Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Pocket wants to help you see the best of the web – Small Empires S. 3 Ep. 5”.
Pocket is a web tool that acts like a Save button for the internet. You could save interesting articles, videos pretty much anything for later consumption and the San francisco-based startup has actually garnered 17 million users worldwide. Now it just has to figure out how to grow that product into a profitable business. So I was working at a web design firm in Minneapolis and I was just always emailing myself links and never getting around to them. And one night just decided to like take a crack at solving that and made this really basic.
Firefox extension, like literally put it up on my on my personal site, which nobody ever went to until a writer on life hacker picked it up and found out a lot of other people. Have this problem too, and I kind of just blew up from their pocket. Is basically like a DVR for the web, you see something you don’t have time to read it or watch it. You tap a button and it saves the pocket and then we have time you open up pocket and it’s there for you to enjoy. We believe pocket is a fundamental tool of like using the Internet. You know you have these kind of core tools that people use when they use content every day. Whether it’s you know, search and browse and share believe save is just one of those critical components. Just like anything else, that’s why we’ve always believed it was like a system-level feature why it makes sense to us that it’s built into a browser like firefox people, were constantly finding all this content on the web, but having no place to put it no way of Being able to come back to it, I always thought like how cool would that be? If, like you did something you built like a million people were using, you know and like actually benefiting from that’s, like always been the thing, that’s been driving you, which is just like.
How do you have a big impact? How do you reach a lot of people and it’s that level of awareness that is really important to us as we grow they’ve raised several rounds of capital into the millions of dollars and they’ve done it, while maintaining a pretty small team like it’s something like a Dozen people so they’re pretty lean and mean raising that money gave them an opportunity to just focus on the product and not worry so much about figuring out the revenue piece because we’re pocket. The revenue piece is actually quite a trick like a lot of venture-backed startups. Pocket has decided to focus primarily on pleasing its users and scaling its audience. Our challenge is just like getting the word out. You know it’s the things that’s like drive me crazy. When I think about it, are like I’ll be at an event I’ll be trying to explain to somebody what pocket is that it’s never heard of it and all of a sudden, their coworker will walk up and they’ll be a pocket. I love pocket. I use the thing every day and they like sit next to each other in the office and somehow just like never talked about this thing, and we are, you know actively pushing to try to reach that audience.
Pockets biggest problem is, most people don’t go through their day, wondering how to save things on the web. They’Re, not even really aware that you can do that, and pocket hasn’t really figured out an easy way to just. Let me I don’t know log in one time. Click, yes, and then just have it everywhere, yeah and for them to become the save button for the web. They’Re gon na need to figure that out they would hear about this product they’re.
You know somebody would rave about it, they could download it and they land in this empty queue, and it would be like go give the app and go follow 17 directions to like set up pocket, and people would just like. Maybe later like you, it’s service for, like procrastinators like and then you’re telling them to go. Do all these things they’re, like I’ll, save these instructions for later right.
It’S not that’s, definitely been a challenge. There are just you know: 100 million users out there today, who are emailing themselves, links to or keeping tabs open in the browser or not able to find like the best content. That’S out there and we are, you know actively pushing to try to reach that audience. You know getting built into a browser, it was a huge win for us in terms of just like, you know, reach. If you think about it’s like Firefox, I believe, has you know 150 Internet’s browser share. It’S like that means 150. The browser’s are the users on the internet, whether they’re clicking it or not.
Like see our icon every day. All of our growth today has been completely organic. We don’t to paid it at marketing, it’s grown because people talk about it or because we’re built into all these in places that they’re discovering us, but the truth is in some ways.
Pocket really is a feature, and so do you justify that? How do you build the company going forward? How do you get it to its own profit, making machine or else do you just sell it eventually, while pocket continues to fund development on the product side and is figuring out a consistent and scalable revenue model for the long haul, but its core mission hasn’t really Changed much since inception and that confidence in its products, ability to stand alone is what is set it apart from the competition. Ultimately, the impact that we want to make is actually just raising the quality of content that people consume out there, no matter what application you’re using no matter. What publisher that you go to that you can save from those places. We actually think there’s still a really big opportunity, like help just facilitate that take the billion things that are out there every single day and actually just still it down to here’s the cream of crop.
A big part of it was actually talking to Evernote about an acquisition and the reason it was interesting to me at the time was like. Oh, I have this thing. I want to be able to do so much more with it they’re this big company. They have all these resources and they could help me do that. Evernote approach, pocket expressed interest in buying them and pocket turned it down because they believe that Evernote was just going to take their app and turn it into a kind of feature within the larger Evernote. Suite and we want to be able to have a bit more control over our own destiny in that way.
Over the years we’ve been doing this, I would say that’s like one of the things I’m probably most proud of with this company is that we’ve always had this just one clear kind of mission, one clear problem that we’ve been solving. We haven’t been pivoting it around. It’S always been about trying to enable people to capture all this stuff and actually consume it in general, there’s so much on the internet. Today, it’s so vast, there’s so much information and people are getting their information, it’s flying in sideways from different websites, social media and that sort of thing it’s impossible to consume everything.
If you think about pocket as like you know the 1 990 rule, the one percent create nine percent, curate and 90 browse right. You can think about pocket as the nine percent who curate and we actually think that 90 percent is a huge audience that doesn’t necessarily use the product or know about the product today, and we think that’s that’s one of the next big kind of places that we’ll See a lot of growth pocket has rivals like Instapaper and there are big new entrants in the field like Facebook, which is created. A save button to stay relevant pocket knows it has to move beyond just saving content for later, and so it’s turned its attention to curation by tracking its users, habits and recommending items from other people in the pocket community.
The company hopes to be a platform not just for saving the best of the web, but for discovering it as well. Another value proposition of some of these read it later, apps like pocket or Instapaper. Is that they’re also suggesting news for you to read? So it’s not just. Let me save my links for later, but it’s also here’s the news you should be reading today. We hope to be able to play a part in when it comes to content.
It’S like actually create a channel and a platform where high quality content can exist because, right now it’s like content is constantly buried. You know it’s just like goes into this wasteland that nobody ever finds again, and we want to want to be able to take all those great things and make sure that people don’t miss them. One good way to think about pocket is it’s the best stuff on the web. Everything that’s in. It is something that somebody picked and they picked it because they wanted to read it themselves, not because they wanted to promote it right, but just because they thought it was cool coming in the future. Our you know, everybody is using this thing in these like very kind of private silos, but they’re all doing this like great work like I am out there capturing all this amazing stuff about you, know technology or entrepreneurship or photography, and we want to make sure that You know we can open up a couple of windows that help like stuff that I capture about technology, that if somebody else is interested in that like that they benefit from me finding it. He deeply believes in this idea that the web needs a Save button and while a few people have tried to build, it nobody’s built anything as good as pocket. Yet I have the belief that if you actually can create this platform that there would be more creation of high quality stuff, because the reason that that doesn’t exist as much today is just because there isn’t a platform for it to be consumed or even discovered. It’S. It’S having to constantly compete with like what’s new over time. I think they have an opportunity to use that to kind of surface a better version of the web, so that pocket is a place where you can go when you just want to see great stuff. That was picked by humans, thank God. .