Loved

Chapter 1When David Beats Goliath: Why Product Marketing Matters

Marco Arment had the Silicon Valley “It” factor. A prolific developer, he was the lead engineer and chief technology officer of Tumblr, a microblogging website that was sold to Yahoo for over $1 billion in cash. His blog was viewed more than 500,000 times a month, and he had a popular podcast before podcasts were a thing.

It's no wonder tech press were captivated by Instapaper, Marco's next creation after Tumblr. They talked about the app for saving web pages to read later as if it was the only one that did the job.

But around that same time, Nate Weiner, a self-taught code slinger from the Midwest, had seen the same problem. People saw articles in their social feeds or web pages and wanted to save and view them later. He created Read It Later to do just that.

With a dash of visual design from his girlfriend and some coding help from his twin, in just a couple of years, Read It Later was used by 3.5 million people—nearly triple the users of Instapaper—and had hundreds of rave reviews. Yet press talking about great productivity apps still only mentioned Instapaper.

Apple announced a feature called “Reading List” at its World Wide Developer Conference. It validated Nate's app but also prompted a brief Twitter storm, with some declaring game over for Read It Later.

Instapaper stayed its course, occasionally adding new features. Three years after he created it, Marco sold Instapaper to Betaworks. Growth languished. ...