I use Sendgrid to send emails, which has worked great so far although it took a while to get my account fully set up.
Re: customers, so far I've had more than 10 and less than 1000. One encouraging sign is that many people are coming back after finishing their first book and buying another.
Instapaper users pay to read free articles from the internet in a way that fits into their lives better. Same concept here.
I used it for a couple of weeks. The app is slick and it has some really cool features (like letting you import your own ebooks) but I kept forgetting to open the app and then falling behind. Also the daily reading length of 20 minutes per day felt too long for me, personally.
Ultimately I got it in my head that I'd be more likely to actually read issues if they showed up somewhere that I already had a habit of checking daily (my email inbox), and if the issues were shorter (~10 minutes each) with more fine-grained controls about when they were delivered. So that's what I built!
I actually emailed Michael (the person behind Serial Reader) back in June, hoping to get his blessing to use the word "Serial" in my product's name. Never heard back and eventually I decided to move forward with the name.
