PaperLater

This week we launched a thing I've been working on for the last few months, alongside a brilliant little team of colleagues and freelancers.

PaperLater lets you save the good bits of the web to print, so you can enjoy them away from the screen. If you've used something like Instapaper, Pocket or Readability before, it's a bit like that, but in print.

It's a really nice scale of product to have built. We solved some gnarly technical problems (automated layout/typography, single copy print production, content extraction), but it's distilled into what's really quite a small web app. There's only a handful of pages, and we've tried to make the whole experience feel really light and easy. Time will tell us whether we've got that right, but I'm proud of that.

It's nice to realise that we're getting better at launching things. Little things make it easier: knowing to get nice photos shot before launch; having a customer support system to bolt into; having an existing framework for legal documents; and so on.

I'm also getting comfortable with patterns and tools that reduce the numbers of things I need to think about, and let me concentrate on building the thing at hand. I'm never changing my text editor again, for example. That's a good feeling, and only taken a decade.

I think of PaperLater a bit like podcasts. I don't really listen to podcasts, not because I don't like them, but there just isn't a podcast shaped hole in my life. But there is a PaperLater shaped hole, and we built it because our hunch is there's one in other people's lives too. If there's one in yours, I hope you enjoy it.