Dear AppSumo Lean Challenge,
(http://appsumo.com/leanchallenge)
For your consideration...
I decided to make unVault (www.unvault.com) to solve my problem of starring items in various places (Google Reader, Twitter) and marking other items to read later (Instapaper, Delicious), but then never getting back to reading them. (video of motivation here: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7953875/unVault)Perhaps because I enjoyed reading a few classic novels using DailyLit, I had the idea of combining daily emails with read-later items.Is unVault cool? Hmm... Well, I'll tell you what's not cool. Bookmarked items that languish, unread, on some forgotten site. I thought DailyLit was cool, and the various read-later/readability sites are increasing in coolness daily. Two cool things unVault does now are 1) automatic detection of multi-page articles; 2) automatic splitting of long items into bite-sized parts (so you can read long articles or html e-books like with DailyLit).Lean: unVault's first version was built in about 2 weeks. I work on it after my day job, and really work on it when my wife goes back to her hometown once a month. I use jQuery, PHP, and MySQL. I use SimplePie to handle RSS feeds. I use the text parsers from Instapaper, ReadItLaterList, and a PHP port of Readability to extract text from websites. I try to release something new at least once a week. Thanks to your Lean Startup Bundle, I'm about to start using Postmark to handle daily emails to users.Funding: more powerful webhosting, better design, our own text parser, etc. Yes, funding is welcome.I have plans to offer similar subscriptions as Readability but also to offer users who create popular reading lists a percentage.From the landing page:You have too much to read.
Read the timely stuff right away of course, but what about the other stuff? The stuff you want to read someday, what do you do with that?Reading it later is not good enough.
You might have "read it later" or "to read" lists strewn about the web. That's great, but what if you actually never get back to those lists? It's like you're throwing newspapers, essays, and books into a vault which you forgot you had the keys to.Let's "unvault" all of those great articles.
Or essays. Or online manuals. Or classic books. Whatever. unVault will send you an email a day (or more if you have free time) containing one of the articles you intended to read.Connect to your existing lists.
unVault can connect to almost any web service: Instapaper, Read It Later, Delicious, Twitter, Google Reader, etc. (Anything that has an RSS feed is okay too.)Use unVault's bookmarklet.
Similar to other "read later" bookmarklets available, the "unVaultlet" saves an article that you want to read later. (We are working on ways to make our bookmarklet even easier than pie. Stay tuned.)You have control.
unVault lets you control how you receive items: randomly, chronologically, size, in custom orderings that you create. If you want to receive more than one item a day, no problem. Want to take a break? You can't yet, but that feature's coming soon.
