Instapaper Goes From Hobby To Startup

Don't compare him to Patrick or he'll be next on lionhearted's chopping block!

I personally find that there's nearly no overlap between articles with comments (at least those which I'm interested in) and those I read on Instapaper. Think that's because I don't tend to put short "news" items on Instapaper, just long form articles.

You could always put the comments page on Instapaper instead.

I'm in the same general space as you (bookmarking / browsing tools), and I have some insight.

I think Instapaper gets a lot of word of mouth spreading because it's an iPhone App. That encompasses a lot more than it sounds. Being an iWhatever App means you get eyeballs from the store, but more importantly from its users - both online and in real life. iPhone/Pad/etc applications are highly sociable and shareable; revealing a useful App to somebody is a form of social value. It's a platform that is in vogue right now: How many times have you been recommended a certain App, or have seen somebody using an interesting one? Ok, now how many times have you been recommended a bookmarklet?

You were blogged a few times, that should have helped somewhat. It's possible that Historious isn't as useful as you think it is. I had written in this box a big long paragraph about why I think that is, but it's not pertinent to your question about promotion. If you'd like more of my thoughts on Historious, shoot me an e-mail, I'd be glad to give you my $.02.

There was also a post around here that detailed a template and methodology for 'pitching' an article about your product to bloggers. The gist of it was: You need to be actively seeking bloggers and promoters, you need to show them you're interested in their work, and you need to pitch them your product in a way that makes them feel their readers will click to read about it.

Hello, I tried historious just now and indeed, it seems a good product. I think you have to find some compelling reason, why one would switch to your service from others. Also, a big improvement would be, if one can try your service without the need of registering - like the Instapaper. I must say that generally I simply don't have a motivation to try another bookmarking service just to see what it is. But I did a very short evaluation just now to help a fellow HN'er ;-)

Ok, so why I won't probably switch to your service? ;-)

Currently, I use two bookmarking sites:

- Instapaper - this is for the stuff I want to read later, but not necessarily "bookmark" it, and

- Google bookmarks - for the stuff I might want later, so I want to bookmark it

Now, as I see it, the only advantage of historius over Google bookmarks is, that I can historify by one click (like Instapaper). But, this is not that important to me, since when I want to store something, my current habit already is that I always want to add a tag anyway. Because, despite Google bookmarks also having a search (in bookmarked sites), I almost never use it - I can recall an old bookmark by the tag more easily. Moreover, another advantage is, that I do not need another account to create, since I am also an Gmail user.

The third thing is, that I probably would not pay for bookmarking service monthly/yearly, when there is so much free offerings. Maybe you could convince me to one-time fee (like pinboard.in does), but probably not regularly.

So, to sum it up, your product combines good things from various other bookmarking services, but that alone doesn't make it better than others. You just need to find people, who like the workflow you are offering them with your service.

So to sum it up, my only advice I can give is - try to make your service available without need to register, so more people will try it.

Tadam, you've just promoted it! I googled and took a quick look at it, but I'm curious how different is it from a bunch of other already entrenched bookmarking sites?

I heard of Instapaper from Daring Fireball.

I guess making something that hits the sweet spot for a famous blogger is one way to promote. May not be the most efficient though.

I think Instapaper launched on Daringfireball.

Heck, I'd be pretty happy with a little button/dropdown in the popup that let me say which article the page is a part of.

I use both and Instapaper does much nicer job of reformatting HTML into something readable. Most of the time it is a blessing, but sometimes it may be the curse (e.g. you have colored table with critical information).

I never used Read It Later, but instapaper can also save kindle and epub files. Even if I have a pro instapaper iphone app, I mainly use it on the kindle these days.

Because it is much more than that ... combines Read It Later, with Readability (Firefox add-on), and ability to download ePub to my N-900 (so it works virtually everywhere, not only on iP*). Also, there is no cost of using it ... if it goes away (or requires payment), I don't loose anything than one day worth of reading.

The product has been out for nearly 3 years[1] and he's been making money for at least half of that.

I'm curious why you don't consider that a startup. What's your criterion?

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/30/simple-bookmarking-now-avai...

I kinda had a hunch he would be doing this. As it stands right now, Instapaper has a greater chance of making more money than Tumblr, simply because they are selling iOS apps already and the datamining potential is greater (with Tumblr, how do you analyze different blog posts and so on?), such as finding out which blogs are most popular.

Ads on the website too I guess.