From project to profession: going indie on NewsBlur | Hacker News Reader

From project to profession: going indie on NewsBlur

blog.newsblur.com

100 pointsconesus24 comments

Congrats! Charge more. It has all manner of upsides, such as decreasing emails written by people who think $12 is a lot of money, and also means you won't have 20% COGS for a software service.

Not only is Samuel an amazing developer, but he is also the perfect person to build the news reader of the future. Check out his Github repo for some of the cleanest Python / JS code you'll ever come across. https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

I worked on a personalized news reader in 2009 (http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2009/11/parsely-a-feed-rea...). We decided ultimately to abandon the project to pursue Parse.ly Dash, a media analytics tool. When we were winding down Parse.ly Reader, I discovered Newsblur. I can say confidently that NewsBlur gets everything "right" that we got "wrong" in our original design. I now use NewsBlur as my primary reader and I am a paying customer. I have also evangelized it to my friends. I am really excited that Samuel is going to go full-time on this project and make it one of the best pieces of software on the web for news junkies like me.

I am very excited to see how you grow NewsBlur. It's a really great looking take on RSS feeds.

As someone who had a large social group sharing items on Reader before their last round of changes, I would love to hear what your plans/timeline on adding social features are.

(fyi, Samuel mentioned adding social features in his 2011 year-in-review blog post, http://blog.newsblur.com/post/15993667293/2011-year-in-revie..., and there is a social branch on github, https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/social)

First, let me thank you for providing a welcome alternative to those of us who were turned off by the "improvements" to Google reader. You made migrating dead-simple and that was a big factor in my choosing NewsBlur over other RSS sites.

My question, though, is that RSS usage seems to have plateaued, and may even be declining. Twitter, especially, has taken a fairly hard line in treating RSS as a second class citizen. Do you think there's a risk that other sites will move away from RSS in favor of social media, and, if so, do you have any plans to deal with that eventuality?

I don't see NewsBlur as competing with other RSS feed readers, many of which are seeing declining use and are either folding or are in the process of folding. NewsBlur, on the other hand, is doing very well because I'm charging people and can afford the popular opinion of "declining popularity" so long as it means revenue keeps increasing.

You have to remember that NewsBlur is unlike any other reader. It shows the original site, it filters and highlights stories, and it's being actively developed. There is a huge swatch of sites for which using Twitter is no substitute. You just want to read every post from those Tumblrs. You don't want to miss what Gruber is saying on Daring Fireball. And Salt & Fat podcasts are only once a week. You sure you want to rely on catching that single tweet a week that gives the link?

As long as the technology is good, I think there's an enormous market, full of people struggling to keep up with a dozen blogs by having to manually visit them all every day.

I'm not going for the expert RSS readers who use RSS in a way I never did. I followed 40-some sites when I started building NewsBlur. I now follow around 110. I never used Google Reader, and I think there's a lot more people like me than the ones who were already hooked on RSS.

My concern is that my ability to get feeds for news I want to follow is being reduced as people move to social networks. As you say, I can't count on catching one tweet or facebook post in the flood of messages. But sometimes people are only posting updates on social media.

I'm a premium subscriber on NewsBlur and love it. I was never satisfied with a reader until NewsBlur came around.

Love the product; sadly, I am so stuck on Reeder (backed by Google) that I can't bring myself to change. Now, a Reeder backed by Newsblur …

I know Reeder is adding Fever as a login in the next iPhone version - maybe we could get NewsBlur on that list somewhere

Samuel, I just wanted to let you know that you are a huge inspiration to me even though you don't know me. I remember your first post when you said you did the first version of your site while commuting on the NYC subway every day.

That small piece of info is my driving force every week as I recall how productive other entrepreneurs can be. So thank you.

Originally this blog post was going to be a "and so can you" type post. I thought it was kind of important to set the tone to say that I'm a schlub who just pushed hard enough on the persistence/patience/perseverance/perspiration mix. It ended up being all about me instead, but I'm still working on the post in my head.

I'm not especially productive. I just work relentlessly on NewsBlur, every single day. Check the graph on http://github.com/samuelclay. There's another year before that of the same persistent pushing. And oftentimes I think that I take more than twice the time others do to get something like a distributed feed fetcher built. But push through it and one day you're shipping.

My first year was all internal motivation. But after I launched, that very quickly switched to external motivation. I added NewsBlur's Get Satisfaction forum to the dashboard of every NewsBlur user. That way I get a lot more feedback about the product. I had to build that little table by hand, even writing a cronjob to grab the latest feedback so it would show up instantly for users just logging in, but that was so clearly the basis for my external motivation.

Getting paid, on the other hand, was never a motivation. It just didn't occur to me that I could live off NewsBlur. Even today, that's not the case. But I'm taking a gamble by going full-time, spending the next few months cranking out my big social branch, and seeing if there's something bigger in NewsBlur. Luckily, at this rate, simply monetizing the current site might be enough to keep me off the streets.

I had a similar experience to you 2004-2007 with an RSS-to-everything service called Feed Digest. It started as a way to get my Delicious links onto my blog and eventually turned into my full time job with 25k users. I sold it in 2007 after a number of mistakes on my part: http://peterc.org/blog/2010/257-three-years-ago-i-sold-my-st...

Anyway, the only reason I'm piping up is because I think NewsBlur is cool and I hope you manage to avoid the single bigger killer for my own project.. not charging enough! :-) I earned enough for it to be an OK living but not enough to hire people, get much help, etc, and it turned into a real burnout situation. There wasn't anything like Hacker News to learn from at the time either.

So if you're going full time with this, I wish you the very best of luck but I pray (and I'm not a religious man!) you find a scalable and realistic business model that makes this project comfortable to run, rather than just enough to keep you off the streets, as it were.

Only now I realized that Newsblur loads the original page for each feed unlike Google Reader - very nice.

What do you think of pinboard's one-time payment formula?

The fee is based on the formula (number of users times $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay.

Currently it is just shy of $10.

Love the idea, but it wouldn't work for NewsBlur. While Pinboard charges once for being able to store bookmarks and all of the associated meta-data, he actually charges $25/year for the archival subscription, which is where a whole lot more work happens.

NewsBlur has to fetch millions of sites regularly, whether you're on the site or not. Eventually I step down the fetching of sites that have few active users, but it's still expensive to do a whole lot of feed fetching and parsing. It's not much, but then again, neither is $1/month.

Congratulations Samuel, I see you have read my email (I'm the Dude from FeedsAPI), that's the way to go. Good Luck and if I can ever help make Newsblur more awesome, it'll be a pleasure.

Congratulations! I didn't know Newsblur was open source, that's awesome.

Good luck, Samuel. Don't forget to change the company name on your Github profile ;-)

Yeah, I noticed that my Stack Overflow profile was outdated, as well as GitHub and others. In fact, my personal blog still says I'm working on DocumentCloud.

This is a problem needing solving. Or not.

It looks beautiful and I am a sucker for beautiful things. Immediately signed up for premium membership. I wish you good luck in your adventure.

I met Samuel at the last startup school, he seemed like an outstanding guy and a very good developer. Congrats and good luck!

Great news! NewsBlur and Pinboard are the only web services I pay for. Very excited to see that you are growing.

Congratulations Samuel, and good luck!

Congrats! I wish you a continuous chain of awesome events for you and your project.

In another note; is nice that you are trying to be unobtrusive with your visitors but I think your design is conversion-flawed; the register form and (after that) the premium benefits should really stand out!

Rough sketches of what i mean: http://i.imgur.com/Gy569.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sKwZF.jpg

Any chance to see you add your email in your pofile? I'm traing to get in touch with you, my email is in my profile.

on the homepage the most unimpressive news are, hacknews everything else looks better maybe newsblur can grab the first page of wherever hacknews is pointing to?

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