Read What Matters with Ben Springwater - [Making Media, EP.56]

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Feb 15, 2024

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Ben Springwater

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INSIGHT

Gap In Reading Tools Creates Opportunity

Reading apps were underserved despite reading being a consequential behavior for many people.
Ben and Rob saw an opportunity to build a better tool and scale curated reading into a decision engine.

ADVICE

Productize Curation To Save Readers Time

Do the hidden labor of curation to save others the time of searching for high-quality writing.
Productize and personalize that curation to deliver reading choices rather than an overwhelming archive.

INSIGHT

Technical Hurdles And New Modalities

Parsing saved web content reliably is technically challenging because of web variability.
Advances in text-to-speech and transcription make seamless read/listen switching increasingly feasible.

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Our guest today is Ben Springwater. Ben is the founder of Matter, a reading app that pulls everything you want to read into one place with curation, audio, and more. There are constant frustrations with how we get served media, as there's infinite content, and it's harder and harder to separate the good from the bad. Ben is working to solve that problem.

He shares what it's like to build a product like Matter and gives insight into how Matter’s team makes decisions around the technical and human challenges that come into play.

An avid reader and content consumer himself, we then asked Ben for some of his favorite recommendations, all linked below. Please enjoy this conversation with Ben Springwater.

Ben’s Recommended Content:

The Road to Self-Renewal

Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijaking Utopia

The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).

Show Notes

(00:00) Welcome to Making Media

(01:36) The Challenges of Building a Product Like Matter

(03:41) The Power of Curation in the Digital Age

(08:03) The Future of Recommendation Systems

(15:26) The Challenges of Building a User-Centric Product

(22:14) The Intersection of Reading and Listening in the Digital Age

(25:12) The Business Model of Matter

(27:04) Ben’s Recommendation #1: The Road to Self-Renewal

(33:14) Ben’s Recommendation #2: Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijaking Utopia

(42:38) Ben’s Recommendation #2: The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic

(51:19) The Importance of Being An Enthusiast

(52:06) Debrief