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Simplifying Yakread, focusing on newsletters
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j
I've spent the past few days setting up a bunch of internal reporting stuff for yakread so I can analyze user behavior. One interesting thing I've learned is that the most active users are significantly more likely to have set up a @yakread.com address, and they spend a lot more time reading newsletters (some of the less active users set up a @yakread.com address, but almost none of them subscribe to any newsletters with it). Anecdotally, I also think it's interesting that in one of the most positive pieces of feedback I've received, which I've quoted on the landing page, the person focused exclusively on newsletters: > “I've been using Yakread for about a week now and I absolutely love it. As someone with a bunch of newsletter subscriptions, it's super helpful to have them aggregated, put in feed form, and get a reminder at a certain time to peruse the daily offerings.” > –Josh C. I'm starting to wonder: instead of the "tiktok for reading" thing (https://tfos.co/p/tiktok-for-reading/), in which the plan has been to focus on Yakread's discover recommendations and not emphasize subscribing to stuff at all; maybe it would be better to focus just on newsletters. I'd still leave all of yakread's features in, but I'd reorganize the UI + landing page to emphasize newsletters. I'm envisioning something like this: Landing page: > The easiest way to stay on top of your newsletters. > [enter your email address] [sign up] > > [testimonial] > > - Subscribe to newsletters with your very own @yakread.com email address > - Yakread curates your inbox to help you catch good reads you might have missed. > - We'll send you a daily reading reminder with the top reads of the day. When you sign in to yakread, the sidebar would have only these items in it: - home - history - advertise - settings - feedback
And the "Open URL" box at the top of the page would be replaced by a message that says "Sign up for newsletters with example@yakread.com [change username]", replacing example@yakread.com with whatever your address is. New users would be prompted immediately to set up their address if they haven't already. Instead of newsletters + rss + bookmarks + books + social media posts + discovery recommendations + ads, the feed would just be newsletters + ads. After new users have set up their @yakread.com address, there'd be a message saying "go sign up for some newsletters", and there'd be some recommendations/ads (since most/all the ads are for newsletters anyway). I'd add a "power user" setting which, if selected, would enable all the other fancy features yakread has now like rss etc. But for now the focus would just be on newsletters.
The other relevant background info here is that yakread's retention is quite bad, so some kind of change is needed. I do think either this or the tiktok-for-reading idea is worth doing--i.e. I want to simplify yakread and focus on one easy-to-understand use-case, and make all the other features less prominent. The question is just whether the use-case should be "reading newsletters" or "reading interesting stuff that yakread's algo suggests"
My gut feeling as of right now is that the "reading newsletters" use-case is a stronger need. So maybe best to start with that, and then after yakread is growing and stuff, then think about if it's worth focusing on tiktok-for-reading in an attempt to attract people who don't yet subscribe to newsletters. (or maybe it would work fine to just stick with newsletters + ads forever).
p
By “reading newsletters” do you mean reading every post from an author you subscribe to (like an inbox)? Or curating your own sources and letting Yakread pick the best reads out of them?
j
in between I guess? if you have time to read every post then you certainly could do that. but I assume most people won't do that (I certainly don't). basically it'd be like a regular email inbox, but the emails are sorted by an algorithm instead of chronologically. the benefits being that 1) the newsletters you like a lot don't get drowned out by a bunch of other newsletters that you're just trying out, and 2) infrequent newsletters don't get drowned out by frequent ones
ultimately I guess I want to do both newsletter management and discovery. I am feeling pretty confident that I should take ebooks, Twitter/mastodon and probably even rss subscriptions out of yakread since they can all be added via external services for those who do want them, and they aren't used much anyway (with the possible exception of rss; I need to dig into that more). I definitely want to have subscription management be a core part of yakread; I don't want to do pure discovery (I already spent two years trying to do that...). so a benefit of focusing on just newsletters is that it'd be the most minimal version of yakread that would still have value. I like the idea of trimming yakread down to just newsletters for now, and refining that; and then after it's growing start focusing on discovery again.
p
Right that makes sense. So your question is if we find recommendations across our existing newsletter subscriptions, or across random interesting blog posts more useful?
The % of articles in your feed you want to read might be another good question. E.g. I think part of the value of RSS readers or “inbox-like” reader apps is to get an overview of everything that’s new, and maybe even process everything.
j
yep, that's a good way to phrase it
this is also a good point--what I've started doing is I've added yakread's "subscriptions" page to my daily bookmarks collection, so in my morning routine I skim through the subject lines and open any that jump out. and then for the rest I just wait till they pop up in the home feed. with that workflow, I've been thinking I'd rather have the home feed be even more algorithmic than it currently is. It's about 70% chronological right now. I think it might be worth baking something like that into the main yakread flow, though I'm not sure what the best way to do it would be. maybe I should use the daily email digests for this--show a list of links for all the newsletter issues that were received in the previous day.
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