Goodreads co-founder Otis Chandler is back to build the next big app community, except this time the focus isn't on books, but on content you can find online, including news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, and more. Smashing, an AI- and community-powered content recommendation app currently released in invite-only beta, aims to connect users with their interests by surfacing the internet's hidden gems.
The launch of the service comes at a time when many news consumers are still mourning the loss of Artifact, the AI news reader from an Instagram co-founder that was recently sold to TechCrunch parent company Yahoo.
At the same time, the media ecosystem is becoming more fragmented than ever, with journalists launching their own newsletters and Substacks. Twitter, once a hotspot for breaking news, has morphed into a more right-leaning app called “X,” whose presence has spawned a host of new competitors. Additionally, Google and Meta changes have caused a huge drop in traffic to online publishers, leading to massive media layoffs. And when it comes to AI, it seems like things could get even worse as apps and Google start offering AI summaries of news, potentially causing publishers to lose even more clicks.
Chandler believes Smashing can address many of these issues by not only surfacing articles and posts that are worth people's time, but also encouraging users to visit publishers' sites to read more.
“We named Goodreads 'Goodreads' instead of 'Goodbooks' because we knew we wanted to add articles one day,” Chandler said. Eventually, “books” became a big enough category to sustain the app, and it was sold to Amazon in 2013. Chandler stayed on there until five years ago.
Image credit: Smashing
Smashing's CEO says he's always had a desire to “find other content on the web, not just articles” — podcasts, blogs, news articles, tweets, social media posts, YouTube videos, “anything that's interesting content,” he says.
Image credit: Smashing
But what really inspired Chandler to start developing Smashing was an experience he had while on sabbatical after leaving Amazon: After a month or two off, Chandler decided to try his hand at a half Ironman triathlon.
“That started me on a journey of, 'Oh, I need to learn about training and cycling and how to stay in shape and not tire my legs, how to eat right for nutrition, and therefore how to cook better, because I didn't know how to cook before,'” he said. But using traditional search engines, it was hard to find the right content. “You can just Google 'how to train for a half Ironman triathlon' or 'how to eat healthy,' and you get a ton of content, but it's not really the content you're looking for. There are a ton of pages that are SEO-optimized and chock-full of ads.”
To find the content he was looking for, Chandler tried news aggregators like Apple News, Google News, Reddit, Twitter, social media and other small and medium-sized apps.
“I tried everything I could find and was really unhappy with the answers I was getting. I just couldn't find anything that gave me good, interesting, accurate content. That's what led to the Smashing paper,” Chandler said.
He then teamed up with former colleague and now Smashing co-founder Greg Veen in 2022. Veen's tech background includes founding MeasureMap, which was sold to Google, and TypeKit, which was sold to Adobe.
Our user research found that people typically had five or six main interests they followed online, including some work-related and some personal interests. They followed a variety of sources, from niche newsletters to social media influencers to publications. But they reported feeling overwhelmed.
Image credit: Smashing
Built last year after raising a seed round, Smashing's iOS app lets users track their interests in a way that's reminiscent of another AI news app, Artifact, but with a broader reach. Users can post their own content, or give their opinions for or against the app's AI-driven recommendations of content shared by others or aggregated from the web. But you can't just post news; you can post anything with a URL.
Like the Web 2.0-era news aggregator Digg, users can vote for content they find interesting and noteworthy, but they can only earn 30 votes a day and can spend all of their votes on one great article or spread them out among more links, depending on their preference.
Like Artifact, users can like, save, and comment on articles, helping surface more of the best content.
Smashing's AI technology provides news summaries, key excerpts and interesting quotes. The AI also helps identify topics and threads that interest individual users, but the real “magic” is creating a community that works in tandem with the AI, Chandler said.
Image credit: Smashing
But despite its use of AI, Chandler argues that Smashing should increase traffic to online publishers, not decrease it. “We designed Smashing to help curate and drive people to interesting long-form content. We're not trying to be an intensive replacement for reading content — I know a lot of people are playing with that model,” Chandler says. “But having done Goodreads, I'm a big believer in long-form, interesting content. There's a lot of talk about the internet becoming more and more full of junk, but I think the internet is becoming more and more full of gems to be unearthed.”
Smashing will begin an invite-only private beta on Tuesday.
The startup was co-founded by Mike Mraz (Condé Nast, Cool Hunting, Hearst) and Dan Barrett (software architect with a JD), and has raised $3.4 million in seed funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, James Currier (NFX), Stan Chudnovsky (Facebook), Chad Byers (Susa Ventures), Gil Elbaz (Factual, Adsense), Abe Burns (Slow Rush Ventures), Adam Jackson (Braintrust), Brian Goldberg (Bustle) and Ben Rattray (Change.org).