High Potential Startup #15: Matter
Social Reading App
At time of publication: Series A | Total Funds raised ~7mn USD
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The internet has made information abundant and inexpensive and with the explosion of newsletters, there is abundant high quality content. But time is scarce and hence discovery, curation and personalization of content for a user is very important.
Many times, readers discover and decide what they want to read via social media. Readers often treat content shared by those they follow (for example on Twitter) as a proxy for high relevance. Social media sites are the major source and pathway for news.
Heavy users of Twitter will identify it as a great ‘serendipity’ content discovery machine but it is not designed for a fully immersive ‘social reading’ experience.
What will a great social reading experience look like? Imagine you follow entrepreneurs and VCs. You may want to:
read the content they read and liked
specifically zoom in on what were their takeaways from the article
check in at your leisure on the entire list of articles they read and share
curate articles you read for the community to discover
discover new interesting people to learn from
I believe Matter is building such a social reading platform and in my view has a lot of potential.
Matter at its core is a read-it-later-app like Pocket. Users can save articles (which they likely discover on Twitter or on other social apps) to read later. Users can read articles saved in their ‘queue’ and can highlight and take notes.
Users can also use an audio option to listen to these articles - really useful during commutes or when taking a walk or exercising.
In the age of Substack and the abundant quality Newsletters clogging your email inbox, Matter has a useful newsletter forwarding option - you can read all your newsletters (paid and free) on Matter.
All this makes for a great reading experience but what sets it apart from other reader apps is the ‘social’ aspect.
You can automatically follow Matter users who you follow on Twitter and can see their ‘activity’ - articles they write, articles they curate and their highlights and notes of articles. Below for example is my Matter ‘Inbox’ - content and activity from those I follow.
You can also ‘Discover’ curated content by Matter.
You can view all activity in the profile of an account and can read the ‘posted’ articles.
Others can also view the articles you post and your notes and highlights.
To quickly recap:
Matter provides a great reading experience, enables you to listen to articles and read all your newsletters in one place
Matter helps you to follow others’ reading activities - articles, notes and highlights
Pocket proved the market size potential - in 2018 it had 30mn registered users and billions of items in saved content. Matter can expand the market size with it's social approach. There will be strong network effects when star curators - those with high follower counts adopt the service which will bring in their followers and which in turn can bring in star curators to engage more with their audience.
But why will star curators take the effort to curate and share content? The best and highly engaging social networks are often status games. Matter Curators can show others they are obsessed and knowledgeable about a few topics and can build reputation. They can use Matter (alongside Twitter) to attract and engage with like-minded enthusiasts and obsessives.
Matter can build some status features to attract such star curators. For example, ‘Topic Influencer’ or ‘Topic Expert’ profile badges can be reserved for very active twitter content creators across topics. The ‘Discover’ tab, while today only features ‘Staff picks’ can be used to automate personalized content and can be a good distribution channel for both writers and curators.
There are some good valuable adjacent opportunities in the future.
Matter can have a ‘Journal’ feature for curators and writers to create and share notes with their followers frequently. There can be in-app tipping and subscription options for a creator/curator’s journal.
I believe Matter can also be a tool for continuous learning/reading. Once there is a good amount of content and articles curated on the app, there can be recommended ‘playlists’ of articles on the app for any topic. ‘Topic Influencers’ can add articles to the playlists. You can join ‘circles’ with your friends on relevant topics and compete to finish reading these playlists. You can see your friends’ progress on each playlist and also see their notes and highlights.
Another big opportunity in my opinion for the company is to be a monetization channel for news companies. Once there is a critical mass of users curating and discovering content, news companies can publish content on Matter and can monetize via micro-payments (per article) or tipping. A share of that tipping can go to the authors too. It is beneficial for the news companies - they get a credibility signal from star curators and personalized distribution to high intent readers leading to higher willingness to pay for their articles.
There can also be micro-subscriptions on Matter. For example, I can subscribe to just the politics section of New York Times, only the Markets section of Wall Street Journal or only the ‘Big Read’ section of Financial Times. Or I can subscribe to just a particular author from Forbes. A reader app like Matter can potentially enable these.
I believe Matter is a High Potential Startup. It has a great product and solution approach with social. Reading is a large market and Matter can be the home for discovering, curating and sharing great content. If they are able to attract star curators by building status games around knowledge and reading, the network effects can be very strong. There are some big adjacent opportunities, especially around news partnerships and distribution and along with it some strong monetization potential. The execution seems very strong as well with the team shipping more than 70 features with feedback from hundreds of users.