Brian Donohue – https://twitter.com/bthdonohue – is President of Instapaper – https://www.instapaper.com/ – and a Product Engineering Manager at Pinterest – https://www.pinterest.com/
You can find him on Twitter – https://twitter.com/bthdonohue
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon – https://twitter.com/craigcannon
***
Topics
00:00 – The history of Instapaper
8:00 – Free competitors enter the market
10:00 – How Brian joined Instapaper
14:15 – Transitioning from paid to freemium
19:00 – Pinterest’s acquisition of Instapaper
26:15 – Moving to California
28:45 – Working on Instapaper within Pinterest
32:00 – Spinning Instapaper out of Pinterest
42:15 – Jareau Wadé asks – What types of product integrations could Pinterest have done with Instapaper?
49:45 – Ryan Hoover asks – I’m curious how he and the team balance simplicity with new feature development/product expansion.
54:00 – Raymond Durk asks – I love the rapid reading mode but would also love a voice enabled mode where the Google Assistant or Siri reads it. Speaking of I’d use it on my Google Home to listen to news if that was a skill.
57:20 – Brian Kim asks – Any growth hacks that worked well?
59:45 – Gustaf Alströmer asks – How does it make time for focused time to catch up on everything he saves? What are his best productivity hacks related to this?
1:03:25 – Backpacking