Samuel Clay is a grad student in the schools of design and of engineering at Harvard. He founded NewsBlur, a personal RSS news reader, and Turn Touch, beautiful control for the smart home.
Talk to him @samuelclay.
Samuel Clay is a grad student in the schools of design and of engineering at Harvard. He founded NewsBlur, a personal RSS news reader, and Turn Touch, beautiful control for the smart home.
Talk to him @samuelclay.
NewsBlur has and, for as far out as I can see, will be a side-project. It’s fun, but I can’t even begin to imagine the headaches I’d face if I had to support a living salary through NewsBlur. My goal is just to meet potential co-founders and to try to make a splash. And I’ve been meeting folks here in NYC who I would not have met otherwise. So it’s working quite well, so far. Fabulously well, in fact.
Raising money for something like this must be difficult and a huge crapshoot. There are a lot of fadish readers out there who have already sucked up most of the goodwill that the press is willing to give to this area, and even then, they have a design element that is extremely hard to compete with. Financial backers would much rather shut a site down than let it live a meager existence. They’re not out to support a site, they want a 10x return. Funding doesn’t make any sense for what I want.
Besides, now I can build fun features like social, the iPhone app, and river of news in peace. Who knows what markets I would have to chase if I had stakeholders. Enterprise! Aggregators! Ick.
I think any other business is a better business to be in, but who knows if my tune will change within the next 12 months, as I roll out bigger features.