Smashing, the latest enterprise of Goodreads founder Otis Chandler, is shutting down after about a year in service. The company had a bold vision of finding valuable information in the rapidly expanding sea of online content through human curation amplified with AI. Smashing’s team had built a service and grew the user base, but unfortunately could not grow it into a sustainable product despite promising adoption.
In the letter sent today announcing the service shutdown, Otis Chandler shared key learnings, which are fully applicable to any content-focused product in the age of AI.
A note from Otis Chandler, cofounder
When we set out to build Smashing, we had one big idea: the internet is full of brilliant content—but most of it is nearly impossible to find. And yet, when you do find a gem, it can be so meaningful.
We believed that a better online reading experience was possible. One built around finding insightful, accurate, and relevant articles, podcasts, and blogs – not noise. One that used the power of AI to personalize recommendations based on your interests, and the wisdom of a community to surface what’s truly worthwhile. One that made you feel smarter, not more distracted.
And for a while, we saw that vision come to life.
But today, I’m sharing that we’re shutting Smashing down. We simply didn’t grow fast enough to keep going. We weren’t able to scale it into a sustainable product.
What we accomplished
We built Smashing because we believed—and still believe—that a better way to discover content is possible. People are overwhelmed with online content to read, and it’s hard to know what’s worth your time. And to really understand something, you often have to do a lot of research and read multiple articles and perspectives. Both of those issues are so ripe for innovation, especially in this age of AI.
Our small team of 7 built Smashing to curate using human + AI signals in new ways. We gave each reader a personally fine-tuned AI to recommend content, and scanned the whole internet for the best articles that matched that reader’s interests. We let curators vote on what was “Worthwhile” and saw a small but passionate community form who found and shared amazing articles that might have otherwise been lost in the feed.
We proved there’s magic in finding the right article at the right time.
We had deeply engaged readers. We uncovered amazing content. We validated the need. We heard so many times from users that they “loved the product and found interesting articles that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen”.
What We Still Believe
Our strongly held tenets about this product and space:
- The mission of helping people find accurate and insightful content online is more urgent than ever. There are more gems than ever out there—finding them still matters.
- “Time Well Spent” is a better metric for content than popularity (likes, clicks, or views). But the internet doesn’t reward that – nearly every content platform today is optimized for popularity, not value, and this has led us astray, promoting fear based, viral content instead of things that are worth our time.
- Reputation matters in curation. Ideally real world reputation, but that is hard to get at programmatically (eg LinkedIn API is restricted). We focused on earned reputation – a form of proof of work of being a good curator historically means your future curations can be more trusted.
- The best discovery tools blend community and AI—this is a case of 1+1=3.
- The reading experience of the future will include a smart, agentic reading companion. Something that knows your interests, recommends meaningful content, and gives you relevant context to better understand it. This will exist. While I’m sad it won’t be Smashing, I’m excited to keep pushing toward that future. And I’d still love to help invent it.
Smashing will shut down at noon EST tomorrow (April 16). Until then users may continue using the site and app. If you would like an export of your data (articles you read or upvoted) please email us.
Thank You
To everyone who believed in us—who used the product, curated brilliant content, gave feedback, and helped shape what we built—thank you. You made this journey worthwhile. I’m proud of what we created, and even more proud of the community that formed around it.
This is the end of Smashing. But it’s not the end of the mission to find worthwhile things to read.
Stay curious,
Otis Chandler
