[tjansen]

Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon.

I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first step is to reach the Google Reader feature set minus social features.

[SyneRyder]

I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.

API access is worth chasing. There was something I wanted to do with Feedly (I've already forgotten what it was) but once I saw their APIs were hidden behind some enterprise level plan, that was the end of that. If we're in a world where everyone has a personal AI agent, giving their agent an API key to their RSS sync account... that might have some interest.

Feedly seems hostile to third-party client access (ie mobile & desktop apps), so being friendlier towards RSS clients could be of interest.

Personalized AI feed is a good idea but you don't have all the personalized year of context that my Claude does. My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.

And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS. But that's me.

[tjansen]

> I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.

Yes, enterprise is certainly where the money is (Feedly's plans start at $1600/month...), but as a solo dev working on a side-project, that's not an accessible market for me anyway. So I try to create a service that's simple and cheap.

> My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.

The idea would be basically: the feed reader know the user's interests because of the subscriptions, and knows the last time the user logged in. So it can filter what happened since then; it can also order the posts by relevance, allowing the user to catch up. And in a second step, an agent could even write the posts dynamically, summarizing information gathered from the user's feed, possibly even adjusted to the user's level of knowledge and offering background info where needed.

> And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS.

There are some feeds that are more like a mixture of text and podcast. I usually read only the text, but sometimes it catches my interest and I want to listen to one or two posts. That's when I start hating the lack of podcast support in Feedly.

[hagbard_c]

I'm using (self-hosted) Nextcloud News, what would your... service? Tool? Product? ... offer beyond what NN does? It is quite simple as well, offers an uncluttered interface, keeps my subscriptions as private as RSS subscriptions can be. I suspect you're targeting a different market from the one catered by self-hosted services like Nextcloud?

[tjansen]

I am not familiar with Nextcloud News. In the first version, it probably won't offer much for you, besides having a catalog of feeds, the ability to search them, and subscribe with one click, which is usually not offered by non-cloud RSS readers.

For people who do not want to use self-hosted services (which generally includes me), it offers simplicity. Open the page, choose Google as auth provider, confirm, and you will get a friendly start page. Click on 'follow' on one of the feeds, and you can start reading immediately. The UI is more like Facebook or X, so basically, you just need to scroll. Either in a feed of your choice, or all your feeds. It's designed to work well on small mobile screens, tablets, and desktops, with great keyboard support on the latter. Larger screens use two or three columns.

[theptip]

Tough market. What’s your differentiator over Readwise? They are crushing it on the “power user feed reader”.

Best of luck though, I think this is a very promising space. (But my bet is you can do all the interesting stuff in vibe-coded thin UI + OSS pipeline.)

[tjansen]

> What’s your differentiator over Readwise?

Simplicity. I can get you reading your first feed in under a minute. Also, I am not really thinking about monetization right now, but I am building a feed reader I want to use. I wouldn't want to spend $13 a month for it.

> thin UI + OSS pipeline

No, the UI isn't that thin. I am optimizing it to minimize my costs for operating it. Everything I can do inside the client is done inside the client. Interactions with the server are mostly limited to polling every 2 minutes for feed updates, and sending read markers after 3 seconds of inactivity. Feed data is stored on CDN, compressed.