TechTok

Here is Part 1

In part 2 I detail how I managed to reduce the curation time from 4 hours to 4 minutes.

I start from the raw articles and RSS feeds of the selected sources and from there I do five steps to automate the daily news as stories and the newsletter out every week, summarising data with AWS Bedrock (with Claude 3 Haiku) and OpenAI’s GPT-4. Here is how:

Step 1. Ranking: selecting the top 10 articles from each source.

A few RSS feeds would have the number of comments, upvotes, likes or stars, which makes ranking much easier. Others would use page position to highlight news pieces or have their own rankings in their main page. I combine this into a function that ranks the articles by relevance and importance based on what the community voted for and/or the editorial position choices.

Step 2. Enriching: gathering more relevant data from each one of the articles.

From the top 10 articles of each source I go run through an enricher which will try to extract the main image of article, credits, authors and the full content if possible. It also extract main topics and categories of the article which are useful in the next step.

This step has a 3-layer fallback which includes some programmatic extraction and some scrapping using LLMs. Here is a diagram:

Step 3. Summarising: I prompt AWS Claude 3 and GPT-4 for summarisation of each article that has been ranked and enriched.

Once I get hold of the enriched content I ask the LLMs for a summary giving a different “system prompt” for each one of the sources. For example, for GitHub trending repos, I’ll say something like this:

You are a helpful github repository summariser.
I'll send you the content of a README.md of a github repository and you should summarise it in 
one sentence of what the repository does and return it as a json. Keep the summarising sentence under 200 characters if possible

* Be direct to the point to what is the repository's purpose
* Try to highlight what could be this used for.

This is how the response should look like:
{
	"summary": [ "This is the summary of the repository" ]
}

Please follow the format above and respond only with a valid json.

I will only summarise the top 5 articles of each source, further in the curation process I can summarise the other 5 if the first ones ranked don’t seem like good content for the daily news.

💡 Up until this point, it was all a ‘script’ - no manual step required apart from pressing a button 🚀

Step 4. Curating: articles might not be so relevant and output from LLMs can be hallucinated or mistaken.

I’ve designed an admin curation page 🪄 that helps me scan through the daily articles and fix any mistakes that have been made in the three initial steps. It also allows me to curate the quality of summaries and chosen news, and I’m able to switch summaries in between GPT-4 and Claude 3 and get the next available news for the source. Sometimes I even delegate that process to great engineer friends.

Here is a 2-minute video of me explaining the newsletter and daily news curating process:

https://youtu.be/cCgjcvixKuo

Step 5. Last but not least: Store and display as beautiful stories 💅🏻

I use my storified component to display the daily tech news stories that I’ve summarised and curated organised by source. Lastly, I double check if they still look nice!

As the headline gave away, it costs me a daily average of $0.19 to do this whole process using redundant LLMs. If I didn’t have the “caching”, ranking and enriching step this price would have rocketed to over 20x of this price.

Key lessons

Two short and sweet lessons I’ve taken from this

1. Feel the pain of your manual process, be lazy and automate.
2. Be mindful of your LLMs services usage, cache and rank to avoid high costs.

Do you want to speed up your newsletter curation process?

We can partner up and do the same for your newsletter. Let’s have a chat (15 minutes and no commitment).

https://calendly.com/joaovitor-martins/chat-about-your-newsletter

Subscribe to TechTok!

Subscribe now to the quickest way to stay up to date with tech news. Replace your daily scrolling through TikTok and Instagram stories with some finite and refined news from TechTok!

https://techtok.today

I’ve decided to build my own newsletter: TechTok is an aggregator of daily tech news, summarised, curated and delivered to you via ‘stories’ and a weekly newsletter. I created it to solve my own problem of feeling overwhelmed by so many daily ‘game changers’ in AI and tech, it’s been hard to keep up!

This article explains how I went from spending hours on tedious newsletter tasks to focusing on what matters most: selecting the best, most relevant content.

There are many reasons to have a newsletter

If you want to build an audience, explore an expertise, use it as a sales tool or just investigate another channel. Emails are great, 4.26 billion people have them.

Before I started I looked into Substack and Beehiiv, and they do have a ‘great’ no-code tool that powers a lot of popular newsletters - the problem for me was just not the right ‘feature freedom’ I was looking for.

I wanted to explore different experiments for engaging an audience and TechTok has its own ‘storified’ version of the daily tech news, using users engagement to select and curate a weekly newsletter.

Pain before the gains

In the first 3 days, I realised… how can I, a single person, scale a newsletter and collect daily news without it taking every minute of my days? And most importantly how can I spend time on the things that matter? For me is choosing the best and most relevant articles and NOT selecting images, copying and pasting things, or writing (crazy!) - I’ve had to automate and leverage AI tools to avoid that.

I started by choosing the main sources of tech news I use to keep myself up to date:

• Trending repositories from GitHub,
• Tech news from TechCrunch and The Verge
• Reddit’s r/technology and r/programming subreddits
• Hacker News
• Blog posts from engineering teams from “Big Tech”
• and Product Hunt

Next step was to MEASURE! Keeping track of how long it took for me to curate articles and automated ONE thing a day.

🤩 The result is: the process went from taking 4 hours to 4 minutes. But how?

See part two for the details of all 5 steps for automating a tech newsletter!

I’ve designed social media and community marketing iterations based on some ‘playbooks’ I’ve bookmarked a while back and was looking forward to try: first100users.com, groundup.vc/resources.

For the first iteration I’ve chosen strategies that involves less visual resources such as videos and images. The goal was to not spend too much time creating visuals and more on writing. It was based on an advice I’ve got and I thought it would be a great exercise for “wording around the main problem to solve” and how “I communicate the solution”.

Here are the strategies I have chosen for the first iteration:

• Reply to X threads and X Ads campaign
• Post on Communities (Slack, Discord and Telegram)
• Write on subreddits
• ProductHunt Launch
• LinkedIn “Personal post”
• Invest some time in ‘good enough’ SEO
• Submit product to Uneed
• Add newsletters to awesome-newsletters github repository

Key takeaways

• The most fruitful one was Product Hunt: 24% conversion rate
• The most disappointing one was X Ads: long time spent setting up ads in a broken ‘Ads manager’. Also had to spent money signing up and in verifying my account (which took 3 days).
• The most surprisingly good one was Telegram’s levelsio community
• The most painful one were the posts in communities on Slack
• Bonus: how I got banned from some subreddits? (read in full here)

Product Hunt: will there be a next time?

Reached top #11 of the day 140 votes. 120 subscriptions out of 500 visitors.

Be ready for lots of incoming messages (spam) for people that would want to talk about your product on their linkedIn pages for a fee. I didn’t use that service, but I’m assuming some the top #5 products of they day could have used.

Important learning here: post as a coming soon product and connect to others on Product Hunt. Most people that see product hunt are people creating or heavily interested in new products, if you build connections increase your change of reaching a better spot.

For a next time I would also prepare a better video for the product page and be ready with a few templates in writing to ‘beg’ for votes across social media.

X Ads didn’t work and X search is not helpful

Wrote about 120 replies got 5 subscriptions. Spent $60 on Ads from credits (some of it accidentally) and got potentially 5 subscriptions. The results of my ads and my replies were the same from a similar effort.

The key tip from playbook was: “search for the pain you’re solving as keywords”. But have you tried to do any search on X? The search by keyword is really disappointing.

The top results for ‘what are the best tech newsletters are tweets from 2020 and 2021, while the ‘latest’ ones are really relevant threads.

I also invested some time in following thought leaders on tech for disseminating tech news and perhaps chatting about the problem. It got me some leads, but haven’t been able to engage any mid-sized influencer after 200 replies.

Important learning there: writing from my personal account gave better engagement than writing from techtoktoday’s account. That in a way makes sense to me I value more someone’s opinion than a ‘company/brand’ talking about themselves.

Communities: love and hate

I went around searching for product, tech and communities around the world (but mostly UK and US) to send a post about TechTok. I’ve sent it to 20 different communities including TechNY, ProductPints (London), Mind the product, levelsio on Telegram, ProductTank Tokyo, DC Tech. The best outcome came out of levelsio Telegram community, apparently I’ve got over 40 clicks and 10 sign ups. Not bad in comparison to other communities.

I was just banned from one group even though I posted on their ‘allowed’ spam channel.

Will it be a second iteration? I don’t think so. Sharing on communities is relatively high effort and low returns.

LinkedIn with a personal post

Some of my next iterations in marketing involve more time on LinkedIn, building up a page and maybe investing in some Ads. For this first one I’ve just written one post on my personal account and the results were as expected a 10% conversion rate and a few clicks to see TechTok.

Important learning here: my post was not being suggested by LinkedIn, one key observation was that I had too many links in a post and LinkedIn algorithm does not promote posts with too many external links.

What next?

A few of those deserve further iteration:

1. Building a more consistent social media presence on Instagram, Threads, X and LinkedIn is the next step. Regular posts, regular replies and quick iterations might have a better result. For that I need to automate some of the process, it takes to long to create and distribute content and currently is not scalable.
2. Release again on Product Hunt. If I can release a significant feature for Product Hunt to approve my post I would follow those suggestions from this Reddit post and Lenny’s newsletter.

Yesterday I invested (time!) in a couple of new marketing strategies for the TechTok product. One of them was writing on subreddits.

I’m not a Reddit power user, I'm normally a read-only one and rarely engage with any post apart from upvoting or downvoting.

My initial approach was to find the communities (subreddits) that would be relevant to post about my tech newsletter (TechTok). So I've found:

• r/startups: found a great thread to engage and do a little elevator pitch
• r/technology: it’s probably the subreddit I check the most, unravels a ‘before it was cool’ side of tech
• r/technews: it seemed perfect for my tech news product subtle mention
• r/SideProject: while looking for other hustlers support
• r/learnprogramming: wild guess but the audience would be the right one for TechTok

My approach was: “let’s give it a personal spin on these posts” with the idea of what is it that I’m trying to solve for me that could work for others. So the titles of the posts followed something like: “I used to wake up and check Instagram every day as a first thing in the morning. So I've built a product to replace this habit with something more useful: tech news!”

The results were: banned for life or “permanently banned from posting” from r/learnprogramming, r/technews and r/technology for violating the rule “No Spam or Self-Promotional Posts”.

In a way “fair” but on the other hand “harsh”. What do you think?
It says “Don't post links you have a financial stake in or otherwise benefit from.” - I get that if people sign up for my free newsletter and eventually I monetise it I would get something out of it.

On the series of “I wish I knew this before” I found this Quora answer that provides 6 steps when writing a post on Reddit that are valuable to know: https://qr.ae/pspjlF - Between (1) “Choose the right subreddit” and (5) “Timing is important” I think I did well. What apparently went wrong on my what I thought to be a harmless post was (6) “Follow community rules”.

Will I continue to use Reddit? Yes. 100%, I can still read things if I keep a legal 200-meter distance.

Today I have reached 250 subscribers.

Out of approximately 800 users that have access the website. Most sign ups now are coming from direct traffic (80%) - it could mean that people are sharing or find it on Google Searches. More strategies of marketing to come. Goal is to reach 1000 subs by the end of the week.

First newsletter will be out on Monday 4th March

On my launch day I reached 130 subscribers from 700 visitors. The traffic came mostly from the Product Hunt launch (40% of traffic) and socials (24%) as well as organic and originated from posts on communities of technology on Slack and Discord.

It reached position #11 on Product Hunt and got 119 upvotes.

The most successful launch from any of the products I've made.

Today I released TechTok on ProductHunt. It's great to see that a lot of people felt like me, overwhelmed by so much happening and tech and are looking for innovative ways of keeping themselves up to date.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/techtok

With TechTok you can get an overview in under 5 minutes from the trending repos on GitHub, Hacker News, engineering blogs from leading tech companies, Reddit, and more. Sign up for FREE to see all summaries and subscribe to the newsletter

This is the part I normally enjoy the most in the whole process of creation and it's where I should be the most careful. There is a risk I'll spend most of my time building and not talking to users, getting early feedback and doing market research.

This time I did part of the market research before, but mostly I kept my main goal in sight: I want something I can experiment with as many marketing tools as possible.

So the design of the solution had the requirements:

• I can measure from day 0: user behaviour, conversion and marketing strategies effects
• It looks like a 'ready' product that people can sign up for.
• It solves a problem for at least 10 people I know
• It's scalable: it requires minimum effort to keep it up to date.

So the process involved:

• Focus on designing tracking capable of analysing impact of my marketing attempts.
• Architect something that would have minimum cost from ML resources (challenging), that is scalable (to add different sources of news and update the existing ones) and I can easily maintain.
• Iterate with friends and family until I find the 10 users that would use the tool.

The number one struggle for me at the moment is not being able to validate product-market fit quick enough or get commercial validation from any of my ideas.

I have great feedback from the process I'm using to create new products, and the key takeaway is: 'validate the commercial value before you invest more time on it'.

I tend to ignore the advice on creating the 'simplest landing page' with 'fake doors' and checking if anyone would buy before even having a github repo. I normally go a bit further and create a basic but functional product / MVP / MLP and then I do the steps for the validation. Sue me, but I prefer it that way.

WHAT DO I REALLY WANT FROM THIS NEW PROJECT?

1. Being able to try playbook(s) for marketing such as https://www.first100users.com/ and https://www.groundup.vc/resources
2. Get to a 1000 users in a week
3. Validate if I can solve a real problem for real people