Instapaper

“Evernote is kind of the central one. Usually for most people, their digital notes app is like the heart of their second brain, the center of their second brain. But then I also use Things, which is a task manager for my to-do list. I also use BusyCal, which is…”

“Both Pocket and Instapaper wound up landing at larger companies back in 2016, and Readability wound up shutting down, because actually I think the market appeal for that product is fairly limited, and it's not one that's, like, massively growing over time.”

“In relaunching Pocket in 2012, I think, you know, I've looked at the downloads for Instapaper, and they just start tanking after April 2012.”

“You have this dynamic where you have this service that's really strong, but there's a free competitor that's also really strong, and people will always seek the free competitor.”

“Because the app downloads were 40 to 50% of the revenue from Instapaper, there was a lot of hesitation around just eliminating it.”

“In that one week period, we had more app downloads than we had an aggregate over the past two years. And we increased our subscriptions by like 10 to 15%.”

“We took a pretty big hit, I think, which was expected on the revenue side for a couple months. But within six to eight months, we had re recouped what we had lost on the monthly revenue. And we were actually back into a growth trajectory, which was awesome to …”

“One of the large New York media companies sent us a letter of intent for a large sum. Very large sum. It was In the eight figure range. Yeah, it was big.”

“The reason being is that treating it as a business unit, I just felt that every dollar put into Instapaper could maybe return 70 cents a dollar. Like, it would be pretty challenging to, like, have it kind of be an investment that had a solid return. But I felt…”

“Basically from late 2014 through now, I've been the person doing all the back-end engineering, all the iPhone engineering.”

“So we raised 80,000 dollars from friends and family. Very ragtag, like six people. So to kind of give you the average size, I think the largest check was from me, which was 13,000. And then most of the people had 10, some people put in five.”

“We are now cash flow positive, which is great. Like a couple thousand dollars. A lot of that was around significantly reducing our server costs.”

“And what I found is that on day, on the first day that we saw those links, only 16% of those links were in Pinterest. So we actually see like a much different set of URLs on a given day. And then over time, I think within seven or eight days, Pinterest gets to…”

“Our strategy for simplicity with new feature development, and it's not a great strategy, is we just hide all the features. We put them kind of in hidden places. And I think our idea and our philosophy behind it is the people who want those features are gonna g…”