Ben Springwater and Robert Mackenzie met during their time at Nextdoor.

Tiny Bookstore aimed to improve the visibility of indie authors that he believed deserved a larger audience. While the project never materialized, he embodied much of its ethos in Matter.

Matter as an idea was born out of casual conversations at Nextdoor between Ben and Rob. Both quickly bonded over their love for reading, being power Pocket users, and their mutual frustration about how basic our current reading stack is.

One plausible hypothesis why the previous generation of either content consumption or discovery apps didn't have an enduring success is that they were centered around RSS feeds.

First of all, they emphasize the where, not the who.

email rose as a new home for content. But, email is not a suitable alternative for many reasons. It was not built for consuming long-form content and offers no mechanics for discovering or retaining information.

Matter was created to address two broad questions

How we read ?

What we read?

Matter built a network of readers who could curate content and provide social context around their recommendation.

The validation test they ran was a roundup newsletter curating content recommendations from public thinkers on Twitter.

99.99% of the best stuff on the internet was not written recently

What you read is inconsequential at the moment but has a massive impact on aggregate.

Trust recommendations are crucial to improving our content filters and information diets.

People save more content than they can consume.

Users where the highly-curated recommendations feed- the very first feature they developed -would resonate the most.

Ben and Rob looked for users who are

Power readers

Actively engaged in the world of ideas

Online and community-oriented

Have roughly, as a group, an affinity towards a set of ideas, themes, interests

They found their early adaptors on three large online communities and worked with the leaders of these communities to introduce the product to their respective members. Anyone who was not a member of these online communities was not welcome!

The Interintellect run by Anna Gat

Progress Studies run by Jason Crawford

The Long Now Foundation.

From the community leaders' point of view, Matter was a benefit they could offer their members. The benefit is having early access to valuable content and the opportunity to play a formative role in the design of the product and recommendations engine.

Curating a feed of people (v.s. websites): In Matter, you follow authors across the web and not the publication.

The social graph of highlights: You can follow and discover what people you admire find interesting.

Measuring quality is hard. Insights, information density, and the author can somewhat be proxies to a high-quality piece.

success for Matter discovery is surfacing insightful content I wouldn't have otherwise discovered- preferably from obscure sources- that is tangential to my core interests and challenges my world views.