easier to spot bugs, issues and also improvement opportunities faster.

Hey guys,

It's been 6 days since I publicly released Oku.io, a dashboard to visualize feeds and content sources in a cleaner, mroe focused interface.

Not much of a big launch, just posted a couple of times on Reddit and one time on Show HN. The latter got a bit of attention, and (as of now) brought in around 500 visitors, and the first paying customer.

After reading initial feedback, I added a public boards section, where you can browse prefilled boards for different topics (tech, startups, finance, cinema & TV) without having to signup.
Lastly, I added a new panel type that allows you to see all major upcoming releases in cinema, TV and gaming.

Excited to see how this continues to grow.

I've been saying that the internet has become unusable for a while now. The majority of times I open a newsfeed, my screen is 70% ads/banners/popups and 30% content. Then I open reddit and I get an insane amount of spam posts, stuff I don't care about, and the AI spam I'm sure we're familiar about. The rest, I tab hop.

Eventually, I decided to fix my own pain and build Oku.io, a better, cleaner way to consume and discover content.

On oku you can create boards with the feeds you're interested in: Blogs, ProductHunt, HackerNews, YouTube, Reddit, and a lot more. Either in a grid view to see everything at once, in a focus view to see the feeds one by one, or with a daily/weekly email digest if you are not interested in actively monitoring it.

As I've been building it, I've also been actively using it and I am extremely happy with how it turned out. I spend way less time hopping between different tabs and I feel like I have a much more clear view over the content I'm interest in both for work and for personal interests.

Supporting sources and widgets at launch: HackerNews (Front, Show and Ask), ProductHunt, RSS feeds, Curated Latest News, Google Trends, TrustMRR, Crypto & Stocks, Website Watch (Monitor a website's section), Newsletters (Get a custom inbox you can read in your board), Reddit, Polymarket, Youtube.

Feature list:

• In-app reader: read articles without popups, banners and ads.

• Grid & Focus view: monitor all your content at ocne in a customizable grid, or by focusing on single feeds.

• Digest: Get a daily or weekly digest with top content from all your sources.

• Smart summaries for YouTube videos (with timestamps), Reddit posts (With comments analysis), Articles.

• Highlights & Notes: Save sections of any article or reddit post.

• Bookmarks: Save anything from your board.

• Keyword filter or RSS feeds and Reddit: Hide or show only content with titles matching your keywords.

If you check it out (there's a free tier), let me know what you think!