RSS isn't ever going to be a big deal. If you are thinking in terms of market size it's never going to be really big. Facebook, and Google+ have both taken the subscription model in a direction that is more consumer friendly.
If you accept that premise, you are building a product for informed, longish-term computer users, and you are treating them like they are beginners. If my intrest was piqued by RSS I probably already use an RSS reader, and have a bunch of feeds I want to use.
You are missing the ability for me to organize my feeds into folders. I have a lot of feeds, and I need folders to triage my reading into a sliding scale from important to least important.
After all of this keep it up, because I am, and I think many others are, willing to pay for an app that does RSS reading well.
Fair point. But if this supported adding and managing feeds of my choice I would certainly give it a try. I'm guessing that this is a test of their reader and hence an MVP.
P.S I currently use Google Reader and am looking for alternatives.
Also open-source (http://github.com/samuelclay), actively developed, and social features coming soon (within the next 2 months). And of course, a history of shipping.
I agree, but it's still missing folders. Oh, and this is something I forgot in my first point, where is the ecosystem. It's a nice new RSS reader, but it's web only. I use a couple different clients in connection with Google Reader. These guys are starting with nothing.
That's a great argument by itself, but it's also a great argument for the point I was trying to argue in my head: consider making this a paid service. It doesn't take that many users to get a great business running, and a lot of the users will probably be RSS power users, so they will greatly respect the removed cruft and great design.
Google Reader is an atrocious experience, albeit one that probably has a couple of useful apps, and Bloglines is a joke. Fever requires you to roll your own with all the hassle and risk it entails, but a paid, hosted service sounds like a great way to go about it in the way that pinboard.in did compared to del.icio.us.
Just think about it, and if you continue with a free model, you can always consider pivoting, if you find that the current model isn't sustainable. Of course, that means that this is a full-time endeavour, which may or may not fit into your lives.
The current state of the project reminds me of Instapaper in its infancy. It will be interesting to follow you.
I'm definitely interested in switching RSS readers. I'm not a fan of the recent changes to Google reader, so a solid alternative would definitely be welcome. Like you, I'd be willing to pay to get a product that handled RSS really well.
If you accept that premise, you are building a product for informed, longish-term computer users, and you are treating them like they are beginners. If my intrest was piqued by RSS I probably already use an RSS reader, and have a bunch of feeds I want to use.
You are missing the ability for me to organize my feeds into folders. I have a lot of feeds, and I need folders to triage my reading into a sliding scale from important to least important.
After all of this keep it up, because I am, and I think many others are, willing to pay for an app that does RSS reading well.