Smashing App Shuts Down - Goodreads Founder's Reading App Closes

Smashing App to Cease Operations Due to Scaling Challenges

The development of an application focused on consolidating news, articles, and social media content into a single platform presents significant hurdles. Smashing, an AI-driven application designed for personalized news curation, is discontinuing its services, primarily due to difficulties in achieving rapid user growth.

According to a communication sent to its user base, the company stated, “Our growth rate proved insufficient to maintain operations. We were unable to develop it into a product that could be sustained long-term.”

Smashing's Core Functionality and Launch

Launched in June of the previous year by Otis Chandler, the founder of Goodreads, Smashing leveraged both AI and community input to curate news articles, blog posts, podcasts, and updates from various social media platforms.

Users were able to track topics of interest, contribute content, and utilize a voting system to assess the relevance of suggested material. The application also featured AI-generated summaries and a chatbot capable of responding to user inquiries.

Funding and Team Size

The company reported having a team of seven individuals dedicated to the product’s development. Smashing successfully secured $3.4 million in funding from a group of investors including True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and a number of individual angel investors.

Alternative News Aggregation Options

Fortunately, several startups are currently addressing the same challenges that Smashing aimed to solve. Examples include AI-powered news readers such as Bulletin and Particle.

Furthermore, feed aggregator applications like Feeeed, Tapestry, and Reeder offer alternative solutions for consolidating information.

Recent Trends in AI-Powered News Apps

Smashing’s shutdown follows a similar outcome for Artifact, an AI-powered news application created by the co-founders of Instagram, which was closed last year and its technology subsequently acquired by Yahoo.

This highlights the competitive landscape and the difficulties in establishing a sustainable user base within the realm of AI-driven news aggregation.