{"id":7172,"date":"2025-04-17T08:07:56","date_gmt":"2025-04-17T12:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.startupecosystem.ca\/news\/smashing-app-by-goodreads-founder-shuts-down\/"},"modified":"2025-04-17T08:07:56","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T12:07:56","slug":"smashing-app-by-goodreads-founder-shuts-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupecosystem.ca\/news\/smashing-app-by-goodreads-founder-shuts-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Smashing App by Goodreads Founder Shuts Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Smashing, an AI-powered app designed for curating reading content, has announced its closure due to scaling challenges. Founded by Otis Chandler, the creator of Goodreads, Smashing aimed to aggregate and personalize news, articles, and social media posts for its users. Despite raising $3.4 million from investors such as True Ventures and Blockchange, the app struggled to achieve the necessary growth to sustain its operations. The closure highlights the challenges faced by similar AI-powered news apps, as seen previously with the shutdown of the Artifact app by Instagram&#8217;s co-founders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Smashing, an AI-powered app designed for curating reading content, has announced its closure due to scaling challenges. Founded by Otis Chandler, the creator of Goodreads, Smashing aimed to aggregate and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1434],"tags":[3256,413,8446,8445,3556],"class_list":["post-7172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-global","tag-ai-powered-apps","tag-global-startup-news","tag-goodreads","tag-reading-curation","tag-startup-closure"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Smashing App by Goodreads Founder Shuts Down - Startup Ecosystem Canada<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.startupecosystem.ca\/news\/smashing-app-by-goodreads-founder-shuts-down\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Smashing App by Goodreads Founder Shuts Down - Startup Ecosystem Canada\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Smashing, an AI-powered app designed for curating reading content, has announced its closure due to scaling challenges. 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