Instapaper Goes From Hobby To Startup

I hate to say it, but while historious might be pretty awesome, you have a lot of factors working against you.

First, there are things that already do this, and they work well enough. My browser address bar (FF3) finds 95% of stuff that I'm looking for. The other 5% I can open up my history and search. And, if that fails, I can retrace my steps somehow (re-searching Google, etc). I don't find it to be a big deal.

Second, Historious has a pretty large barrier-to-entry, and the pain-point may not be strong enough to overcome that. By barrier to entry, I'm referring to the effect of users finding it very difficult to switch the way they do things. I'm sure this is well documented, and there's a name for it, but if a user has their own way of doing things it will take additional value over just the new process being better, because there is a cost to the actual switching itself. By routinizing a process, it actually feels easier (even though it may be much more difficult than other methods). Since finding things you've previously browsed probably happens a lot, people probably have their own way of dealing with this. I'll just search again, or look through my browser history.

Third, it makes me think. I don't want to constantly evaluate whether or not I should historify a site; which is necessary since it'd be ridiculous to historify every site I come across.

It's hard to gain a fresh perspective on something you've worked so much on. Believe me, I know. I've been working on an the most incredible bookmarklet (guaranteed). I use it all the time, and I love it. But I've been routinized, and that's one of hugest problems. Even though it solves some pretty annoying problems and is awesome, I've found that people who try it out will not connect the fact that it solves problem XYZ, and they have problem XYZ, so they should use it. If they already have a solution to XYZ, that comes up to the top of their mind's list of how to solve the problem.

This is because you've used this thing thousands of times.

Prospective users, however, will weight the cost of learning/remembering a new thing, and changing the way they browse, versus the benefit of "now it's slightly easier to recall things that I've browsed before."

Imagine you saw some crazy weird looking mouse at the store. If you bought it, it'd feel weird at first, but it's pretty much guaranteed to be an awesomer mouse. However, your current mouse works fine. Would you buy this new mouse?

Probably not. It's easier to not switch, even if it would be beneficial to do so.

In terms of improving your conversation rate: If you are requiring people to create an account to try historious, you should immediately get rid of that. Let them try it with as low barrier to entry as possible, and hopefully get them hooked.

The thing that has always made me hesitant to use Instapaper and services like it (in particular the ability to read stuff on an e-ink reader later) is for me a major part of the value of most of what I read, is the comments on HN. When you move the content to a reader device, you lose that. Has anyone though of a solution to this other than read the article and then hop on HN and try to find it?

I don't think you can use Instapaper as a model, unless you can be Marco.

His Internet fame originally came about because of his status as the (late) lead developer on Tumblr. Marco frequently writes insightful posts on Apple products that are linked by John Gruber of Daringfireball, who reads his blog attentively. This means his blog posts show up on HN and echo across the entire Apple-focused blogosphere. Apple bloggers are a great audience to have, because they are used to promoting paid products. So Marco has a huge blog readership, and his frequent mentions of his experience with Instapaper in his writing create a huge awareness of the product.

You could always put the comments page on Instapaper instead.