Smashing: Goodreads Founder’s Reading Curation App Shuts Down – What This Means for Book Lovers
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, building an app that effectively aggregates news, articles, and social media content has proven to be quite challenging. Recently, Smashing, an innovative AI-driven application designed for curating news and posts, announced its closure due to difficulties in achieving sustainable growth.
Smashing App Shuts Down
According to an email sent to customers, the team behind Smashing stated, “We simply didn’t grow fast enough to keep going. We weren’t able to scale it into a sustainable product.” This decision marks the end of a platform that had great potential but struggled to maintain momentum.
Background of Smashing
Founded by Otis Chandler, the co-founder of Goodreads, Smashing was launched in June with the ambitious goal of utilizing AI and community input to curate a variety of content, including:
- News articles
- Blog posts
- Podcasts
- Social media posts
Users had the ability to follow their interests, submit content, and vote on the relevance of suggested posts. The app also offered AI-generated summaries and a chatbot for answering user queries.
Funding and Team
At the time of its closure, Smashing employed a team of seven dedicated individuals. The startup had successfully raised $3.4 million in funding from a variety of investors including:
- True Ventures
- Blockchange
- Offline Ventures
- Advancit Capital
- Power of N Ventures
- Several angel investors
Alternatives to Smashing
Despite the shutdown of Smashing, the market for AI-powered news aggregation continues to grow. Several promising alternatives are available, including:
These alternatives aim to solve the same challenges that Smashing faced in the competitive app landscape.
Recent Trends in News Apps
The closure of Smashing is reminiscent of the fate of Artifact, an AI-powered news app launched by the co-founders of Instagram, which was shut down last year and later sold to Yahoo. This trend highlights the difficulties faced by new entrants in the news aggregation space.
In conclusion, while Smashing may no longer be operational, the demand for effective news aggregation solutions remains strong. With various startups innovating in this space, users can still find platforms that cater to their content consumption needs.
