Beyond publishing: We're designing Bonzai as a network around shared ideas

I was packing the dishwasher when Nina asked what would make it easier for a busy person with a thought to actually share it. The dishwasher turned out to be part of my answer. I happened to have the time in that minute. Plenty of people won't.

We're making the step into a conversation with Nina one press, so I don't think friction is the real obstacle. The harder questions are whether people are comfortable sharing with Nina, whether that trust has been built, and whether they have the actual time in that minute.

Bonzai is a voice-first publishing platform. I got the prototype from concept to working really quite well in less than a week, running a lot of agents in parallel, pushing features live and putting them in front of my co-founder, Jeff, in twice-daily reviews. The original concept was more of a publication, with an AI journalist who interviews you and has quite an editorial opinion about what goes out. We pivoted toward a publishing platform, closer to Medium, Substack or X, built around user-generated content and less opinionated. We're hoping to raise some funding, and we want to be positioned as a publishing platform, not a publication.

But this isn't just a matter of making an AI writing tool. The part I keep coming back to is the network beyond publishing: what happens after a post goes up, and how a network can actually form around it.

Content density

There are so many unique niches out there. One just needs to look at Reddit. My thinking is that there could be quite a lot of content density around ideas shared by people who traditionally would not have written or shared about a particular topic. Maybe it's steam trains. Maybe it's diffusion models instead of large language models, or some other niche like that.

What would make someone a repeat contributor is a density of content around the niches they've chosen. The feeling I'm after is that they're sharing their thoughts with colleagues, really: trusted colleagues, or trusted comrades in their chosen niche. It would tap into people's need for belonging.

The feeling I'm after is that they're sharing their thoughts with colleagues, really: trusted colleagues, or trusted comrades in their chosen niche.

The reward for publishing is somebody engaging with your post, through a like, a comment or a follow-up article. What I'd hope someone feels is the sense that they have found their people. Nina asked whether that happens more when someone responds to another person's post or when they share something of their own first. I think it's probably when somebody responds to their post.

An open door

On Bonzai, everyone has an AI journalist, so I'm thinking we can put calls to action at the end of articles inviting people to add their own take on the topic. I want that to feel like an open door, not a nudge. The journalist would let them take the direction. Maybe they give a quick reaction, and hopefully that leads to more commentary, so we'd ask whether they have more they want to say.

A follow-up article would feel connected to the original because the person has read the post and worked out the ways their own experiences in the world align with it or disagree with it. The AI interviewer can pull on the thread the article started. A comment, I imagine, could be incredibly quick. Whether someone takes the longer step probably has more to do with their time and their inclination to engage with the AI interviewer, otherwise known as Nina.

I suspect this would mostly be for people on their second, third or fourth post: power users, people who have shared a few articles and are leaning into the service more deeply, and who have already established some trust with Nina. I haven't thought through whether someone's first use might be responding to someone else's post rather than creating a new one.

For a reader who is curious but hasn't said anything yet, the smallest signal might be subscribing to other people. That's a quiet signal; the person could get a notification that they have a new subscriber. But ultimately we want to move people to publish, and the nudge is really an invitation into a conversation with our voice system. What I'd hope happens in that first conversation is the feeling that a good article is being written.

Roll-ups and the feed

We also have an idea for roll-up articles that pull in content from multiple contributors. Once a few diverse opinions on a topic have emerged from different authors, and maybe different posts from the same author over time, we would gather them into a roll-up post, publish it and somehow notify people that they were part of it. I'm guessing that would help them feel connected to one another.

Discovery comes first. Early on, I imagine authors would share their posts by text, email or social media, which might draw other people in. For people already on the network, we would have outbound emails and a news feed they can look through. We would make our own attempt to engage people with others they wouldn't otherwise have met.

For an author, I think seeing a lovely post is the first magical moment. It should cover the topics discussed accurately, read like a really well-written piece in a polished journalistic voice unless they ask for something different, have a beautiful image and great formatting, and be almost ready to share. We have a listen button, and I find listening is often a better way to understand whether content is any good. When I use it, I'm mostly screening for inaccuracies and whether it sounds good overall. It's AI, so you're a little skeptical about what it might have written.

None of the network has been tested with strangers. In that first week, I didn't know whether the publishing experience itself was working. We will have to get a lot more cold users into the system, look at transcripts and logs, and understand in more detail what, if anything, they're getting out of it.