Smashing: The smartest way to read anything online

(6 minutes)

Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This startup was started by a co-founder of Goodreads (Sold to Amazon for $150M)

• They’re solving the problem of content overload and mindlessly scrolling on your phone forever 📲

• They’ve raised a $3.4M seed led by True Ventures, Blockchange and more 💰

p.s. Stay till the end to read about the CEO and co-founders’ interaction with Jeff Bezos…

So what’s the startup and who are the co-founders behind it? Here’s the story of Smashing 📈

Smashing was founded in January 2022 by Goodreads Co-founder Otis Chandler, Greg Veen, Mike Mraz and Dan Barrett with the mission to help people read smarter online. 🤓

In this era of the internet, we’re increasingly overwhelmed with an ever-rising sea of content. 🌊

The internet is brimming with more interesting articles, podcasts and tweets than ever before. 

The problem? 🤔They’re just a lot harder to find. 

The whole internet is badly curated. Algorithms currently push out popular content, not useful content.

Smashing helps curate high-quality content for you, cutting through all the mindless scrolling you’d be doing otherwise. 💎

It prioritizes “Time well-spent” > popularity using worthwhile upvotes to prioritize meaningful content over clicks and likes. 👍

Curators who are right about what others like gain curator points, giving them more reputation in the app.

This way it cuts through all the BS content you’d see if you were on Tiktok or Twitter. 📱

With Smashing you’re also able to create multiple different topic feeds. Each of these feeds uses a fine-tuned model which matches content specifically made for you. 🤖

I’ve recently started using Smashing myself instead of platforms like Tiktok and Twitter, and it’s cut down my scrolling time by HALF. It really is a game-changer.

Smashing AI Questions 💭

Smashing recently introduced Smashing AI Questions: A way to provide readers the full spectrum of thought around a topic. ⁉️

It helps people become smarter readers by seeing multiple perspectives on the same story if multiple pieces of content cover it. 

For example, if a story consists of 10 articles, 5 social media posts and 2 podcasts, the reader would be able to tap each one to see how and where they differ.

This way the content curation is able to: avoid biases, filter through bubbles and give you a much higher-quality reading experience. 📖

Check out Smashing at Smashing.xyz or in the app store here !!

Backstory 👀

Otis Chandler had always been into reading books and discovering content. His father was a big influence: A journalist who worked on curating the news of the day.

He grew up in California and ended up going to Stanford for a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering in 1996. 🏫

This was a time when the internet was blowing up, so he started learning how to code and got a software engineering day job at Tickle: An early social network and dating site. 💻

While working this job in 2005, Otis walked into a friend's apartment in San Francisco and had been looking through his bookshelf. 📚

If you’re a big reader:

1. You probably have a bookshelf in your house where you’ve carefully curated all the favorite books you’ve ever read. 📑

2. If you walk into someone’s house with a bookshelf, you’re instantly drawn to it. It usually tells you a lot about the person.

When Otis looked through his friend's bookshelf, he naturally looked into it and ended up walking away with 10 books he got excited to read. ☺️

This was really powerful. Otis had basically struck GOLD. 💥

“What if we could take all this awesome social networking stuff and applied it to books?”

This way people could have an entire online profile of exactly what was on that bookshelf.

Founding Goodreads 🐣

In January 2007, Otis and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler, his girlfriend at the time (now wife), founded Goodreads to solve the “discoverability problem”. ☄️

The first place Goodreads had a lot of traction was the blogosphere in 2007. Goodreads did exactly what readers wanted and better.

They nailed PMF through their initial power users. 90% of the content produced on Goodreads was by 10% of members. 💫

In the early days, Otis spent 1-2 hours a day on making sure those power users were happy by commenting on their posts.

They were mission-driven and always put their users first. 🏢

By 2013, Goodreads had hit over 12 million users and was acquired by Amazon for $150 million to be integrated with Kindle. 💰

Meeting Jeff Bezos 🤝

When selling to Amazon, Otis met Jeff Bezos, one of the greatest CEOs EVER. 🥇This is what he told Otis:

The first thing to come out of Bezos’ mouth was “We like mission-driven people”.

Instead of asking about his day or greeting him, he just got straight to the point.

The biggest thing Otis learned about Bezos was that they had the exact same secret to building apps with hundreds of millions of users:

Obsessing over solving customer problems. 💨

Quickfire Stats on Goodreads 🔥

• 📈150+ Million users to date

• 📃400 million monthly page views (At Peak)

• 🌐Top 60 most visited US websites at its peak (more traffic than apple.com, walmart.com)

• 🚺70% Female Audience (Only Pinterest has a higher % female audience)

Otis ended up leaving Amazon in 2019 after working on Goodreads for over 14 years, and had a 1-year sabbatical from work.

During this time, he wanted to try and get into new things. At one point he even wanted to pivot into crypto…

He ended up challenging himself by entering a half-ironman triathlon. 🏃

This led him to go down rabbit holes on good nutrition, training times to not burn out, and how to stay in-shape overall. 🥦

When trying to search for this stuff using a traditional search engine, it was hard to find good, high-quality content.

Most of the top content was optimized for SEO and stuffed with ads, and just wasn’t of a high quality standard.

Even during his time building Goodreads, he always thought there was a better way to curate the rest of content on the web: not just articles and books. 🛜

He then met up with a couple of former co-workers to build Smashing and solve this problem.

What’s next? 🤔

Chandler says that Smashing’s AI algorithms to curate the best content for you have “vastly improved”  because they are fine-tuned on what EACH USER reads instead of what goes viral. 🤖

Smashing is now in the process of building the ability to make custom AI prompts that find the content you need instantly.

They’re also looking to focus on both podcast and youtube video discovery soon, so that your feed only has the best content tailored to you. 📜

They’re working on building out their community with a focus on power users as Chandler did with Goodreads. 👊

They now have a few thousand users testing their beta version with the goal to help every single person online read better.

💰On June 25th 2024, Smashing announced a $3.4M seed from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital and Power of N Ventures, and some angel investors, some of which were early backers of Goodreads.

Again, check out Smashing at Smashing.xyz or in the app store here.

 To clarify, this is a sponsored post but I genuinely love using Smashing and would recommend it to anyone trying to cut through the BS of content on the internet.

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