#101 - Brian Donohue

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast.
Today's episode is with Brian Donohue, Brian's president of Instapaper and a product engineering manager at Pinterest. You can find him on Twitter at bthdonohue.
All right, here we go. Hi, Brian. So Instapaper has a very curious lineage in history. Could you just explain that?

**Brian Donohue** (0:25)
Sure.
Sure, so Instapaper was started by a single guy named Marco Arment and he built the entire product and service and operated it from 2008 to 2013 Marco, beside Instapaper, was previously known for being the CTO of Tumblr. And Instapaper was kind of his side project that he worked on while he was at Tumblr. So my impression was he would work nights and weekends. He eventually launched this thing. It had quite a bit of fanfare early on, even though it was just a bookmarking service at the time.

**Craig Cannon** (0:59)
Yeah, but it was early days App Store.

**Brian Donohue** (1:01)
So this is even pre-App Store. So we're talking January 2008
Marco launches this bookmarking service called Instapaper. And essentially just a website and a bookmarklet. So you could save articles using the bookmarklet. And all it was was a website. Coming into like March or April 2008, he launched the reading mode for Instapaper using its text parser. So the text parser would take an article from a website, extract just the text and the images, and provide just the reading view and experience. So if you use Instapaper, you're pretty familiar with this. It's one of the core value propositions. And then in August 2008, he launched, with basically the App Store launch, he launched Instapaper for iOS, which leveraged the bookmarking service and the text parser to kind of create Instapaper experience that kind of we're familiar with today. And I think it was the first time where you had this combination of bookmarking experience, this text parser that would extract the important parts of articles, and then also the mobile application where it was kind of all the articles were saved offline and kind of available to you wherever you were.
I think in the early days of Instapaper in that 2008 App Store world, Instapaper solved three key pain points, consumer pain points. The first one was, if you remember early iPhone days, their early mobile networks were really slow, and it was like impossible to load a website. So you'd be waiting forever, things would come in pretty progressively, and then when it did load, it was impossible to read the content because there was no such thing as the mobile web.
And so you'd pinch the zoom and try to zoom in on this column, and then you'd be panning around and it was this really weird experience. I think the third thing was that the iPhone was kind of primed to be a reading device because it was always with you, but for a lot of reasons, it was not really a good reading device because there were no good reading applications, the screen wasn't really good. And so Instapaper comes along and it lets you save articles.
The articles are perfectly formatted. You can sync the articles while you're on Wi-Fi, and then access them from anywhere. And so I think it's solved. And then also like back in the App Store days in 2008, there were not a lot of really useful mobile applications, I don't think. There were like a lot of fart apps and things like this. And so I think at the time it came as pretty revolutionary and solved a lot of pain points. And as such, kind of had a pretty huge addressable market, which is almost anyone with an iPhone, right?
And as the iPhone user base grew, Instapaper kind of grew alongside it.
Now, you fast forward to 2018, most of those things are no longer problems. You have LTE networks that are super fast. The mobile web has its problems and there's various efforts to try to solve them, like accelerated mobile pages from Google. But at the end of the day, you can still load a website and read it pretty easily. And then the third one is there's actually tons of reading applications now. And the iPhone is a main reading device for a lot of people, whether you use Kindle or Apple News or New York Times or Wall Street Journal, or you use some aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News or Twitter. It's fairly easy to read on your phone now.
And so I think the market has shifted from something that had kind of like a pretty wide appeal in the early days to something that's far more niche now. And basically the use case for Instapaper these days is you are kind of like a voracious media consumer. You source content from a lot of different places. That might be directly from publishers. It might be from news aggregators like Reddit, Hacker News, Techmeme. It may be from social like Twitter or Facebook. And you essentially need a place to stage all that content temporaries until the time that you have enough time to kind of read it in bulk and go through it in bulk. And I think the market size for that is fairly modest. And I think that's part of the reason that both pocketed and Instapaper wound up landing at larger companies back in 2016 and readability wound up shutting down because actually I think the market appeal for that product is fairly limited and it's not one that's like massively growing over time.