RSS to Kindle is on Product Hunt

RSS to Kindle is officially “launched” on Product Hunt. If you’re not familiar with the site, it’s a place to showcase new apps and websites.

Truthfully, my plan was to put it up to help my search ranking with backlinks. But creating the launch content has gotten me excited to tell more people about the product.

Recently, users have been sending really nice thank you emails for building it. That’s never happened in my 7 years of building independent online products. It’s probably because I followed the classic advice of building something for myself first. It was never meant to be a product.

Like most people, I’d wake up and mindlessly doom scroll my phone, consuming whatever the algorithm fed me. It was the worst way to wake up. I kept feeling anxious and overwhelmed before the day even started. That feeling went away when I read on my Kindle instead.

The thing is, sometimes I want to read things besides books in the morning. So after a little vibecoding with Claude Code, I had the first version. It sent Cal Newport’s and Jason Cohen’s blogs to my Kindle.

The product changed my morning routine completely. I stopped reaching for my phone and started reaching for my Kindle. The app has been a slippery slope of reading. This year I’ve read 15 books already, more than ever in my life. The tool has retrained me to reach for my Kindle instead of my phone.

The rest of the story, from the video

The first version really did start at the gym. I was listening to Cal Newport podcasts about why reading on an e-reader matters — it’s less distracting, and you’re less likely to skim, because there are just the words and you have to focus on them. I thought: wouldn’t it be great if my favorite blog just showed up on my Kindle, instead of me having to go to my phone? So I pretty much vibe coded it on an exercise bike. By the time I got home I had a couple of Cal Newport posts waiting on the Kindle, and I thought, holy crap, this is working.

Growth since then has come almost entirely from word of mouth — Reddit posts, and videos like this one. That has worked, but it’s why I wanted to tell a few more people, which is what’s driving the launch.

In the video I go through the analytics, because they’re the part I find most exciting. The green line is returning weekly users: people who have had at least one blog post delivered to their Kindle that week. Around 30 people are in that number each week, and it’s slowly been growing. As of September, 57 people have had posts sent to them this month. It’s the first indie product I’ve built where it isn’t a one-and-done deal — people keep coming back.

The last stretch is a look around the product itself: the landing page, the free plan (five articles a day, forever), and Discover, where you can see the feeds other people subscribe to and send one straight to your Kindle. And Random, which is still the feature I like most. Someone might write something amazing but not publish every day — Jason Cohen at Smart Bear, say. You can have one random article from their back catalogue sent to your Kindle each morning. You don’t always have to read the latest news. There’s a lot of good stuff people wrote in the past, and we get stuck reading only the present.

If you’re on Product Hunt, give it an upvote if you’ve liked using the product. More importantly, if you have a Kindle, go try it out.