Is your Pocket reading list too long for you to keep up with?

You find articles/news to read from multiple sources (twitter, facebook, rss, media outlets, Hacker News, Reddit etc etc.) but can't find time to read them all?

Are you irritated by all the clickbait headlines and manipulative snippets and wish you had a fair idea of what you are getting into before reading a piece?

WiseGuy (placeholder) aims to solve your problems.

There is a small (maybe large?) consumer segment that loves to read stuff and is hungry to absorb as much knowledge as possible. I have a morning and before bed ritual of going through my favourite news/article sources (which includes HN) and just reading stuff, but of late I have started feeling overwhelmed by my "addiction". Clickbaits and manipulative snippets designed to make me visit the site only to later find the piece pointless are the most irritating. I'm sure many on HN would relate.

WiseGuy will be an app that I wish someone made for me, but no one has yet so I will solve my own problem + maybe millions of other people.

How it works is simple:

1. You find a piece that you would normally read.

2. Share it to the app just like you would "Save to Pocket".

3. A real human will read and craft a summary of the piece for you and tell you if you should invest time to read it yourself. Some articles will be insightful, include deep analysis that should be read in detail to be properly absorbed, while others could be summarised in 2 sentences to tell you what you need to know. WiseGuy will do it for you.

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Examples:

1) This piece was on HN front page for quite a while yesterday: "How cheap does solar power need to get before it takes over the world?" (http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11415510/solar-power-costs-inno...)

WiseGuy Summary:

Article is based on a study by researchers on what is termed "value deflation" of solar energy. In a free market where the marginal cost of producing solar electricity is zero, the value of solar energy during the day (the panels most productive time) will deflate as more and more panels come online. This will happen because there will be a LOT more electricity available at say, noon, than there is demand for, leading to a huge drop in wholesale prices. Batteries can help but not completely solve this problem. Researchers calculate that the price needs to come down to $0.25 per watt by 2050 — down from around $3 per watt today. We are not on track for that given current pace of incremental improvements. Value deflation could be the difference between solar staying as niche technology in the grand scheme of things or it taking over the world.

Original Article: 2700 words (~20 minute reading time)
WiseGuy Summary: 148 Words (less than a minute)

WiseGuy Analysis: The article is very well researched and goes into deep details. It references to several other studies and analyses the situation, solutions and future in detail. It includes useful graphical data. Reading of the full article is highly recommended if the summary and the subject intrigues you. Rating: 4.5 Stars (maybe crowd sourced?)

Another example:

2) Original headline: "How is it that Bernie Sanders still averages $27 per donation?” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/18/be...)

WiseGuy Summary:

Piece questions how is it that over months and months the average donation has stayed at 27 dollar. It gives out a few possible reasons and then proceeds to calculate what the latest average is. First, averages involving millions of numbers change slowly. Second, the campaign encourages a $27 donation explicitly (with a button on its fundraising page) and implicitly (by making it a point of pride). And, third, it actually does waver from that point. It finally concludes based on public data that the actual average should be 27.88, 88 cents more than claimed.

Original Article: 800 words (~5 minute reading time)
WiseGuy Summary: 96 Words (less than a 30 seconds)

WiseGuy Analysis: Clickbait headline, not much new information. WiseGuy summary is sufficient to explain the piece, feel free to skip it. Rating 2/5

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How is WiseGuy better than alternatives? Well for one it is powered by real humans. It is much better than NLP based summarizers which are not even close in quality, they are actually terrible. Also while there are sources where one can get curated human summarized content, they actually only summarize news and not any random article/blog that you want right now. WiseGuy is for whatever you want summarized, whenever you want it! You can send your entire Pocket Reading list with a 100 saved articles to Wiseguy and have all of them analysed on demand.

Business Model- It will work as an ad supported community where the analysis will be provided by members of the community who have actually read the piece. If possible ad revenue will be shared with top contributors based on quality.

There will also be a subscription based plan which will remove ads and will guarantee an analysis from our staff summarizers in case no one from the community take it up within a reasonable time. I have run numbers and the economics work.

Does this have the potential to be a unicorn? I would assume not but so did the founders of AirBnB think of their company.

I can't say how big the market for this service will be but I do know that it will solve the problems of a large number of people. A future where all consumers of online content will first run it by WiseGuy, or make it the primary source of discovering useful community rated content is not unimaginable at which point this could be a 10 billion dollar business.
One study I came across that made me realize this might be more than just a niche problem: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/03/19/am...

Besides I have some ideas of how such a basic service might evolve into something that solves other related problems as well.

How will I use 20,000 dollars? Firstly where I am from adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity, $20,000 dollars will be worth $200,000 so I will be able to do much more with it than a founder in Bay Area.

I plan to use it to pay my living expenses while I take a semester off at grad school, build an initial team, site expenses and paying staff summarizers to solve the chicken and egg problem of building a community. I'd work out of my apartment so there will be no office expenses.

Best Case WiseGuy would be able to save millions of man hours, help hundreds of thousands read quality stuff and avoid the rest, absorb more knowledge from the limited time they can spend on casual reading and pay thousands of people to basically.....read.

BTW if HN is going to help us get into Ycombinator Fellowship then it seems proper that it also helps us come up with a name (or keep the current one), so PLEASE suggest away!

Also I will be analysing some posts on HN front page every day to demonstrate how WiseGuy might work. Look out for them. Feel free to share articles you want analysed in this thread too, I am just one guy but I’ll do my best!

Don’t worry too much about being nice. I am going to give this a shot even if I don’t get through YCF so I appreciate any suggestions/criticism, especially from HN community as most of you would be the ideal target market and early adopters.