Simple Content Discovery Platform
Hi all Indie Hackers 👋
TL;DR
Do you think there is a market for a personalized newsletter/content discovery platform where you would connect sources like Youtube channels, RSS feeds, podcast feeds, social platform profiles and mentions, that would be summarised hourly, daily or weekly and sent to you by email and available in an app reader dashboard?
Recently I released a website to watch skate videos called ripn.tv. It's basically a curated aggregator and video player for skate videos that are already on YouTube.
The main feature is something I call Weeklies.
A Weekly is a curated playlist from all skate videos that has been released on Youtube in the prior week.
In the beginning, I manually started following all channels I could find on youtube that releases videos. Then I would go check youtube all the time for notifications on each channel and keep a list of video URLs in notes for the whole week.
This led to a lot of stress of always being behind and afraid I'd miss something.
So I started automating everything, and in the process, I developed a tool that will go scan youtube for all videos on specified channels and generate me a summary with video metadata and embedded players for each, and with some frontend magic, I can filter and order on different parameters.
This has freed me so much time, and Monday is now my favorite day. With a click, I now get a week of skate videos from over 80 channels on youtube.
This tool is so great to me, and I couldn't run ripn.tv without it.
As I'm currently extending this to more things like fetching posts on social platforms, mentions, hashtags, RSS feeds and podcasts I've begun to wonder if this should be a SaaS product for others to use as well?
I've looked at "similar" SaaS tools out there, and they take a very different approach to content discovery, they are more like search engines, and they split up summaries per search term.
So my question is,
Would a SaaS tool where you can create summaries sent by email and available in an app reader dashboard hourly, daily and weekly from specified sources like:
- All videos from x,y,z youtube, channel since the last summary.
- All tweets from brand x,y,z, since the last summary.
- All new articles from website x,y,z, since the last summary.
- All new podcast episodes from x,y,z, since the last summary.
- And so on...
You could call it a personalized newsletter/aggregator.
I'm thinking that it primarily would be interesting for content writers and marketers, and people who do curation for newsletters and websites. And secondary for people who would just like to turn off their notifications and get a summary sent to their mail at a time that fit's their schedule.
Let me know what you think :)
Do you know of any similar products?
Would you like me to build it?
Do you think it would have any value to you or others?
Please get in contact with me if you have more questions, ideas or inputs :)
All the best,
Just to follow up on this article years later :)
It turned out that someone else had the same idea, and while I was tinkering and conceptualizing this, something similar was being built at the same time with this product https://mailbrew.com/
I guess it just goes for show, that ideas rarely lives in solitude, and multiple people get the same ideas at the same time because we're living in the same world :)
Hi @Emolr,
since this post was posted a year ago, i hope you will see my answer nevertheless.
Do you experience content discovering still being an unsolved problem? I've been flooded with all the content coming up day by day.
It's very hard for me to pick the quality content out of that unsorted mass of content.
Do you have some advices for that problem?
Hi Florian,
Just saw your message and thought I'd answer :)
Well, I think there are plenty of good tools to discover a mass of content from specified topics like Feedly mentioned in my own comment.
The trick is for sure to separate the good from time wasting content. For this I don't have any clear answers as this really depends. Like maybe it's a specific author you found writing quality content, or maybe you need the trending content (like views and likes in a trending curve).
What I was looking at was more focused on not missing anything from specific authors and channels. Eg. If you are writing a news blog on a topic or a youtube channel with news and you want to make sure you are out quickly and without missing a thing.
This will of course require a good design solution where you'd collect as much data, get the things in a dashboard and have very precise filtering options to help you quickly glance across it all.
And I think feedly is the closest to currently provide this.
I hope you find some good tools and share it!
Hey Emolr,
thank you very much for answering this even older post! :)
I've heard of Feedly a while ago and I am currently trying it out. As the free version was just like an aggregator of all sources and one wasn't able to filter out some irrelevant stuff. I then quickly decided to try out the AI research Assistant Leo which comes with the Pro/Business version of Feedly. Do you have any experience with 'it'? Do you think 'it' filters out the right noise?
This comment was deleted 5 years ago
I kept researching this concept, and it turned out that feedly has updated a ton since i used it. And I won't start competing with feedly :)