A year in review - Check your Pulse

A 2022 year in review from Sari Azout, Sublime founder, starts by succinctly summarising their mission: "build a more human and nourishing internet... a platform where curious humans come together to curate and interconnect the best knowledge ... because our search engines and algorithmic news feeds are letting us down. The right idea, or the right combination of ideas, can change the course of a life, an organization, or a civilization. But our modern internet increasingly drowns ... us with a firehose of noise... reliably brings out the worst in us... incentivize the shallow and new... amplify outrage and despair".

Before launching Sublime they did an experiment: "Season Zero experiment... worked. We struck a chord ... got enough traction to validate our hypothesis...:

• hand-selected and onboarded 250 founding curators ...
• ... collectively curated more than 10,000 unique pieces of content and added over 88,000 connections between them.
• Over 25,000 people accessed the startupy knowledge graph.
• And most importantly, we built an incredible team."

Note: I discovered and annotated startupy over a year ago, or 16 months after this year in review was published: "in some ways the most similar-looking idea to myhub I've seen since launching in 2020: "you can think of startupy as ... a searchable, interconnected repository of the most insightful content on the Internet..."" - my notes on Startupy.

There's a lot more in the year in review about how they're a startup trying to not look or feel too much like a startup, as they're in for the long haul: raised early capital, staying lean to make it last 3 years, focused on sustainability. They also, like me, looked into the possibilities of web3, and declined.

Their experiment helped them realise what they needed to build. In a 20 years later echo of delicious: "Instead of a shared database you contribute to, startupy is first and foremost for ... building your own personal library... plugged into a global network of other smart, curious librarians ... the focus and utility of a productivity tool, with the aliveness and connectivity of a social product".