In the post I mention that I'll probably put discovery for yakread on hold for now and add it back in later as an optimization. However, I was just thinking through what the experience would be like if I were to just use The Sample to provide discovery... and honestly I think it would work well. The onboarding flow would look like this: 1. New user signs up for Yakread 2. They're shown a prompt that asks them to pick a username for their @yakread.com email address. 3. The user is dropped on the home page/home feed with a message that says e.g. "You haven't subscribed to anything yet. Try subscribing to [The Sample]. It'll help you discover excellent newsletters to sign up for." 4. User goes to The Sample, subscribes, and then sees the "check your inbox for the first email" message. (The Sample sends the first email right away.) 5. User goes back to Yakread and sees the first email from The Sample. As is the same for all The Sample subscribers, they can sign up for the recommended newsletter in 1 click, and they can view additional newsletter recommendations on demand. So even if they don't have many emails in their yakread inbox yet, they can still read as much stuff as they want to immediately on The Sample; so there isn't a missed opportunity from not having enough content to display.

I could throw in a few things to reduce friction a bit. e.g. yakread could pass the user's email address to the sample in a query parameter, i.e. by having the user click on a link like

https://thesample.ai/?email=example@yakread.com

. Then the email field would be be prefilled. I could also have Yakread pass in a redirect URL for the inbox. So when The Sample shows the "Check your inbox" message, it can display a button that says "open my inbox", which would link back to yakread. Maybe I should just do that based on the domain. if it's a @yakread.com address, link back to yakread.com; if it's a gmail address, link to mail.google.com, etc. Finally, in the yakread home page, if there aren't any unread posts left and yakread sees that you've already signed up for the sample, then instead of showing a "hey you should sign up for the sample" message, it could show a "read another newsletter in The Sample" message and link to the same place as the "Next newsletter" button does in The Sample's emails.

this is a great epiphany This means that within a couple weeks I could have Yakread in its final form. And then going forward I can work on Yakread and The Sample in tandem. Maybe The Sample won't be banished to maintenance mode forever after all.

Now I'm gonna have to partially rewrite this week's newsletter

Just updated it: https://tfos.co/p/delete-delete/. There's a new "Resurrecting The Sample" section.

Update: I think I'll at least leave RSS subscriptions in. Just added info about RSS to my internal report, and there is a decent chunk of people who add their own RSS subscriptions, and there is a correlation between doing that and being an active user. I've also started sending a feedback survey out, and although I've only received 4 responses so far, 3 of those talked about RSS.

re: twitter api stuff--actually I wouldn't necessarily mind paying for API access, if the Twitter integration were actually being used a lot. I think that would've been an interesting business model; don't worry about monetizing via ads, but encourage 3rd party clients (which wouldn't display the ads anyway) and charge for api access. However evidently they don't even allow 3rd-party clients like that anymore, so it's possible that Yakread would get banned if it ever grew large enough to get noticed. But also, I'm very much not a fan of you-know-who and don't really want to contribute anything to him financially. I'm mostly content to watch it burn 🙂