Readership

Gregg Blanchard had always been fascinated by the Twitter API. In his own words, "It's completely amazing. It's like being a fly on the wall of any conversation happening at any time all over the world." While experimenting with what he could do with Twitter data, he started playing with expanding short URLs and extracting domain names. Using his own profile as a test case, he noticed funny patterns in his behavior: he was favoriting a lot of snow-related tweets (he's a snowboarder) and parenting-related content (he has two young kids). This observation sparked the idea for Readership—a tool that could identify and visualize what topics and content types any Twitter account gravitates toward.

Readership was built entirely on Twitter's free, public API endpoints, making it accessible to any developer. Gregg found the technical challenges surprisingly interesting, particularly building a fast link expander to resolve thousands of shortened URLs. He spent considerable time optimizing this process—what started as a fun experiment turned into 100+ hours of work spread across evenings and weekends. The reporting interface came together more quickly thanks to a UI kit he'd built years prior. Pricing was straightforward: $99 per report, with no branding so PR professionals could theoretically resell them for $250-$500 to their clients.

Gregg's market research seemed solid on paper. He conducted 10-15 conversations with PR professionals before launch, validating his theory that they would be his primary customers and resellers. He launched with a database of ~2,000 subscribers and hit the usual channels: a PR push, Betalist, and Product Hunt. The launch generated significant interest and hundreds of requests for free sample reports. However, there was a critical problem: not a single person paid for a full report or second report after seeing the free sample.

The visual analytics were genuinely appealing, and the market research methodology was solid—Gregg was talking to real potential customers, asking hard questions, and getting product feedback. What didn't work was his ability to listen to what those customers were actually telling him. Every time he showed a sample report to a PR professional, their reaction was essentially "okay, so...what do I do with this?" In retrospect, their confusion was the clearest possible signal. But Gregg was blinded by how fun the product was to build and the time he'd already invested. He kept pushing forward thinking launch would change things.

After launch, the feedback was uniform: "Wow, this is cool...but...um...what do I do with it exactly?" Readership had no actual problem it solved. It was pure eye candy with zero tangible value for marketers or PR professionals.

Gregg cut his losses—the only thing lost was time. He shelved plans to integrate with GNIP API and Pipl API, both of which would have required paid subscriptions. The failure of Readership taught him to listen more carefully to market signals, a lesson he applied immediately to his next product, Hemlock (a content calendar visualization tool). While Hemlock did generate paying customers, it had extreme churn because users got all the value they needed in the first month—a different problem, but equally valuable feedback. Now he's focused on SendView, a platform that creates custom tracking addresses for newsletter signups and provides email analytics to marketers. Users stay for 10 times longer than they did with Hemlock, and the market is buying. Gregg credits his willingness to let go of failing products to the hard lessons learned from Readership.