A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors’ 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 stumbled upon a potentially viable business model for Bluesky before 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.
“I’ve been doing tech startups for 30 years and this is actually the craziest early-stage growth curve I’ve ever seen,” says Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke, speaking to the tool’s adoption. “We went from zero — literally no traffic — to serving hundreds of thousands of unique people every day, tens of millions of content impressions. It’s nuts. It’s totally nuts. And it’s all word of mouth.”
Bakke is joined by co-founder Devin Gaffney, whose background is in social media and network analysis. The two began working together around 12 years ago on Little Bird, a social data analysis startup that relied on parsing Twitter’s full feed, also known as the “Firehose,” to extract insights that could be useful to businesses.
Now, they’re working with the new generation’s firehose: the “Jetstream” offered by the open and decentralized social network Bluesky, which includes all the public posts from its now over 30.3 million users as well as future apps building on the underlying AT Protocol (or atproto, for short).
“We’ve always been interested in social networks, especially the nascent, growing social networks, to see what’s happening next,” Bakke says.
Following the events that drove millions to leave X to join Bluesky over the past year (and in even larger numbers after the U.S. presidential elections), the two founders seized the opportunity to start working in this space again.
In November, they began building Graze, a tool that gives Bluesky users the ability to “create their own algorithm,” so to speak, in the form of custom feeds built with complex logic, multiple filters, and rules. And its tools have rapidly taken off.
Graze’s growth is being helped by Bluesky’s increasing popularity; the network added 23 million users over the past year.
Though Bluesky looks and feels much like X (formerly Twitter), with its text-first nature, timeline, and DMs, it’s 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 and set their own moderation controls. They can also build their own custom feeds to filter the network’s content in a variety of ways, instead of only relying on Bluesky’s algorithm.
Graze operates on Bluesky’s Jetstream and works with atproto allowing people to build not just feeds, but also their own websites and experiences based on their filtered versions of the Jetstream.
For instance, one Graze customer is building a social media platform focused on professional cycling. With Graze’s toolset, the customer can create different algorithms that identify and track specific teams and people, and also moderate the feed so it’s “safe for work.”
It’s also the tool that built top Bluesky feeds like News and BookSky.
Several of the apps building their own “TikTok for Bluesky”-type video experiences are working with Graze’s toolset, too.
What’s potentially more interesting is that Graze is one of the only platforms working to monetize these custom Bluesky feeds, and it’s doing it with the Bluesky team’s blessing.
The startup has already quietly tested sponsored posts via its platform, which loads ads into custom feeds. (Because Bluesky doesn’t have a way of differentiating ads in its product, these posts use a hashtag to flag themselves as ads.)
“Temu can’t just come in and buy like $100,000 of advertising on [someone’s] news feed,” Bakke says. Instead, an advertiser offers a sponsored post and the number of impressions they’re aiming for. “The feed operator has to consent to it. They maintain 100% editorial control over what goes into their feed.”
Plus, he says, if someone overruns their feed with ads, the users will likely abandon it. “So, there’s a natural ecosystem balancing process,” he says.
The ads can be set at whatever price point the feed’s creator chooses. Initially, Graze’s guidance is a $1 to $3 CPM rate. That’s 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.
Graze also respects Bluesky’s existing privacy guidelines — meaning the ads are not targeted by collecting users’ 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.)
Other Graze tools will soon allow for private feeds, including those that require a subscription payment to access.
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.
Portland-based Graze is currently a team of three, including front-end developer Andrew Lazowski, based in San Jose.
