{"id":835782,"date":"2025-03-21T14:12:05","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T19:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/21\/custom-feed-builder-graze-is-building-a-business-on-bluesky-and-investors-are-paying-attention\/"},"modified":"2025-03-21T14:12:05","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T19:12:05","slug":"custom-feed-builder-graze-is-building-a-business-on-bluesky-and-investors-are-paying-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/21\/custom-feed-builder-graze-is-building-a-business-on-bluesky-and-investors-are-paying-attention\/","title":{"rendered":"Custom feed builder Graze is building a business on Bluesky, and investors are paying attention"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A startup called Graze<\/a>, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky<\/a> social network, has caught investors\u2019 attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions.<\/p>\n

In other words, Graze has stumbled upon a potentially viable business model for Bluesky before<\/a> the social network itself has. Investors are taking notice, too: Graze is poised to announce the close of an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been doing tech startups for 30 years and this is actually the craziest early-stage growth curve I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d says Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke<\/a>, speaking to the tool\u2019s adoption. \u201cWe went from zero \u2014 literally no traffic \u2014 to serving hundreds of thousands of unique people every day, tens of millions of content impressions. It\u2019s nuts. It\u2019s totally nuts. And it\u2019s all word of mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bakke is joined by co-founder Devin Gaffney<\/a>, whose background is in social media and network analysis. The two began working together around 12 years ago on Little Bird<\/a>, a social data analysis startup that relied on parsing Twitter\u2019s full feed, also known as the \u201cFirehose<\/a>,\u201d to extract insights that could be useful to businesses.<\/p>\n

Now, they\u2019re working with the new generation\u2019s firehose: the \u201cJetstream<\/a>\u201d offered by the open and decentralized social network Bluesky<\/a>, which includes all the public posts from its now more than 30.3 million users<\/a>, as well as future apps building on the underlying AT Protocol<\/a> (or AT Proto, for short).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve always been interested in social networks, especially the nascent, growing social networks, to see what\u2019s happening next,\u201d Bakke says.<\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong>Graze<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Following the events that drove<\/a> millions<\/a> to leave X to join Bluesky over the past year (and in even larger numbers after the U.S. presidential elections<\/a>), the two founders seized the opportunity to start working in this space again.<\/p>\n

In November, they began building Graze<\/a>, a tool that gives Bluesky users the ability to \u201ccreate their own algorithm,\u201d so to speak, in the form of custom feeds built with complex logic, multiple filters, and rules. And its tools have rapidly taken off.<\/p>\n

Graze\u2019s growth is being helped by Bluesky\u2019s increasing popularity; the network added 23 million users<\/a> over the past year.<\/p>\n

Though Bluesky looks and feels much like X, with its text-first nature, timeline, and DMs, it\u2019s offering a more democratized experience than traditional social networks. Instead of being centrally managed by a billionaire owner like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, anyone can run their own Bluesky Personal Data Server<\/a> and set their own moderation controls<\/a>. They can also build their own custom feeds<\/a> to filter the network\u2019s content in a variety of ways, instead of only relying on Bluesky\u2019s algorithm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong>Graze<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Graze operates on Bluesky\u2019s Jetstream and works with AT Proto<\/a> allowing people to build not just feeds, but also their own websites and experiences based on their filtered versions of the Jetstream.<\/p>\n

For instance, one Graze customer is building a social media platform focused on professional cycling. With Graze\u2019s toolset, the customer can create different algorithms that identify and track specific teams and people, and also moderate the feed so it\u2019s \u201csafe for work.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s also the tool that built top Bluesky feeds like News<\/a> and BookSky<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Several of the apps building<\/a> their own \u201cTikTok for Bluesky\u201d-type video experiences are working with Graze\u2019s toolset, too. <\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong>Graze<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What\u2019s potentially more interesting is that Graze is one of the only platforms working to monetize these custom Bluesky feeds, and it\u2019s doing it with the Bluesky team\u2019s blessing.<\/p>\n

The startup has already quietly tested sponsored posts via its platform, which loads ads into custom feeds. (Because Bluesky doesn\u2019t have a way of differentiating ads in its product, these posts use a hashtag to flag themselves as ads.)<\/p>\n

\u201cTemu can\u2019t just come in and buy like $100,000 of advertising on [someone\u2019s] news feed,\u201d Bakke says. Instead, an advertiser offers a sponsored post and the number of impressions they\u2019re aiming for. \u201cThe feed operator has to consent to it. They maintain 100% editorial control over what goes into their feed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plus, he says, if someone overruns their feed with ads, the users will likely abandon it. \u201cSo, there\u2019s a natural ecosystem balancing process,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

The ads can be set at whatever price point the feed\u2019s creator chooses. Initially, Graze\u2019s guidance is a $1 to $3 CPM rate. That\u2019s a quarter of what it costs to advertise on other social networks, but so far, the click-through rates and engagement are comparable, he says.<\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong>Graze<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Graze also respects Bluesky\u2019s existing privacy guidelines \u2014 meaning the ads are not targeted by collecting users\u2019 personal data and or demographic info, but rather by which feeds the advertiser wants to reach. (Presumably, a cat food brand would do well advertising in a feed focused on cats, for example.)<\/p>\n

Other Graze tools will soon allow for private feeds, including those that require a subscription payment to access. <\/p>\n

With both ads and subscriptions, Graze is eyeing a 30\/70 revenue split, similar to the App Store, with creators taking the larger share. It will also work with brands and businesses to match them to feeds that would best serve their interests via a creator marketplace, launching next week.<\/p>\n

Portland-based Graze is currently a team of three, including front-end developer Andrew Lisowski, based in San Jose.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Sarah Perez
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors\u2019 attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions. In other words, Graze has<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":835783,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28912,3921],"tags":[59020,20198],"class_list":{"0":"post-835782","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-builder","8":"category-custom","9":"tag-builder","10":"tag-custom"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/835783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}