Our Mission
The initial product of Perch is a mobile app that puts the best writing on the Internet at your fingertips. But the overarching purpose of Perch is to make great writing accessible.
Writing is how we store ideas, and ideas are the core driver of human progress. Writing lets each generation begin life with a higher floor of knowledge than the last, and the easier it is to access great writing, the faster society advances. That's why Gutenberg's invention is considered an inflection point in human history even though it was mostly just stamps for letters and punctuation.
We are starting with a reading app to remove the three layers of friction we believe keep people from reading more:
- Cost. Writing is shockingly expensive. Twenty dollars for a book or a ten dollar monthly subscription is out of reach for most people. Perch will make it free. Lots of great writers already publish their content online for free, so we'll start with those. Then, once we've hit the scale required to support tasteful advertising, we'll share the majority of that revenue with writers to attract writing that currently sits behind paywalls. YouTube demonstrates how effective this model can be: it'd be silly for MrBeast to paywall his videos today.
- Discovery. Writing is scattered across millions of websites, newspapers, magazines, and books. Perch will show you exactly what you want to read, before you even knew you wanted to read it.
- Ease of use. Highlighting, picking up where you left off, audio, summarizing, themes, fonts, adjustable text sizes, and bookmarking should be seamless. And if your grandma can't figure out how to do it, it's too hard!
We believe that removing each of these layers of friction will increase reading across the globe dramatically, and an increase in reading is an increase in demand for writing. As the supply of writing increases to meet this demand, so will our collective ideas and knowledge.
However, Perch won't stop there. We can already think of lots of ways to make great writing even more accessible. For example, an e-reader would let people read before bed without using their smartphone. And a free, open-source writing platform would allow even more people to publish their ideas. So we'll build those too. This is a lifelong journey for us, and we're excited for you to be a part of it.