Custom Topic Ideas: 36 Prompts That Make Good Daily Reads

A good custom topic is one or two plain sentences that name a subject and a reason, such as "I want to improve my Swift skills" or "How the Roman Empire actually ran day to day". In Topicly you type it into the "What interests you?" box, anywhere from 3 to 200 characters, and each daily discovery is written around it. The best prompts are narrow enough to have a center and wide enough to last months.

Below: how to phrase one, 36 examples, and what tends to go wrong.

#When is a custom topic better than the catalog?

The topic catalog has 39 categories, from space and AI to chess, psychology and Liverpool FC. If your interest already lives there, start there. Catalog topics are a known quantity, and you can still narrow them with a focus or subtopic in the topic's settings.

A custom topic earns its place when your interest sits between categories or far below them. "Finance" is in the catalog. "Understanding the bond market well enough to follow central bank news" is a custom topic. So is "Byzantine history", "urban beekeeping" or "the maths behind music theory". Nobody curated those for you, and that is the point.

Custom topics are private. Nobody else sees what you typed, which means you can be honest about your level. "I keep nodding along in meetings about Kubernetes and have no idea what it is" is a perfectly good topic.

#How do you phrase a goal so it works?

Think of the box as a brief to a writer who will come back every day. Three things help.

A subject with a center. "Photography" is a department store. "Street photography with a phone" is a shelf you can actually browse.

Your starting point. Words like "as a complete beginner", "I already know the basics" or "I work as a nurse" change what a useful article looks like. The same subject reads very differently to someone new and someone who does it for a living.

A reason, if you have one. "So I can talk to my kid about it", "for a trip to Japan in spring", "because I start a data job in March". A reason quietly tells the writer which angle matters.

You do not need all three. You have 200 characters, which is roughly two sentences. That is enough room for a subject plus one qualifier, and the limit keeps you from writing a syllabus.

A before-and-after helps:

Each added phrase removes a whole family of articles you did not want.

#36 custom topic ideas, grouped by interest

Copy any of these as written, or change the qualifier to fit you. Each one stays under 200 characters.

Work and career

1. Negotiation basics for someone who hates negotiating
2. How product managers decide what to build next
3. Plain-English accounting for small business owners
4. Writing clearer emails and short documents at work
5. How supply chains work, for someone new to logistics
6. Public speaking habits that actually reduce nerves

Programming and tech 7. I want to improve my Swift skills, I know the basics 8. SQL beyond SELECT: joins, indexes and query plans 9. How the internet works, from DNS to HTTPS 10. Kubernetes explained for someone who has only used a laptop 11. Security basics every web developer should know 12. How large language models are trained, without heavy maths

Science and nature 13. Birds I can see in a European city and how to recognise them 14. The chemistry of cooking: why recipes work 15. Plate tectonics and why earthquakes happen where they do 16. How vaccines train the immune system 17. Weather: reading clouds and forecasts like a sailor 18. Everyday physics hidden in household objects

History and culture 19. Everyday life in ancient Rome 20. The Ottoman Empire from rise to fall, one period at a time 21. How the Silk Road shaped food, religion and trade 22. Cold War history for someone born after 1991 23. The history of typefaces and why fonts look the way they do 24. Great architecture of the 20th century and the ideas behind it

Money 25. How the bond market works and why rates matter 26. Index funds and diversification, explained for a first-time saver 27. Behavioural economics: why people make odd money choices 28. How inflation is measured and what the numbers mean

Hobbies and life 29. Street photography with a phone 30. Beginner chess openings and the ideas behind them 31. Growing vegetables on a small balcony 32. Wine regions and grapes, for a supermarket-wine drinker 33. Music theory for someone who plays guitar by ear 34. Preparing for a first trip to Japan: culture, manners, food

Language and thinking 35. Common logical fallacies and how to spot them in the news 36. Interesting English words and where they came from

#What works badly?

Some prompts technically fit in the box and still produce disappointing reads.

One word for a whole field. "Science", "art", "business". The writer has no center to return to, so the discoveries wander, and a wandering topic is hard to care about on day twelve.

A question with one answer. "What year did the Berlin Wall fall?" is a search query, not a topic. After the first article there is nowhere to go. Turn it into "The end of the Cold War in Europe" and it can run for weeks.

Personal advice requests. "Should I sell my shares?" or "What dose of melatonin should I take?" will not get you a personalised answer. Topicly's articles avoid personalised medical, legal or investment advice, and every discovery carries the line "This discovery was generated by AI and may contain errors. Check original sources for important decisions." Ask to understand the subject instead: "How melatonin and the body clock work" is a good topic.

A shopping list of interests. "Space, cooking, jazz and tax law" in one box gives you a strange mix and none of it done well. Make separate topics. On the Free plan you get one topic, Basic gives you 4, Advanced 15 and Professional 30, so pick the one you care about most if you are limited.

Breaking news on a niche. Custom topics are strongest for things that stay true for a while. Topicly's "In the news" pieces are grounded in articles a moderator has added in the last 48 hours, so for a fast-moving niche a dedicated news source will serve you better.

Formatting instructions. "Always use bullet points and three examples" spends characters on things the article already handles. Spend them on the subject.

#Tuning a custom topic after the first week

Your first wording is a draft. Read a week of discoveries and notice the pattern. Too basic? Add "I already know the basics". Too scattered? Name the sub-area you actually want.

Each topic also has its own settings: a focus or subtopic, a depth of Light, Balanced, Deep or All, a reading time of 1, 3 or 5 minutes, and delivery times down to the minute. We wrote a separate guide on choosing depth and reading time, because the same prompt feels very different at 1 minute than at 5.

Two other signals help. In your library you can mark discoveries as Interested or Not interested, which steers what you get next. And under each article, "Keep pulling this thread" offers 3 to 5 related concepts; tapping one writes a new discovery about it. If you keep tapping the same kind of concept, that is a hint your topic wants rewording. There is more on that in following a thread of curiosity.

One honest limit. A daily discovery on Swift will not replace writing Swift, and a year of wine articles will not replace tasting wine. Custom topics are good at steady exposure to ideas and vocabulary. The practice is still yours to do.

#A next step

Pick one interest that has nagged at you for a while and write it in a single sentence with one qualifier, like "Byzantine history, as someone who only knows the Roman part". Read it back and check it has a center and room to grow. Then keep it somewhere until you can type it into the app.

Topicly is coming soon to iPhone and Android, and you can see where to get it when it launches.