Charged

*BTW: If you sign up with the code `kittyclub` I'll give you 25% off the first three months. Make sure to redeem fast if you want to join, it's limited to 100 people. 😍* --- Hey everyone! I started sending a weekly newsletter three years ago and found a weird niche where people _really_ liked getting the news delivered to their inbox because it wasn't algorithm driven, full of ads, or clickbait. It felt weird to focus on email, but I started realizing its limitations are a huge opportunity to reach people that's frequently discounted as 'boring' despite it being the one thing we all check multiple times a day. I've been wanting to build this for such a long time, and over the last year just started noticing people have total news burnout, so began tinkering with the idea of flipping the news model on its head. I noticed two trends that were gaining a lot of steam: 1) Private communities are getting huge and 2) People want less news, not more, and not from an algorithm News sites basically optimize for the lowest common denominator: quantity over quality. Visit any mainstream site refresh over the space of eight hours -- if you weren't there all day checking, something key is likely to slide right past you in the stream, and once it's off the front page it's gone. As all of this happened, the comments section started disappearing across the web as well: suddenly, the nuance or context that (sometimes, not always) occurs below an article is gone, and it's driving people to places like Twitter and Facebook... which most people don't really enjoy. This, I believe, is driving the huge surge in _private_ communities we're seeing -- I'm in so many private Slack groups it's insane. re:Charged is a start on trying to solve both of these problems. It's a combination between the two: you pay a small monthly fee and get access to a daily briefing of everything worth knowing in tech, and a deeply integrated community that goes along with it. I've built an app in the middle that wires these two up, onboards you and introduces you to the community -- and the newsletter surfaces great comments, threads and other discussion directly. There's no advertising, algorithm optimizing to get you to click or anything else -- just the curated briefing and everything worth knowing. Yes, it costs money up-front, but I want to build something that's sustainable from day one and doesn't rely on advertising to prop it up at any point. If I need that, I've failed, and the product doesn't work. For three months we've been testing with 150 members who've been an incredible help, and the feedback has been fantastic: people aren't checking the news as much and are having meaningful discussions in our community. It's been pretty incredible to watch, and now I'm focused on offering other ways for people to receive the content, and surfacing the gold from across the community on a regular basis. If you'd like to try it, I'd love to have you onboard and have your feedback. As I mentioned, it's early and a little rough, but I wanted to get this out there now rather than iterating on it in a vacuum :). If you want to read more, check out my post about this today: https://char.gd/blog/2017/announ...

One of the best communities is now getting better. I know I will subscribe today.

I joined re:Charged recently but already getting a lot of value from the daily newsletter. Owen covers all the most important things happening in tech and brings some personal voice. And re:Charged is not just another newsletter about tech, it is also an amazing community! It really makes a lot of difference. One of the very few Slack communities that I check out daily 😀 (and that says a lot!) @ow Exciting to see how Charged is growing and curious about what is coming next.

This is gonna be great! Good luck!

I've been a subscriber to the re:Charged newsletter since day one and it has genuinely stopped me from visiting any tech-related websites. I don't have to worry about missing anything and if I don't feel like catching up I can always just delete the email anyway.

Owens commentary on the news always feels on point and puts thing in another interesting perspective. ❤️

Pros:

Very well focused, high quality content

Cons:

The community is still a bit new, hope that grows quickly. :)

Sounds great. I used to be subscribed to your free newsletter. Nowadays, I am subscribed to Ben Thompson's ( https://stratechery.com/) newsletter and I really enjoy it. @Owen: How is your newsletter different than Ben's? Not saying it is not a good idea that you are doing it - just wondering :)

I've been a part of Owen's beta over the last few months for re:Charged and I'm a big fan. It's timely, interesting, and relevant content. It's like he knows about the stories that matters to me and cuts through the BS to deliver the relevant parts.

Pros:

Timely, distilled, and interesting news with solid takes on them.

Cons:

There were mobile formatting issues but those are now resolved