Instapaper Goes From Hobby to Start-Up

InstapaperInstapaper

On Tuesday Marco Arment, the chief technology officer at the social networking site Tumblr, announced that he would be leaving it to tend to a personal project: Instapaper.

I caught up with Mr. Arment on the phone on Wednesday to find out what was next from his personal project.

For those readers who don’t use Instapaper, it’s a very simple service that allows you to save articles from a browser to read later on another computer, mobile phone or iPad.

Mr. Arment explained that he originally built the product for himself, as he found it difficult to save interesting articles he wanted to read on his iPhone. He said he was the only Instapaper user for the first three months, but after friends began asking if they could gain access to the service, he decided to offer it publicly.

“The goal with Instapaper was always the space-shifting and time-shifting of content,” he said. “I wrote a blog post about it, and that kind of launched it.” He said he was “blown away at the response,” as the service grew by 40,000 users in first few months.

Mr. Arment said that he now has 800,000 registered users and that 200,000 people use it on a regular basis.

When I asked him what users can expect from the product in the coming months, he noted that until now Instapaper has been a side project; he has focused about 10 hours a week on maintaining it and adding simple iterative new features.

“Basically the plan is to keep doing what I have been doing with it,” he said, adding that it’s always been a profitable business. “Now, there are features I want to create and business relationships that I’d love to explore.”

Instapaper offers a downloadable application for the iPhone and iPad, and although there isn’t a plan for an Android or BlackBerry application yet, Mr. Arment said he would like to build a high-end HTML 5 Web version that would cover all the Android devices coming into the marketplace.

As for financing, Mr. Arment said he was going to go it alone for now.

“It’s all self-funded so far and has been for the first six months of the service,” he said. “My only costs are my time, server fees and paying the contractor for some Web work.”

The only added cost now, he said, is coming up with the money to pay his own health insurance.