KevinBenSmith

Yes, there was! And there are even some similarities. My understanding is that they focused on collecting valuable pages from the web. In comparison, we are focused on collecting valuable moments from podcasts :)

Given how early we still are we first want to focus on podcasts and make sure we nail the functionality & experience. In the future, we then want to enable users to also upload their own audio content (e.g. an audio book) and benefit from all of the same features.

For now, we haven't really thought about enabling text mediums and going the other way around (text to speech instead of speech to text). You could however check out the Matter app. Not sure whether you can upload your own pdfs, but you can do text-to-speech for blog posts, including highlighting. They also have a Readwise integration like us.

I completely get that. See my comment above why we decided against having a dedicated feature for this. I'm hoping that tipping (or similar forms) will get more popular in the future and be supported by more podcast creators in their RSS feed.

We thought about that and actually decided against a dedicated feature doing exactly this. The reason being that we do not want to hurt podcaster's ability to monetize their content. That being said, with the automatically generated chapters in our app, you do already get a good sense of where the ads are.

I personally am hoping that some of the podcasting 2.0 features will make it easy for listeners to tip podcasters directly. Once we have that, we could implement an ad-skipping feature which is then only activated for listeners who have tipped the podcast creator.