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đ Hi Reader,
I read Pete Koomenâs âAI Horseless Carriagesâ essay last weekend (highly recommended reading btw, Pete articulates like very few other VCs or tech founders can)
The Issue
It led me to think the newsletter reading experience over email is a similar horseless carriage, similarly made to retrofit what we have today, not what we could do with the interfaces of the near future.
Yes, I do understand that newsletters in their present form are delivered over email, but they were not meant to be completely savored over an email interface.
Letâs be honest, Gmail was meant to help you take quick actions over email (one could argue that Superhuman does a better job), but it was never meant for you to go through a long-form essay at your leisure from Mario Gabriele (The Generalist) or Ben Thompson (Stratechery)
The Insight
The medium was never meant to be the same place as the message
The Opportunity
Therein lies a huge whitespace for immersive experiences just for long-form newsletter reading. The Substack team gets it, which is they built a mobile app experience to fully immerse the reader into the content. But that becomes a walled garden, for others like Kit and Beehiiv.
Substack app screenshot from substack.com
âEnter: Apps like Matter. I think Ben Springwater has built a compelling spiritual successor to the Pocket app, which he acknowledged recently on this X thread too.
End of an era. Bit of personal history... Before starting Matter, Pocket was my favorite app. It wasnât just the app I spent the most time in, Pocket was part of my identity. I was proud of my Top 1% status, as I'm sure many Pocket OGs can relate to. In 2015, I actually https://twitter.com/Pocket/status/1925587570286895494 Pocket @Pocket Over the years, Pocket has helped millions of people save, discover, and enjoy incredible content across the web. 𧾠1/5
â
Matter builds on the read-later premise, and gets (most of the) reading experience on point. Holding out to check if they have an Android app in the works, though.
ââ
Matter iOS app screenshot from Matter
The fact that there exists just a couple of these apps to complement the reading experience, begs the question:
Is the newsletter market underserved for avid readers?
Where is the next category getting created?
john travolta nba GIF
What do you folks think? Hit âReplyâ and let us know your thoughts on this topic.
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