Sunslider's April (May?? 🤦) updates

As always, this newsletter took its sweet time in actually getting sent. Apologies for that, but it’s the result of a conviction that is at the foundation of this company, namely that I don’t want to produce content just because the calendar says it’s time; I also don't want you reaching for the delete button because you get tired of seeing Sunslider pop up in your inbox.

But things are happening! I hope you’ll find what comes below informative; and if it sparks some thoughts that you’d like to share, please do reply with your feedback.

Onwards, Jeeves! 🛞

What exactly are we doing here?

I recently got to take a break from the computer and think about this. France had a long school vacation in April, and my family and I went to Croatia (sidenote: I don’t really recommend Croatia! It’s full of striking landscapes, but has become extremely expensive after a double whammy of post-COVID inflation and then switching to the Euro; I’ve spent time in plenty of tourist traps - after all, I lived in Pisa for a year - but I’ve never been in a place where the entire country felt like a tourist trap 😣 Anyway.).

Long parenthetical aside, I had the opportunity to think hard about everything we've built and shipped over the past year: Sunslider the social network, Sunslider Albums, ReadMoar, and Scroll Break. I wanted to step back and figure out what they had in common, and why.

The conclusion was this: Sunslider builds tools to help you share moments with people you care about, while also spending less time on your phone.

So the first thing I did after getting back was rework the Sunslider website to put that message front and center. In doing so, there was another goal as well: to make sure that visiting the site isn't the same experience as visiting every other site out there. I’m not sure things went quite as far as I wanted (the original design inspiration was a ‘79 Firebird with a flaming eagle on the hood and an electric engine swapped in 🦅), but I do think it feels different from what the vast majority of sites have today with their Wix/Squarespace templates. At the very least, I hope it reflects another one of my convictions, that we should be trying to make the internet fun again.

Check it out and let me know what you think 💗

Product updates

In addition to the site, we’ve also been putting in a lot of product work. Here’s some of what’s new:

• Scroll Break has been updated with minor bug fixes, stability improvements, and quite a few new messages to keep things fresh 💅
• ReadMoar also has a new version with bug fixes and UX improvements, as well as more reading suggestions 📚
• Albums got the most substantive changes. First, there’s an improved selection algorithm to ensure that the photos selected for your album are a strong, representative selection from the full range of photos you uploaded. And thanks to a specific user request, there’s also a new “viewer download” feature that you can toggle on if you want your album viewers to be able to download your photos (basically a cleaner, more user-friendly way of sharing photos with friends than just uploading en masse to the Whatsapp group 🎉 
• By the way, want to see how Albums actually works? Here's a quick product walkthrough 👀

And what about Sunslider itself, the app that first brought most of you into this little universe? It’s next up on the list, as we’ve got a number of areas marked out for improvement, all of which are aimed at improvements we need in all digital products, for example by getting rid of (hackable, forgettable) passwords and having lightweight but effective verification mechanisms to reduce AI/spam accounts.

So keep an eye out for our next email update (when? Ooooh, a mystery 👻), and in the meantime, post a slide or two, take a look at the new site and our new Sunslider promo video, and go try out some of our other products!

Love from Lyon,

Kyle

PS: Got ideas for other problems linked to the Sunslider “share with people I care about, spend less time on my phone” ethos? Let's talk about them 🤗