Food for thought, RSS is dead because it does not provide an incentive for the author. If you do not collect a mailing list/email list you do not have a known audience. If you dont have a known audience there is no way to measure growth and monetize it. You also would struggle to monitor popular articles over time without your own web real estate and analytics.
I am an RSS noob.. so maybe some of the above IS possible with RSS but consider the case of Medium.
Medium thought to incentivize content creators with cross-pollination of readers. Person A is an author and writes on medium because medium will promote content to its network of readers which is larger than the auidence that Person A has today. Person A inevitably also brings an audience with them albiet likely humble.
Medium MAY have failed for a few different reasons but I suspect retention being low for the larger majority of its visitors and also being unable to monetize in a meaningful way - I know this team is actively working on this and more and I am rooting for them!!
Substack is the new platform.. it focuses on the ease of capturing an audience and monetizing it. Today that is what most writers want for their efforts.
If you could somehow bake the ability to capture and monetize an audience into the RSS subs then perhaps we'd have something.. the reality is whatever RSS becomes it needs to provide a 10x better incentive to the content creator than the traditional means.. and if its just "another" channel.. likely it will be ignored for the more lucrative channels (ie build my own list.. or even sites like medium)
Its also worth mentioning Master Class .. but I dont know enough about them to make any real conjecture.. just that they seem to have cracked the nut on reputation and content creation. Who doesn't wanna learn how to shoot threes from Steph Curry?
I agree that rss as a protocol doesn’t have clear incentives but I don’t think the right people have given a serious attempt at building said incentives (via examples).
One such example could be building a rss based content publisher that gives money, spotify-style, to the authors via view on their own rss clients. The publisher would have to have a good value add for a premium, too, so it’s not just an easy business but I could absolutely see it work.
Essentially it’s the same as the Spotify model. A lot of good content is available in one spot, for free, with ads and premium features, and authors are getting money for it.
Of course, if you do this, nothing stops you from … not using rss, and instead using some proprietary crap. But using rss means most blogs will already have compatibility with you ready to go so it’s a huge get for lowering the barrier of entry to your service.
This is just a 5 minutes idea I’m sure there’s lots of issues with it but I’d put money on a model like this working, given good marketing and evangelism.
> But using rss means most blogs will already have compatibility with you ready to go so it’s a huge get for lowering the barrier of entry to your service.
This is a very important characteristic, making it possible for any new software to immediately deal with real content. Without paying a cent for that content.
Besides, the OP might conflate a thing or two, just like you point out. RSS is an open protocol, not a closed source app with guarded walls (there's not even a garden behind these walls anymore). RSS is so simple and open, one might even type their XML feed by hand.
I like that idea, it could be a worthwhile project - I doubt it's for me, but I also can see this work for the right team. Many good ideas in this thread now!
Your newbie is showing. Authentication on RSS feeds is a thing. Plenty of major publications offer RSS feeds to paying customers. Been a thing for many, many years.
I have built a remote team and 99% of the time the people I hire have not ever had a chance to own options in a company before so I always end up teaching them how they work.
The best way to negotiate options, in my opinion and experience, is to choose a number that you want your options to be worth in 4 years. For example "Hey CEO/Boss, if I work here and blow it out of the water for the next 4 year, I want the options you give me today to be worth at least X number" - This is a fair way to structure the conversation for a few reasons.
1. It sets up a timeline that is inline with your realistic amount of time at the business. If I tell you your options will be worth 100k for example after we IPO for 3B, that is not realistic or fair to you - it only justifies me shafting you today because I'm talking 10 years out and best case scenario.
2. You can walk through the future states (ie 1 to 2 funding rounds) and project the current value out based on expected increases of valuation at these subsequent fundraising rounds.
3. You set the number that you think your effort is with.
4. it is not talking about % points which people have weird biases around due to internet
Note: Assume 20% dolution at each fundraising round.
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My rec's: If its your first startup, tell your boss after 4 years you want your equity to be around 200-300k. This gives you a way to walk backwards to today and come up with a real number of options to hit it.
If its your second and you want a home run be in the 750k-1m range
If you're an exec/leader - aim higher and talk it over.
I understand that this is a compelling pitch for employees people who's first rodeo is with you; and consider this sort of discussion much more honest, than what people generally do.
On the other hand, this disregards liquidity: specifically, that vast majority of startups tend to die, vast majority of rest stagnate in funded but non-liquid form, liquidity events are boolean, and are happening generally years beyond fully vesting into stock options.
So, I feel, this too would lead to significant misunderstandings as people vest fully into their options, but can't get a penny for them.
I'm a founder of a SaaS company and can provide some insight that I am surprised is not really written clearly in this thread yet!
There's three types of innovation..
1. What you think people want
2. What they tell you they want
3. What they actually need
Most startups die because their product strategy is #1, the chances your view of the world is going to be adopted by people with many different circumstances is very low. The few think, lets go talk to people, but then die due to misdirection.. customers aren't PM's, they dont know how to solve problems but they know what their problems are.
so you must figure out what do people actually need..
You have two ways (well technically 3) to validate your idea
1. Quantitative
2. Qualitative
3. Resegment an existing market (questionable if you can skip traditional validation but your chances are better here than 1 or 2 above)
If you have funding, you can do quantitative. Build stuff and get it in front of your audience with paid acquisition/marketing.
#2 is the best if you want to be a scientist about things. Learn Jobs to be Done, start conducting interviews, find the problem folks have.. figure out if its a priority and a pattern.. there's lots of good JTBD literature out there, read it all.
#3 - segment an existing category. Take form building for example, you can build a form builder with limited features for a niche audience.. higher ed? (Qualtrics anyone?)
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Hopefully this just scratched the tip of the iceberg for you and gives you some direction!
Just to clarify, qualitative research is less costly per dollar but does cost time. Check out the book "Nail it then scale it".
There's also #4 which is "What I definitely actually need". Tools that you build for other people have a market size of [0, everyone). Tools you build to scratch an itch and actually use have a market size of [1, everyone). That may not seem like a big difference but the scale is exponential, there's as much space between [0, 1) as there is between [1, Infinity).
The next step, and one where people frequently fail, is to introspect and to ask why is it I find PMF with my tool, to what degree are those reasons personal vs universal and what are the minimal tweaks I need to make to expand the adoption of the tool by the next exponential factor? A trivial example would be like, a tool that you build for yourself doesn't need to have authentication but a public tool does. Various things that you hardcoded in because you built a tool that fit you like a glove instead need configurators and other things to fit other people as well.
The most common form of failure with this approach is that people who build their own tools are very high variance from the population so you're likely to build something too niche or too obscure to reach sustainability but that's in many ways a better problem to have than a tool with zero adoption.
I am an RSS noob.. so maybe some of the above IS possible with RSS but consider the case of Medium.
Medium thought to incentivize content creators with cross-pollination of readers. Person A is an author and writes on medium because medium will promote content to its network of readers which is larger than the auidence that Person A has today. Person A inevitably also brings an audience with them albiet likely humble.
Medium MAY have failed for a few different reasons but I suspect retention being low for the larger majority of its visitors and also being unable to monetize in a meaningful way - I know this team is actively working on this and more and I am rooting for them!!
Substack is the new platform.. it focuses on the ease of capturing an audience and monetizing it. Today that is what most writers want for their efforts.
If you could somehow bake the ability to capture and monetize an audience into the RSS subs then perhaps we'd have something.. the reality is whatever RSS becomes it needs to provide a 10x better incentive to the content creator than the traditional means.. and if its just "another" channel.. likely it will be ignored for the more lucrative channels (ie build my own list.. or even sites like medium)
Its also worth mentioning Master Class .. but I dont know enough about them to make any real conjecture.. just that they seem to have cracked the nut on reputation and content creation. Who doesn't wanna learn how to shoot threes from Steph Curry?