Personalized long-form essay recommender
Keep surfacing the long essays you actually want to read, not another feed
- Problem
- After finishing all of Paul Graham's essays, readers struggle to consistently find long-form writing of the same quality. News and books have mature discovery channels, but high-quality personal blogs and commentary are scattered, and existing feeds favor short, fast content.
- Solution
- A tiny subscription-style recommender: users add favorite author sites or seed blogs, the system crawls article metadata and recommends new pieces by topic and style similarity, delivered via email or RSS digest with read/save state.
- Users
- Deep readers of long-form blogs and essays, indie developers, writers
- MVP
- Add seed sites and auto-crawl article lists; similarity-based recommendations from titles/summaries; a weekly curated email; read and save markers; a minimal admin view
- Revenue
- Free with three seed sites; paid tier for unlimited sources, finer topic filters, and shared lists
- Why now
- LLMs make topic and style similarity cheap to compute, while feed platforms keep tilting toward short content, leaving long-form readers underserved