Reading App with history, reminders and revision

Inspiration

This App idea is to solve a personal pain point for myself. I read so many things on the web everyday. Articles about distributed systems, programming languages, career growth and many more. Some of these are from other engineers blogs, company tech blogs, social media posts etc.

I am a human and forget things. I want to read some of these blogs again because they are great at explaining that thing.

How do I do that?

• I tried bookmarks. Painful. No history, reminders etc.
• I tried using OneNote. It is painful to copy links to a notebook. There is no way to check what I read last week.
• I tried Notion templates with web clipper. Somewhat better still does not solve my usecase as it is a generalist tool.
• Tried few other SAAS apps. Most of them are centered around Note taking and did not work for me.

So, I have thought of building this productivity App myself.

Also, read here about why I am publishing an Idea.

Problem Statement

1. Users read lot of things on the internet every day and forget. There is no way to track what are you reading, apart from browser history.
2. Users read technical papers and move on halfway because of lack of time. There is no way to help them complete the reading and derive value from spent time.
3. Users need to re-read deep technical blogs to completely grasp and retain it but there is no easy way to do that.
4. Users don't know what they have read last day, last week or last month. There is no way to track reading habits. Many reading apps are centered around books and not internet links.
5. There is no way to query your reading history other than manual scrolling.

Target Customers

The key user would be a software engineer like me who wants to track his reading and revise often to retain things.

Students and Researchers can also use it for their own requirements.

Problem Proof

We are using many different tools to track what we have read and found important and worth revisiting.

1. Bookmarks in browser
2. Note taking Apps like OneNote and Notion, Evernote
3. Chrome Reading List. The problem is important that why we have something like this in a browser.
4. Github readme files
5. Social media bookmarks

Product\App Details

There are two components to this product. A web\mobile App and a agent or extension.

Extension

• Identify on page load, if the URL is matching user's interest areas and user has read some portion of it. Is it worth saving?
• Send the link and timestamp to a web API or store it locally.

Web\Mobile App

• This is the key differentiator
• Shows a feed of all links and papers read by user.
• Filter by time, topic, complexity etc.
• Automatic classification of links
• Normal Search and semantic searches
• Derive meaningful reading patterns from the data
• Schedule reminders for revision
• Add additional metadata
• Create playlist of links
• Share playlists with other people (Viral loop?)

How to make money?

• Subscription model can fit well here. Maybe a 10\15$ monthly sub with some fremium.
• The initial free duration can help user see the value from the product.

Distribution Channels

1. LinkedIn seems like the best distribution channels.
2. Dev blogs like dev.to, substack etc.