The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2024–2025
Smashing, Goodreads founder Otis Chandler's AI curation app, shuts down after 10 months
Chandler's $3.4M bet that community plus AI could curate the whole web died in April 2025: 'We simply didn't grow fast enough.'
Smashing
What the business is
Smashing is an iOS app that curates news, articles, podcasts and social posts: users follow interests, submit and vote on links, and AI summarizes stories and surfaces 'hidden gems' from across the web.
Starting capital：$3.4M seed from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital and Power of N Ventures, plus angels including Balaji Srinivasan and James Currier.
How it started
After leaving Amazon, where he stayed five years past Goodreads' 2013 sale, Otis Chandler spent his sabbatical training for a Half Ironman and found search and news aggregators could not surface genuinely good long-form content — only 'SEO-optimized, ad-stuffed pages.' That dissatisfaction became the thesis for Smashing: AI plus a voting community, built to send readers to publishers rather than absorb them.
What happened
Chandler teamed up in 2022 with Greg Veen (Measure Map, Typekit), Mike Mraz and Dan Barrett, raised $3.4M in seed funding, and launched an invite-only beta in June 2024. The app let users follow interests, submit any URL, and spend 30 daily votes surfacing content, while AI added summaries, story overviews and a question-answering bot. The public iOS launch followed in October 2024 with an 'AI Questions' feature, on a waitlist of more than 2,000 people and a few thousand beta users.
How it ended up
On 16 April 2025 Smashing announced it was shutting down, roughly ten months after launch, with seven employees. In an email to customers the company said: 'We simply didn't grow fast enough to keep going. We weren't able to scale it into a sustainable product.'
Background
Smashing was an AI-powered reading app launched in June 2024 by Otis Chandler, the founder of Goodreads, which he had sold to Amazon in 2013. His thesis: the open web's best long-form content — articles, newsletters, podcasts, posts — was buried under SEO spam, and a community that voted content up, guided by AI, could surface it the way Goodreads surfaced books.
Chandler co-founded the company with Greg Veen (Measure Map and Typekit), Mike Mraz and Dan Barrett, and raised $3.4 million from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital and Power of N Ventures, plus angels. The invite-only beta launched in June 2024 with 30 votes a day per user, interest feeds and AI summaries; the public iOS app followed in October 2024 with AI Questions, story overviews and more than 2,000 people on the waitlist.
The product deliberately pointed readers back to original publishers rather than summarizing content away — Chandler called himself 'a believer in long-form, interesting content.' The app filled the gap left when Instagram's founders shut down the AI news reader Artifact in early 2024 and sold its technology to Yahoo.
Smashing never found the growth curve to make curation sustainable. On 16 April 2025, about ten months after launch and with seven employees, the company told customers it was shutting down: 'We simply didn't grow fast enough to keep going. We weren't able to scale it into a sustainable product.'
What has to be true
- Chandler brought a proven playbook — community curation built Goodreads into a 30-million-user business — but links and posts are commodities that platforms and AI feeds give away for free.
- The product drove traffic to publishers while the industry moved toward AI summaries that keep readers on the aggregator — working against Smashing's monetization story.
- A consumer app needs a distribution loop; a waitlist of 2,000 and a few thousand beta users were not enough to escape the 'quality niche' trap before the seed money ran out.
- Artifact's simultaneous failure showed the problem was structural, not specific to one team: paid or ad-free reading curation could not reach the scale needed to survive.
What can be applied
A famous founder and a credible product do not make a growth curve: consumer apps live on retention loops, and 'quality discovery' is a feature until someone proves it is a scalable business.
Aftermath
As of 16 April 2025 Smashing had ceased operations: the company emailed customers announcing the closure, citing growth that was too slow to sustain the product, and its seven-person team was let go. The shutdown landed less than two years after Artifact's demise, leaving the AI-news-reader category to a fresh wave of competitors including Bulletin, Particle and feed aggregators. Chandler has not announced what he will build next.
Sources
- Smashing, from Goodreads' co-founder, curates the best of the web using AI and human recommendations
- From Goodreads' founder, Smashing debuts its AI-powered app for online readers
- Smashing, the reading curation app by Goodreads' founder, shuts down
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