Show HN: I built a tool to send you daily digest of your saved bookmarks

65 points by marcinem 6 years ago | 23 comments

Bookmarks which you wanted to read, but simply forgot...

It happened to me all the time. I bookmarked the articles to read later and simply forgot about them. Forever.

I built Mailist to help with that. Already 2350 users enjoy their "weekly digests" composed from their bookmarks. It makes me super happy!

So now, https://mailist.app Pro account allows you to send an email newsletter every day, built from your bookmarks.

Does it sound interesting? The free version (weekly email) is available for everyone!

Let me know what you think.

PS. Unlike other tools, we care about your privacy and don't suggest promo content based on your saved links.

sciencewolf 6 years ago |

I remember https://www.linkdrop.co/ tried to do this and the Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19960313) appears to be this exact idea. However, it looks like they shifted to using an extension as opposed to a bookmark. Any idea why?

Also, curious how many pro subscribers you currently have? I imagine it's pretty difficult to get people on board with a $4/mo tool for personal consumption, unless you market it as a "productivity" tool.

kirubakaran 6 years ago | |

As a data point, https://histre.com/ (Effortless Knowledge Base) that I'm bootstrapping, includes features around bookmarks - so it is in a way in the same space fwiw. Histre has a "solo plan" currently at $3/month. People who use it for "personal consumption", as you put it, sign up for that plan. When I talk to them, they say that at $3/month, they don't even have to think about it. You're definitely getting several multiples of that in value and it's a great way to support the startup be independent.

Otherwise all we'll have in the world is different flavors of VC funded adtech companies providing "free" services.

marcinem 6 years ago | |

We have 35 pro users right now. But yes, it’s been a tough journey to get them subscribe and most of them have either lifetime access or discounted price.

Still learning here, what price would you suggest?

brudgers 6 years ago | | |

Just to throw numbers around:

  4x engineers @ $10k/month
  50% overhead
  25% net revenue

Is $75k/month. At $4/month that’s about 18,000 paid users. So 4500 paid users/engineer. Without a free tier and without prepaid lifetime plans.

Twenty dollars a month gets users per engineer down to 1000. A hundred bucks a month gets it down to 200 users per month and then there’s time to develop features and such.

Again, I am just throwing numbers around to provide an example of one way of establishing price. The important thing is that prices close to zero dollars are hard to make work at modest scale because there are a lot of users and not very much money for operating and growing the business.

On the other hand, 1000 users at $4/month is not bad as passive income for a person. That’s a different kind of business model.

Good luck.

butz 6 years ago |

How about skipping email and displaying digest right in browser? It could be implemented as extension, and you could even take actions on read bookmarks, e.g. move to storage folder or delete.

marcinem 6 years ago | |

Each digest is also available in shareable web format. Here is an example: https://my.mailist.app/share/JHqkkGfFxc

I am working on a personal archive of these for a quick access.

kerrybright3000 6 years ago |

I use time filters in Bookmark OS for this. You can view only bookmarks created in the last week and it keeps folder intact. https://bookmarkos.com

newman314 6 years ago |

I would love a related tool.

Content search engine for my open tabs / bookmarked. Oftentimes, I bookmark or leave a tab open for something to read later but I can't find it later.

To be clear, it would index and search said URL.

kirubakaran 6 years ago | |

Please try my https://histre.com/ for this. My email is in my profile if you have any questions.

newman314 6 years ago | | |

Will try it out when I have some time... Thanks.

ashishb 6 years ago |

I recently build a similar one to read books - https://ten-pages-a-day.ashishb.net/

marcinem 6 years ago | |

Nice! Love the idea :)

raveenb 6 years ago |

this looks like a cool tool.

My problem was that i had collected a lot of such links and simply wasnt able to go thru all. So I had built this app that took all the links in the bookmark and summarized it.

You can check it out at https://www.makemysummary.com anyone is welcome to try it out, it summarizes youtube, podcasts and webpages

If your app has zapier integration then anyone can route their bookmarks via MakeMySummary and get them summarized

hackeratrandom 6 years ago |

@marcinem - FYI, you misspelled "through" as "thorugh" on this page https://www.mailist.app/pro-bookmark-manager.html ... really like this idea for an app :-)

marcinem 6 years ago | |

Oh, thanks! Will edit this ASAP!

d0m 6 years ago |

It's funny, I had this similar idea just last week. It's been hard for me to read books with a baby but I can afford to read emails here and there.

blaydator 6 years ago |

Very nice. I have built similar tool for Android and iOS to save notes (And webpages) by email so they don’t get lost in another note app. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boomerang.... https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/boomerang-email-myself/id11544...

fraXis 6 years ago | |

I just installed your app. Works great. Been looking for something like this for a long time now. So easy to share myself a link and have it automatically emailed to me. Great job!

blaydator 6 years ago | | |

I am pleased it suits your need :)

marcinem 6 years ago | |

Well done!

happppy 6 years ago |

I think its a typo in footer, 'GIve it a try,', 'I' in give is capital.

fock 6 years ago |

looks like wallabag to me