@matthartman Great question! They are indeed using the app itself. For a lot of our influencers (and normal users), existing platforms are not providing the optimal experience for discovering interesting content and reaching a relevant audience. What we've done is create a more natural experience--read a story, have a thought, write it down, share it. Otherwise, it's more like: read a story, go to Twitter, copy and paste, try to remember your thought, write something down, go to Linkedin, copy and paste, and on and on. They use the app themselves because news consumption is personal and it's habitual--it's not like have a social media account which is handled by a PR person to create an online persona. On the community side, we are focused on curating content and commentary that is interesting for business people--be that tech, media, finance, fashion, etc. Existing platforms are so noisy, that it's extremely difficult to find relevant content and be heard, even when you have something interesting to say. And even then, the toxicity is overwhelming. We've designed our product so that the best commentary, on the most important stories, will always be surfaced to our front page every day--whether it comes from normal users or influencers. For our ProPickers, we convinced one, then two then the third came more easily. They really enjoyed the product and began to invite their peers. Most of our ProPickers are recommended by existing ones.

The Twenty Minute VC

Hey Ian, can you talk a bit about how this works? At first I thought it was scraping twitter but looks like the “pros” are using the app itself. Can you talk a bit about how you built the community?

7yr ago

Ian Myers

NewsPicks

Maker

Erin Holmes

NewsPicks article curation is democratized across major news publications. If you're one of those people who starts your day out reading the news, it is helpful to have it aggregated in one place. I often hear of breaking news on this app before I hear about it anywhere else.

Pros:

Expert commentary is good, app has a great user interface

Cons:

None

Max Lockie

Find me on NewsPicks @ Max Lockie

Great news curation, expert community, and helpful push alerts.

none so far

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