We built the app first
The first version of Clove was an app. A nice one — cream background, good type, a little fox in the corner. Beta testers opened it every day for a week. Then most of them never opened it again, which is the standard biography of a reading app.
The lesson wasn’t “build a better app.” It was that any destination, however lovely, is one more place to remember to go. Reading tools die in the gap between intention and habit.
Email was worse, sorry
Email was the obvious second try — meet people where the newsletters already are. But delivering a digest into the very inbox we’re rescuing you from felt like bailing water into the boat. Open rates agreed.
A chat thread won
Telegram is already in your pocket, already checked, already where friends send you links. A delivery from the fox reads like exactly that — a friend who says “this one’s worth it” and is right. Replying “more like this” is a message, not a settings page.
That’s the whole argument: the best interface for a curator is the one you’d use with a human one. More channels will come. The chat-first shape stays.
Thanks for reading. The fox thanks you too.