You follow 12 publications and share links across 6 different chats. CatchUp brings it all together — your curated sources and your friends' shared content — into one intelligent, personalized feed.
You read Wired on one tab, MIT Tech Review on another. Your friend drops a must-read article in WhatsApp. Another shares something on Telegram. A third posts it on Instagram Stories. You miss most of it.
There's no single place that knows what you care about and also knows what the people you trust care about.
Configure once, read everywhere. CatchUp pulls from your chosen sources and your network into one clean, swipeable feed — then lets you do something with what you've read.
Add any publication — Wired, MIT Tech Review, The Guardian, or any RSS source. Toggle topics per source. Everything flows into one filtered feed, no algorithm tax.
Articles your friends share across WhatsApp, Telegram, and Instagram surface in a dedicated "Friends' Adds" tab. Nothing falls through the cracks.
Save articles into named collections. Keep them private or share with friends for collaborative curation. Get notified when someone adds to a shared collection.
Chat with your collections. Summarize your AI Ethics collection, compare articles on climate tech, or get the top 3 takeaways from this week's reading — all grounded in what you've saved.
Use the default Grok integration with zero setup, or bring your own API key for Gemini, OpenAI, Perplexity, or Anthropic. Your data, your model.
Know the moment a friend adds something to a shared collection. Never miss an article someone thought was worth saving for you.
Add publications you trust, set topic filters per source, and connect your social accounts so friends' shares start flowing in.
Swipe through your feed. Save articles to collections with one tap. Dismiss what's not relevant. The feed learns from your choices.
Use Ask AI to query across your saved collections — get summaries, comparisons, or key takeaways without leaving the app.
Aggregating sources and social sharing sounds simple until you hit the real constraints. These are the hard problems that sit underneath the clean UX.
WhatsApp has no public API. Instagram actively blocks scraping. Telegram is more open but still requires workarounds. "Friends' Adds" — the most differentiating feature — is also the hardest to build reliably without platform cooperation or a share extension model.
→ The core technical risk for the product
Adding every source a user follows doesn't reduce noise — it amplifies it. Without smart de-duplication, topic clustering, and read-time estimation, the unified feed can feel more overwhelming than the fragmented experience it was meant to replace.
Mitigation: progressive onboarding, topic limits per source, smart dedup
The Ask AI feature is only as useful as the collections a user has built. For new users with empty collections, it has nothing to work with — which is exactly when they're evaluating whether the app is worth keeping. The most powerful feature is invisible at first use.
Mitigation: seed collections from onboarding, demo mode with sample articles
The Friends' Adds tab is empty if none of your friends use CatchUp. It's a classic cold-start network problem — the feature that makes the app compelling requires other people to be on it first. Solo users get a good RSS reader; the real value only emerges at 3+ connected friends.
Mitigation: friend invite flow, "import shares" from existing chat history
Training users to swipe-to-dismiss is good for engagement metrics but bad for actual reading. A feed designed for speed can inadvertently reward shallow skimming over the deeper engagement with ideas that the app is meant to support.
Mitigation: read-time tracking, "deep read" save mode, weekly reading stats
Before investing in the social graph, I'd test whether users actually use the Friends' Adds tab or just the personal feed. If 80% of engagement is personal sources, the WhatsApp integration is a nice-to-have — not the core. A simple share link (not a platform integration) might be enough to prove the concept.
→ Measure the tab before building the integration
A full walkthrough of the feed, collections, Ask AI, and multi-LLM configuration.
Watch Demo Video