I'm shutting down The Sample

The following is an email I sent to The Sample subscribers in September 2025.

The time has come for me to shut down The Sample. I worked on it full-time from February 2021 to August 2022, but was never able to turn it into a real business. For a while it was able to make enough money to pay its own server costs, so I left it running. However, that changed toward the end of 2024. I've been operating The Sample at a loss since then.

I just finished a complete rewrite of Yakread, a somewhat similar app that I am continuing to develop on the side. I'm going to move The Sample's subscribers over to Yakread, and then I'll shut down The Sample. Yakread will send you a regular email with links to five recommended articles. If you like, you can also use Yakread to manage your newsletter/RSS subscriptions. It can be used as a read-it-later service similar to Pocket or Instapaper as well. If you don't want to be migrated over to Yakread, hit the unsubscribe link below within the next week.

Thank you for giving The Sample a try. Thanks to people like you, The Sample did have some promising initial traction. I'm grateful for the opportunities I had to get to know many of you. Good luck in your own endeavors. I still love email, independent publishing, and reading things on the internet. Maybe Yakread will have more success over time. Maybe down the road I'll try something new in this space.

Until then, have a good one!
Jacob O'Bryant

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I also want to specifically thank the folks at Recomendo who featured The Sample, free of charge, after I submitted a link on their website on a whim. That was about 5 months after I started working on The Sample, and I was about to move on. Their feature resulted in about 2,000 new signups over night. I was ecstatic, and it gave me enough momentum to keep working on The Sample for another year.

(It also taught me that no signup spike is large enough to make up for a product with low retention.)