Dear reader,

Yeehaw! Finally, after a stretch of good vibes and average-y (at best) numbers, we're actually seeing the lift that we knew we were feeling. If you don't have time to read this entire email, at least peek a view at the graphs below, because I want you to see what I think I see: accelerating growth.

Yesterday, Jia Tolentino's article, The Age of Instagram Face, became her sixth (!) Article of the Day. That makes her the top writer in Readup history. Hopefully one day she cares. In the meantime, we've got more work to do.

Since there are no short stories in the Top 10 right now, I'm gifting ya'll a few choice cuts from bona fide literary fiction heavyweights. All three of these are absolute treasures: The Adventure of a Skier by Italo Calvino. Elliott Spencer by George Saunders. The Match by Colson Whitehead

Product Updates

First, we're stoked to see peeps using the new markdown formatting options. Excellent!

We're overhauling all logged-out views of the platform, to try to get a higher percentage of the people who hit the site to actually create accounts. That'll go live in the next few days and will include implementing single sign-in (aka "Sign in With Apple") which will knock a few unnecessary clicks out of the iOS onboarding flow. Also, this week we launched an initiative (meaning Jeff and I talked about something) to figure out SEO once and for all. We're getting there. And hopefully we'll be there by the end of the year.

Finally, a pro tip: Readup automatically saves your spot if you need to take a break in the middle of a long article. The bookmark indicates that your spot was saved:

When you return to the article, you'll get prompted to pick up where you left off. (Note: On Chrome, make sure to activate Reader Mode.)

The Numbers

Like I said, we knew we were feeling something last week. We're definitely up:

The Big Picture

At the end of the day, we're trying to get people to read. So, here's yet another perspective on that, which also - at the very least - seems to be trending in the right direction:

Readup's alive and life is good.

Catch ya next week!

Bill