Show HN: Alpha Feed – Using LLMs to curate AI news and end endless scrolling

[stephancill]

Hey everyone

Long time reader, first time poster here. I run a telegram channel where I post interesting things I come across related to machine learning every day. It takes a lot of effort to keep up and it's time consuming to filter through all the noise on social media, so that's why we set out to build Alpha Feed.

Our mission with Alpha Feed is to help users reclaim control over their time spent on social media and stay informed about their areas of interest in a focused, efficient way. Currently, we're focusing on AI, but we plan to expand our offering to more topics in the future.

Here's how Alpha Feed works:

Our system ingests content from a curated list of sources. Each piece of content is then scored using ChatGPT on metrics like relevance, novelty, impact, and reliability. With this information, we calculate a significance score, which enables us to surface only the most important pieces of news.

The end product is a concise newsletter with the most significant AI news, delivered straight to your inbox every day.

We're looking for feedback to learn how we can improve the user experience and build something that's useful to people wanting to keep up with fast moving topics.

You can sign up for a 7 day free trial which you can cancel at any time at https://alphafeed.xyz.

[jaggs]

Asking folk to hand over their credit card details with zero view of the product is highly ambitious and aspirational. Sadly it's probably not going to go too well. Even a simple screen grab video or some UI shots. Anything really. Ideally, no credit card until the free trial is over, but that's of course your call in terms of the numbers you're looking for. Good luck!

[stephancill]

Thanks for the honest feedback. Adding images to the landing page now and I think it would be a good idea to either separate the trial from Stripe or have some kind of limited offering for free.

[jaggs]

I suspect it will transform your adoption rate.

[stephancill]

We have implemented those changes if you'd like to try it out now. Would appreciate any further feedback!

[skilled]

Absolutely this.

[stephancill]

We have implemented those changes if you'd like to try it out now. Would appreciate any further feedback!

[jaggs]

Thanks, it looks much better. FWIW here's my subjective comments:

1. On-boarding is now much better (although I would have a sentence saying 'credit card not needed' somewhere along the process to encourage more uptake.

2. The addition of the screen grabs really helps with first impressions.

3. I'm afraid I don't find the layout or the content compelling enough. At any price. Sorry. I am comparing the value to a quick read of HN on any given day, and a) I can't scan the content fast enough to make it trivially easy to assimilate the news and b) the curated stories in no way match the compelling quality of HN - in my opinion.

4. The bottom line is 'why would I pay for this?'. I would gently suggest that you remove the subscription requirement right now, until you test the product quality and market fit. Set up a Discord, encourage feedback, send out a newsletter. Do whatever it needs to discover the value and market fit before you go any further.

Apologies if that is not what you wanted to hear, but I am just one opinion, so I could be talking a load of rubbish. As I said though, good luck with the project. I think there's definitely a germ of an idea there.

[stephancill]

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback.

I fully understand the argument for the value not being there yet, appreciate the honesty. There is work to do on the product and marketing side to increase the value delivered.

While making it free to gather feedback may be one sensible approach to take, for now at least I think charging users from the get go will give us a better indicator if the idea has legs. With that being said, we will explore your suggestions to see if there's a compromise to be made.

Hopefully we can win you over in the future!