Testing an Experiment: SandHill.io
A single feed that highlights VC & startup oriented content from 190+ writers
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a proliferation of new writers producing venture & startup related content. Across investors, operators, and industry analysts, we’re seeing an incredible amount of content highlighting insights, learnings, and best practices from across sectors and geographies.
Although a big fan of this content, I’ve found it hard to keep up with the latest content & writers. A big reason for this has been the fragmentation across channels where writers publish, with many generally sharing content through personal distribution lists and newsletters.
I’ve wanted to test a new way to track and consume this content for some time and I’m excited to share an MVP I’ve been working on over the past few weekends to help with this: SandHill.io. The site aggregates content from over 190 VC & startup-oriented writers in a single feed & shares a digest of a selection of the top posts each week in a newsletter.
The site is fairly bare-bones for the time being, primarily bringing the content together in a single feed. This is very much a weekend project and my intention is to launch several new features in the upcoming weeks and months. I’d love feedback and suggestions around what others would want to see for the site.
I’m hoping this project serves as a helpful tool for both readers and writers. As an occasional writer, I’ve struggled in the past to find where to share venture-focused content. My hope is that writers can find SandHill.io a valuable channel for syndicating content, sharing ideas, and further developing their own readerships & distribution.
Below are some of my intentions with this project.
For Readers
The aim is to help readers find & reference the best content around building and investing in new tech ventures. Although the topics will be broad and will vary over time, much of the initial content that is highlighted will center around:
- Market shifts & trends shaping the world
- Investment theses & opportunities for new ventures
- Mental models for making sense of the world around us
- Operational best practices & case studies
For Writers
My hope is that this project is additive for writers, both those with larger distributions and those who are new & starting to publish content. All traffic is sent back to the original platform the writer publishes on and the aim is to enable writers to share their posts to a larger audience and further grow their own distribution. If you’re a writer and have ideas on how a product like this could better enable you, I’d love feedback (I’m [first name] @ sandhill.io).
About The Name
Most in the venture ecosystem will recognize that the project’s name refers to Sand Hill Road. While paying homage to the historical epicenter of the venture industry, my intention is for this project to highlight writers and learnings from across the globe. Incredible companies are being built all over and I’ve personally found insights from investors and builders outside of the U.S. to be particularly enlightening for my own education.
The project thus far has a lot of U.S. oriented feeds since many of the writers I’m aware of are located here. However, I’d love to greatly increase the breadth of coverage — please let me know on writers I’m missing that I should be highlighting.
THANKS!
A huge thank you to Zann Ali, Brett Bivens, Aashay Sanghvi, Simran Suri Kunal Tandon and Chelsea Zhang for taking the initial version of this product for a test-drive and providing invaluable feedback!
