Why We’re Bootstrapping Readwise (Readwise)

Readwise’s founders on why they chose to bootstrap rather than raise venture capital.

Why it was kept

The passages Kyle kept: the reading-tools market, the statistics on how little people retain from what they read, and why making the market look venture-scale would have meant distorting it.

As Kyle captured it

• Read Why We’re Bootstrapping Readwise by Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon
  • While technology has successfully disrupted publishing and distribution models, the experience of reading is yet unchanged. Digital books have merely moved the words from a printed page to a backlit screen. Why Books Don’t Work
  • You can see this clearly in the statistics: only 10 percent of ebook sales are nonfiction whereas that same number is 50 percent when considering both physical and digital books
  • There will always be something aesthetically pleasing about a physical book, but soon, the benefits of reading a software-enabled ebooks will be so vast that readers will finally switch, just like software-based word processors rendered typewriters nearly obsolete.
  • To make our market appear attractive, we’d be forced to prematurely attempt to appeal to everyday readers, and the wants and desires of an everyday reader are quite different from those of the hardcore nonfiction reader who loves Readwise. Expanding our breadth at the expense of depth is a tradeoff we aren’t yet ready to make.
  • No, we cannot win a war of attrition by stealing market share. Instead, we intend to stake out a new corner of uncontested market space — creating demand, once and for all, for nonfiction e-reading
  • In the end, bootstrapping means we must move more deliberately. For example, we can’t hire a small army of developers right now to build anything and everything for us, all at once, but those things we do build are the things we know people want.
  • With Readwise, we are harnessing your digital notes and highlights to help you better retain what you read and put ideas to use in your life.
  • Beyond that, software has the potential to facilitate multi-way conversations between authors and readers, hyperlink-like connections across books, and a more efficient reading process focused on what the reader is truly interested in.