Nivi · December 6th, 2009
“nicely done as always. i can count on one hand the number of daily emails worth signing up for.”
Startup News is two weeks old today. I want to share some stats and thoughts about the product.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Startup News is a daily digest of our tweets, with links to the best startup advice on the Web. You can subscribe via email or RSS. It looks like this:
Stats
300 folks have subscribed in two weeks. Almost half of them subscribe via email, the other half subscribe via RSS. Every time I mention Startup News on this blog, we get more subscribers.
In the past, we could never get more than 50 people to subscribe to an RSS feed of our tweets (that’s the flat part on the left side of the graph). Re-positioning the same content as a daily digest made the difference.
If you like the advice on this blog, you’ll like the advice in our tweets. But lots of people don’t use Twitter. And those who do don’t catch all our links. I’ve been searching for a way to get our tweets into your hands and I think this daily digest is a great solution.
Creating a daily digest of your own
If you’ve got interesting tweets, there’s demand for a daily digest. Put one together and tell your subscribers/followers about it. It’s easy to do with FeedBurner (to handle the email and RSS subscriptions) and Twitter Digest (to create a daily digest of your tweets).
Subscribe
If you haven’t checked out Startup News, try it for a week and see if you like it: subscribe via email or RSS.
If you want us to consider including one of your posts in Startup News, submit it to Hacker News — we read it every day. Or tweet it and include: “Tip @venturehacks”.
Topics Newsletter · Twitter
Is there a reason you send Startup News when there have been no twitter updates?
“No updates for this day. All your digestees must be sick of Twittering.”
Can this be suppressed ?
You’re probably seeing that as a post in your RSS feed. If you use Google Reader, it will automatically morph into the correct post in a couple hours or so.
Startup News is put together with twigs and glue. We’re at the mercy of Twitter Digest which is a little buggy it seems.
I think there’s a lesson here — we’re still dancing around the value of lowest-latency broadcasting of info vs. delivering it at the right granularity and with a frequency that we’d actually want to/be able to process. I don’t bother with Twitter yet because there just isn’t that much that I would want to follow in near-real-time. A daily or weekly digest with meaningful, brief teasers is a better fit for me — I can skim it in a few seconds, and I know whether I’m missing anything.