The Sample publisher report (14 Mar)

This week we made a newsletter directory to help people do cross-promotions and sponsorships. It’s an experiment based on my experience using various existing directories. I’ve wanted to make a new-and-improved directory for a while but hadn’t done it because I didn’t want it to be a distraction. Last week I figured out the simplest possible version of my ideas, and it doesn’t even involve any custom code (just Airtable mostly), so here we are. Join here, and see the first link for details.

Speaking of which—I started thinking about doing a directory again because someone with a product for listening to audio versions of newsletters wanted to participate in the cross-promotion program. Of course The Sample is only good at promoting newsletters, but I thought it'd be nice if there there was a way to help out with this kind of thing. Hence the directory. In the mean time, see this post if you'd like to take a look at his product and give some feedback.

Anyway—besides the directory, we also added “on-demand” recommendations and “re-recommendations.” We pick newsletters to show you on the fly while you use the web app, and we now will sometimes show you the same newsletter up to three times (but with a different issue each time).

I also posted the following in the Discord server a few days ago:

feature idea: forward emails to readitlater@thesample.ai to bookmark them, and then we'll mix in your bookmarks with your regular newsletter recommendations

so for email workflow you can forward stuff that looks interesting and then archive it, so inbox stays clean and you actually end up reading the stuff you bookmark

?

My gut is starting to say that we should expand The Sample to be a (very simple) read-it-later service. Discovering new content sources/newsletters is good—but I worry that having a thing that only does discovery is a bit like eating a meal that consists only of cake. You need a main course, and I think reading the stuff you’ve already discovered might be that main course. I think handling the read-it-later use case and mixing discovery into that might increase retention a lot and would perhaps be exactly what we need to get the business growing steadily. (We are still doing Facebook ads—but performance has flagged a bit recently, and it’s not clear if we’ll be able to rely solely on those for growth without making significant product changes.)

We already have a nice setup for showing you one newsletter after another and collecting your feedback on each one, so for read-it-later, we’d just start mixing in stuff you bookmark with your newsletter recommendations. In addition to the email forwarding thing I quoted above, I’d probably import your bookmarks periodically from Pocket or whatever other bookmarking services people request.

Do you use a bookmarking/read-it-later app? If so, are there any needs you have that it doesn’t quite solve? Do you actually read stuff you save? Read-it-later is a pain point for me, but I’d like to get some additional perspectives on it before diving in.

If we do this, we’d need to rework the landing page and figure out how to best describe The Sample. I’ve been musing about describing it as a personal assistant for your inbox. We keep track of the stuff you want to read so you can keep a clean inbox, and we suggest new things to subscribe to so your inbox doesn’t get stale.

—Jacob