JAMES: Welcome to Happy Paths, where we unpack the human stories behind some of the most used, the most influential, and most famous software from the internet era. I'm James Evans. I'm the CEO of CommandBar and the host of Happy Paths.


It might be hard to believe, but smartphone notifications are a fairly new phenomenon, at least as we know them today, constant notifications for every app on your phone unless you turn them off. 


When iOS and Android first became popular, you'd really only get three types of regular notifications: a new email, a new voicemail, or a missed phone call. With the invention of push notifications, mobile apps gained a new way of sending information directly to users. 


One of the categories where push notifications are most used and overused is news —every day, all the time. Suddenly, you can get breaking news updates pushed straight to your phone every hour of the day. 


For this episode, I talked with Matt Galligan. Matt was the Co-founder and CEO of Circa, which was the first mainstream news app to approach news delivery in a fundamentally mobile-first way. We talked about what being mobile-first means, some of their highest-leveraged design decisions within Circa, how it was received among mainstream media, as well as its legacy in online journalism. 


When the iPhone was released in 2007, it was iconoclastic in several ways. But probably the most irreverent design decision Apple made was the form factor, a slate-like phone that was mostly all screen. With all this visual real estate, developers now had a blank canvas to build rich mobile-first experiences instead of just porting desktop experiences into a smaller screen.


MATT: When we started Circa, the iPhone 4s had just come out, so it was the fifth generation iPhone. It's kind of wild to think about what the state of mobile was when we got things started. It wasn't actually, say, all that common to start mobile-first at the time. Circa started partially out of the motivation of, say, going to coffee shops and standing in line and waiting to order. And my phone was my only [laughs], you know, way into the news at that moment. 


And so, the state of mobile...let's also recall what iOS looked like at the time, which was skeuomorphic design everywhere. It was papery notes apps, and it was a YouTube icon that I think still looked like a TV. We are talking [laughs] many, many, many years ago in the mobile world.


JAMES: Back then, iOS didn't ship with a native news app. At first, if you wanted to browse news, you could open up a news site on a mobile browser. But eventually, some news outlets and magazines did begin creating mobile apps to keep up with popular demand.


MATT: The state of the art at that time was kind of New York Times was a decent app. Obviously, it was about the big, long articles and things like that, but that's what it was. You had apps like Flipboard that had a really nice user experience but, ultimately, were aggregating the other news sources at the time, also articles. 


And so, yeah, you did have mobile news apps that were native. The key thing that led us to building Circa was that while the interface was native and the app was native, the news itself was not native. And so something that was a bit more fitting for that platform was what we were after.


JAMES: But the way news was produced at the time was still optimized for non-mobile consumption, even non-digital consumption.


MATT: If you can believe this, at the time, there were a lot of newsrooms that were still writing for print; New York Times is a good example. Or you had CNN that was still producing content that was specifically intended for the television and not yet ready to be broken up into shareable bits and things like that to go on to TikTok. And so just, even how content was produced was quite a bit different back then.


You had a handful of news orgs that were a little more prepared for this sort of thing. If I think about it, The Economist would be a good example where their first few pages in The Economist, like The Recap, or The Summary, that worked pretty well in a mobile context all the way back then. But they were already doing that. Similarly, The Wall Street Journal had some sort of bite-sized chunks that you could consume on mobile easily. But the examples were not super deep. And then now all that was left out of that was aggregators who were intentionally summarizing some of those existing pieces. 


To kind of put a cap on this, the web itself was also really slow at the time. So regardless of mobile app or not, when you were loading up a news page, oftentimes, there were two tons of, say, cookies and JavaScript and all this stuff that was loading up at the browser, and just, oh my gosh, they were so slow and ads everywhere and things. And it really took until, like, 2015 or so when Google and Facebook both did things to kind of speed that up.


JAMES: A lot of news sites are still like this, even though we have faster processors and better internet speeds. But Matt mentioned Facebook, which, at this time, so around 2011-2012, was starting to expand from being a social media platform of purely individual-produced content to also becoming a news syndicator.


MATT: Facebook was, at the time, attracting a lot of news companies to start putting, say, news articles and things like that directly into the Facebook platform. It was kind of wild because, for a little while there, they were publishing the full texts directly into Facebook, where you weren't even necessarily popping out to or linking out to the actual sites. 


And so we saw that as, you know, oh my gosh, [laughs] not only are we entirely reliant on the algorithm as a news company to surface the content to the right people, as users, we were entirely dependent on this algorithm to deliver us content, which may be different from person to person, like, dramatically so. And lastly, like, as a publisher, you're totally giving up your last mile to the user, which was kind of wild. 


This was at a time where, you know, newsrooms didn't have budget to go and build out native apps and, you know, have budget to build a really high-quality website. And it was kind of treated as a second-class citizen or something where they didn't have to spend money on. And what did we see out of that? You know, we saw the sort of mass aggregation movement and, you know, news sites and things like that stopped being destinations. And so it's kind of wild to think of all that happened after that and that almost all of these things that I just described were in our pitch deck [laughs] for Circa.


JAMES: Media organizations and news outlets were trying to figure out how to best deliver news on mobile devices. And this is happening at a time when they're also competing with Facebook and Twitter in terms of news proliferation via social media. 


If you remember our earlier episode with Chris Messina about the hashtag, it really began to take off when it was used to spread information during current events. So the internet was sort of figuring out en masse how news was going to be created and distributed. And now Matt and his co-founders were jumping into the fray with an app of their own that would change the game for everyone. 


Next up, Matt talks about Circa's UX and its most important primitive, the so-called atomic unit, as well as launching the app. The original vision for Circa was straightforward and fit into the zeitgeist.


MATT: We wanted to be able to consume news on our mobile devices that fit the mobile devices and fit the user experience of the mobile device. I wanted to be able to go into a coffee shop and fire this app up, and get caught up. But the most important thing was that I wouldn't just catch up, but I'd be able to keep up with what was going on. 


And so someone that's producing the news doesn't know what the reader knows. You kind of have to have this lead in that catches the user back up to the current state, just so that you can add all the rest of the context in there, whatever the new thing is, whatever the new development is. And so if you think about it, like, reading the news is insanely inefficient because you have so much background that you're constantly reading over and over and over and over again.


JAMES: Something else that was part of this landscape of catching up with the news were RSS readers like Bloglines, Flipboard, and Google Reader. Even if you added a few feeds from news outlets, you would easily see the same story from several different publishers in your feed, further adding to that issue of repetition. 


MATT: And that's one of the things that we said, okay, if you were to take all of the news and deduplicate it [laughs] over your period of reading it and consuming a particular storyline, then you end up with something streamlined. And so we wanted to write news in that way. 


We broke it down into what we would call, like, an atomic unit. Like, what is the smallest bit of information that still carries meaning and that can help give context to a story? And so you could just think of these things sometimes as bullet points. But if you were to take a story and break it down into, say, six bullet points, then we would write those bullet points and put it together as a story. But, as I said, keeping up with it is the harder part. 


So, once I've read those six bullet points, as a news org, if there was a big development in the story, maybe that's three new bullet points, but maybe it actually overlaps with two previous ones that we can now remove because they're no longer contextually relevant to the story as of that moment. Like, if you were to read an article over again, it would read logically, but it would only show me the diff, the new stuff that I haven't read yet. And that's because we had this relationship with the reader. We knew what they had already seen. And so now we can kind of just stick in the newest stuff and get caught up easily. 


So, to boil it down, it really was one, an entirely new way of writing news stories. It was efficient because it also meant that our writers didn't have to write the same things over and over again. It was a user experience that would allow me to kind of snack on whatever news that I cared about, get to the point really quickly, go as deep as I'd like to go, but then be able to follow these stories and keep up with them over time. 


You know, unfortunately, nothing quite like it exists today, still, [laughs] so it's a bit of a bummer, and I miss it dearly. But it was a really, really cool experience when you were consuming news that way.


JAMES: At the top of this episode, I talked about notifications, but let's put that into context here with Circa. Apple launched their Push Notification service (APNs) in June 2009, making it the first push notification service. Google released their own service, Google Cloud to Device Messaging, in May 2010. And as technology improved, banner notifications on mobile devices became what's now the standard way apps deliver up-to-date information. This gave Matt and the Circa team a lot to figure out.


MATT: Yeah, I mean, there was lots of different ways of thinking about this. We knew at the time that we had a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. We couldn't just create a new CMS and expect, you know, both readers and, you know, news orgs to understand it, how to use it, its value, all that kind of stuff. But we also knew that to achieve our vision, we needed to write these things. There was no such software like we have with ChatGPT today that would have produced content in not only the sort of format that we want but also keep things up to date and all that stuff. And so we knew it had to be people. 


Now, the model of having those writers was actually something that was an innovation in and of itself because we had, I want to say, about ten writers on staff that were working, you know, 24 hours around the globe. I mean, the writers weren't working 24 hours, but we had a team that would span a 24-hour period. And so some were stationed...there was one in China. There was one in Egypt. It was kind of all over. 


But we were able to, because of our unique way of writing and never duplicating the content we've already written and all those kinds of things; we were able to keep about just as much content up to date as a news team 5 to 10 times our size. And so there was definitely innovation in the content production side. You know, it wasn't just hemorrhaging money to just pay for the writers. 


Eventually, though, you know, once we had proven out the model and specifically metrics like retention, if somebody goes and reads a story, how likely is it going to be that they keep the app and keep coming to the app and things like that? And our retention was, you know, the adjective that I'll use was bonkers, as in, you know, we would see sometimes 60% retention 12 weeks out, which is remarkable for a news application or really any mobile app for that matter. 


And so the things that we could show to newsrooms, hey, you'll be way more efficient in writing like this; hey, your readers are just going to keep coming back and back and back, would then eventually have enough to attract somebody into these CMS platforms.


JAMES: In this way, Circa was way ahead of the curve. Their atomic units concept, along with working with a global distributed team and their unique way of updating stories, meant that they could move a lot faster than legacy news organizations and nascent new media startups. 


And while Matt's vision for how mobile-first news could work was compelling, he also had to convince investors that it would form the foundation of a sustainable, venture-backable business.


MATT: The questions that we were getting, you know, in the earliest days from the ones that invested, it would be that they didn't know if this was going to work. But it was important to try. It was important to see if there was a new model or a new way of consuming. And so it was worth trying. So a lot of those backers came in because of that. 


The ones that said no, were kind of looking to, oh, a couple of things; one was, you know, how are you going to get your top of the funnel? Which was definitely a challenge for us. We were not writing sensationalist or clickbaity headlines. We weren't doing listicles. We weren't doing a lot of these things that, at the time, were considered necessary to keep these news orgs going. And some, you know, just felt like the direction of news, you know, kind of all being gobbled up into Google, and Facebook, and Twitter, and whatnot meant that our opportunity would be limited. Those kinds of things were tough. 


And also, just the general belief that [laughs] writing news was an issue in and of itself. There were lots of reasons why somebody wouldn't want to invest. But then, you know, over time, we had some folks that were just, like, really true believers in the way that we were doing things, in the hope that we were going to be able to, you know, inspire a new way of doing news and a new way of consuming news.


JAMES: Circa launched on iOS in October 2012, in the midst of a heated election cycle here in the U.S. And it quickly gained media attention. The Guardian called it quote, "A perfect fit for a generation of readers for whom facts are free and abundant, opinions are suspect, and long-form stories are a relic of the past."


MATT: It was really pretty electrifying, actually, so kind of the war room of everybody getting together and putting all of the content out there was really fun. The initial user experience had some differences to it, specifically, like, how you would consume your updates and all of those kinds of things. But, you know, by and large, it was really well-received. The news world had some very colorful things to say. 


So we had some haters early on [laughs] that were, you know, say, critical of maybe the fact that our writers would, you know, pull together some of these details and were using sources like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and The AP, and stuff like that. Having said that, you know, we went out of our way to cite our sources, and heavy-link, and all that kind of stuff. So we had initial criticism, but the users, you know, definitely loved it. 


At the time, you know, top of funnel was certainly challenging. We were lucky in that we had been passed around a whole bunch to the executive teams at Google and Apple and a lot of these places where we got some pretty awesome placement in the app stores. At the time, like, you were installing apps on a more regular basis. I think that app churn or whatever, or new installs per month, has really, really, really slowed to a crawl or a halt these days. I mean, if I go a month and get an app installed, that's probably likely. But at the time, I was probably installing, you know, 20 to 30. 


So people were experimenting more. And they were, you know, window shopping at the app stores, and we had really great placement there. We were app of the day on The App Store at one point. And we were pretty constantly up in the higher parts of the news charts. So it was pretty easy to acquire from that standpoint. And then a lot of word of mouth. Eventually, we put out a web version so that links could be shared and get some usage back there. But that was it. We did no advertising and anything like that.


JAMES: Coming up, Matt talks about some of the challenges with news reporting and shares his thoughts on sunsetting Circa and the current state of online news. 


It's 2013. And by this time, Circa has gained a reputation for their method of delivering the essence of news to their users. They produced 40 to 60 news stories a day with 70 to 90 updates. And they managed to keep pace with some of the biggest breaking news stories at the time.


MATT: If I look back at the Boston Marathon bombing, and we were so conservative with putting our details out there because there was just such a limited amount of information possible. And the problem at that time, and it still exists today, is that you, as a news company, want to be where people go to when news is happening. And if you're not out there blasting these updates and somebody else does, then the chances that they pop over to your competitor is pretty high. And so, a lot of times, misinformation can kind of run rampant. And you might have retractions and things like that. 


But, you know, throughout that week of the Boston Marathon, there was tons, tons, tons, tons of retractions by all the major networks. And I can say, you know, with pride and honesty, that we didn't have a single retraction the entire time. And it's because we had this sort of direct relationship with the user. They clicked follow, and the user knew that when a detail was confirmed, and viable, and all that stuff, they would be notified of that. And that's great. 


But it would have been interesting to kind of be able to push out some things that may have not been unconfirmed, tag them as such, and make sure that we're able to follow up with the reader later on once we have more information. 


When we looked at traffic patterns of popular news sites and things like that, there was a very, very, very common arc to the traffic of an individual news story. And it looks like a big spike in the, say, first minutes, hours, days, probably day, maybe hours, and then just a total drop off after that. Like, you think about some random article about some random decision by a lawmaker, and how much traffic do you think that page is going to get into the future? Like, nil, unless there's a reason for it to come back again. 


But what we were noticing was because we had these sort of canonical stories that people keep coming back into and the same URLs being shared and all that stuff, was that whenever an update got pushed out there, and the news story got revved in that way, we would see that flood of traffic. So it ended up becoming, you know, this sort of really interesting traffic pattern where you just see spike after spike, after spike, after spike. It was interesting to know how users were reacting. And quite frankly, like, product-market fit or not, we knew that that feature worked, and it worked well because the traffic could not lie.


JAMES: Unfortunately, in June 2015, Matt announced that Circa News would be put on an indefinite hiatus. In a Medium post, which we'll link to in the show notes, Matt spoke about the difficulty of raising funds to keep his news production going.


MATT: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, it was kind of one of those decisions that got made for us because we had lots of great evidence that what we were doing was really working. At a time when retention was the single hardest problem for news companies, we had that on lock. Like, it was just undeniable. But, you know, the top of the funnel was not easy. And we didn't have any sort of real evidence of we'd be able to sustain monetization there. 


And I'll tell you, like, it's tough because the subscription models that have come to us in droves today or that we kind of see as dime a dozen and very likely...like, Spotify 2011 it had a customer base of a million paying subscribers across Europe. But subscription was just not a thing back then, and so that was tough. 


And so the decision was kind of made for us. We just didn't have a go-forward path. The investors weren't ready to kind of keep pouring money onto this. And we had talked to a handful of different companies about potential acquisition, one of which was...it was going to get to the finish line. 


And we were literally at the finish line of an acquisition, and for unknown reasons, and it kind of is a bummer to this day that I still don't know, like, they pulled out at the very last minute. And that was tough. It was really, really, really, really, really tough because the team had all gone through, you know, interviews. And, you know, I was even looking at apartments [laughs] where the headquarters was and all that kind of stuff. And it was no doubt heartbreaking. 


And so, you know, we ended up kind of finding a solution that meant that we could kind of take care of any outstanding liabilities and things like that but otherwise have a pretty clean wind down. And that's what we ended up having to do.


JAMES: That acquisition was by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which happened in November 2015. The newly revived Circa launched in July 2016 but couldn't capture that same enthusiasm of the original app, and it shut down for good in March 2017.


MATT: It was just a real bummer to see it go down like that.


JAMES: Circa may have been somewhat short-lived, but it made a lasting impression on its users, as well as on the news industry broadly. As we wrapped up our conversation, Matt spoke about where he sees traces of Circa's influence today.


MATT: And so you saw apps, like, Inside, and there was another one like Yahoo News Digest, and there was a few others that kind of came after that resembled that to a degree. But the ones that really stick out to me are NYT Now, which is probably, like, a long-forgotten experiment. But it was basically The New York Times' attempt at doing what we were doing. It was missing the ability to follow and things like that. But it was a more succinct New York Times.


You can imagine that they were basically just creating bullet points, probably something that ChatGPT would do today, of their most popular news stories and running them in an app that was a bit more dedicated to that experience. You know, and they had called us out. There was, like, this innovation report that got leaked from New York Times. And they called Circa out specifically as both a model of what could be done and a potential competitor, which I found was very interesting considering the size difference of those organizations. [laughs] I don't know if it's still there today, but it was, you know, say, a handful of years ago.


In Los Angeles at UCLA, they have a school of journalism. And years ago, I learned that there was a phone, an iPhone 4s, that still had Circa on it, and it still worked because all the stories were cached and all that stuff. I did have an opportunity to go to that class and to sit in and, you know, show some of what we were thinking and things like that. And it was wild to just feel this phone in my hand of an app that was dead [laughs], you know, that I didn't even have on my phone anymore, you know. And I'm feeling this app again, and it's just the nostalgia that comes right back up to the surface.


But then to realize that, like, here's this thing that represents someone's interest and genuine belief that there was something special about it, and it wasn't me. I don't know; it was a very special, like, sort of founder moment and very proud sort of thing that, like, somehow, some way, these ideas, these concepts might live on in the memories of the people that got to use it. I mean, it's really interesting. 


And I think that I at least am happy looking back that there was always some bleeding edge to it, that it was always kind of in the front of whatever trend was there. And I think that as a product builder, as a founder, that's just a critical thing that you have to have. Like, you really need to understand where everything is going to know what you need to be doing today.


JAMES: That was Matt Galligan, the Co-founder and CEO of Circa and currently the founder of XMTP, a decentralized, secure messaging network. 


Thank you for listening to Happy Paths. For more information about the show, visit us at commandbar.com/happypaths, or you can send us a tweet @CommandBar. 


This podcast is executive produced by Maurice Cherry, with engineering and editing from Mandy Moore. 


Special thanks to Matt Galligan and, of course, the entire team at CommandBar. 


I'm James Evans, and this is Happy Paths. See you next time.