THE THING WE BUILT:

The Reading Room

You’ve probably seen this graphic going around about HubSpot blog SEO being dead. It’s not pretty.

It’s also part of a larger trend. Google Reader has been dead for a long time. Lots of think pieces about the death of blogs in general.

It’s driven by a few things (at least). Social media doesn’t like to send people off platform, and doesn’t tend to reward long-form content. Organic search is likely decreasing at least in part because people are going to LLMs first to get their answers.

Publishers of the written word have figured out they still have one channel that makes sense. Our inbox. Newsletters are the new blogs.

But this presents a problem. That thoughtful essay about the economics of a post-AI world are jumbled up with emails from princes who urgently need to send you money if you’d just give them your bank account information.

So… we built a thing.

How it works:

This is a simple tool that lets you forward those nice newsletters somewhere else to read later in peace.

• We give you a special email address. You can forward newsletters you want to read here.

• Your personal reading room. Everything is organized by author, waiting for you when you’re ready to focus.

• Read in peace. No notifications, no pressure to join other newsletters, no ads, no upsells. Just the content you want to read in a peaceful little browser window.

  
  

We also made a Chrome Extension to make it easier to add things to your reading room.

The reason everyone lamented the death of RSS readers was (in my opinion) the single purpose nature of it, the lack of distractions. It did one thing really, really well.

Maybe we can have that again?

Things we learned from the thing:

1. How do we email? We wanted to build something around email, and in the process, we tested a lot of different services (and revisited many). Postmark stood out—it made the entire system possible and was incredibly easy to work with.

2. Supabase was the right call. Our last app didn’t need a database, but this one did. Supabase handled it seamlessly, making data management straightforward. That hasn’t always been true!

3. Chrome extensions still have their place. We found ourselves wanting this right in our email client. So we thought... it’s been a while since we built a Chrome extension—why not? It came together faster than we expected.

4. A small, smart share feature. Since we were already handling email, we added a subtle sharing feature—if you CC someone when forwarding, they’ll get a suggestion and know it came from you. No noise, just a simple way to share good reads.

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