RM: What are the main usage patterns that you’ve noticed so far with Instapaper – and has anything surprised you about how people are using it? Whether on the iPhone, or iPad or even on the web.
MA: Yeah, there have been few surprises. One of the biggest was when I first launched the iPhone app, I thought that it would just be people who are already familiar with the web app – that they’d want the iPhone app to go along with it. Okay, that’s pretty much the way I use it. I use the web app first and the iPhone app as an accessory to it. And what surprised me was from the very beginning – and it still holds true today – how many people do both the browsing and the reading on the iPhone. Instapaper is really optimized for browsing on the computer and then reading on the iPhone. But a lot of people just do everything on the iPhone.
Another big surprise was that the iPad has taken off like crazy. At least half of my paid app sales are from the iPad, which given the size of its relative installed base (iPad versus the iPhone), that’s a pretty impressive number.
The iPad has proven to be a better device for reading content than even I expected. I had high hopes for it, but I thought it would be about the same for reading as the iPhone. And it ended up that a lot more people find the bigger screen more comfortable. So a lot more people are reading web content on the iPad than on the iPhone.
RM: Yes, that’s certainly been my experience. So is the success of the iPad what prompted you to go full time on the business?
MA: Oh sure, that was a huge part. Especially because the iPad sales [of Instapaper] have more than doubled my overall sales since the iPad came out. So it finally gave me enough momentum to take it full time.
RM: Right. And are you hiring other people in the business?
MA: Not at the moment. I do have a contractor who edits the front page editor’s picks, also called "Give me something to read." It’s the popular, good, long form stories saved by users. So I have a contractor who does that. But otherwise it’s just me.
In the future I might hire employees to help out with certain things, but I have no immediate plans to do that.
The Future of Instapaper
RM: Let’s discuss the future of the product. Do you plan to expand to other delivery platforms, or are you going to stay focused on iPad and iPhone?
MA: For now, I’m certainly focusing on the iOS platform and also on the Kindle. I really do like the Kindle a lot. It’s a much smaller market, but it’s a very devoted and very hardcore market – people who really love reading. So right now it’s iOS and Kindle. I don’t have any immediate plans to support Android or Blackberry, or other mobile platforms directly. But what I’m going to do is make a full feature API, so that other people can write clients for those if they want to.
Right now there are a few Android clients that are unofficial, but because there’s no good official API they have just kind of scraped the site to try and make it work. And it’s worked with mixed success. So hopefully a real API will encourage better clients to be made.
RM: Will Instapaper add more social sharing and curation features in the near future? [hat-tip Justin Houk for suggesting this question via Twitter]
MA: That’s a good question. One thing I do want to do is have better export support for services that will help you with long-time archival. Things like Evernote, Delicious and Pinboard. So I definitely want to add those. I wouldn’t really classify any of those, except maybe Delicious, as social though. And Delicious, while it is technically social, I don’t think it’s really used like that as much anymore – if it ever was. So I want to add features that help people with their own organization.
I also want to add features that help people with information overload management. I don’t want Instapaper to just be another bucket for the thousands of items that you have deal with and that you feel obligated and burdened by. That’s the last thing I want. So what I really want to do is give people tools to help them manage information overload [so] that it’s not a burden, that relieves them of stress rather than adding to it.
Regarding social features, I have a few draft ideas in my head of some kind of sharing features. For the most part they’re very, very alpha stage. But even in my head there’s something I roughly want to do. It’s the kind of feature that before I was doing this full time, which was only two weeks ago, I would never have had the time to do non-essential features like that. Now that I have time to do that sort of thing, I will probably explore those options in the future.
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