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September 27, 2021

#103 - Why did you subscribe?

On why users pay for the product, our huge user number milestone, the incoming new version of similar users, and help needed to flesh out buddy reads!

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#103 | 27 September 2021

Why did you subscribe?

 
I've recently finished a round of customer interviews.

I spoke to seven people who had given the Plus free trial a go and then decided to become a paying member.

One of the things I'm trying to understand is why each person subscribed, to see if there's a pattern.

And I did find a pattern...
 
Still from a recording of a video customer interview. A white woman with dark brown hair, wearing a black blouse and a silver necklace, stares off to the right-hand side of the screen, with her hand against her mouth. She looks pensive.
A StoryGraph user deep in thought during a customer interview

"I mainly want to support what you're doing. I don't really know what all of the Plus features are."

That's the general gist of what pretty much everybody said.

And, of course, we're super appreciative and honoured that we are where some people choose to spend their hard-earned money. 🙏🏾

But is this trend ultimately a good thing? Or is it cause for concern?

Can we survive long-term off of people wanting to support us without really caring what extra perks they get?

Perhaps it is completely fine since further analysis reveals that, at the point of subscribing, most users were already using StoryGraph every day, suggesting that the strong desire to support stems from a love for the product itself! 🥰
 

Since last time...
 

We reached a huge milestone for the number of registered users...
Screenshot of white card, with the heading "Number of Users" and a large printed figure in black reading: 504,107.
That's right — over half a million people have created an account with us! 🤯

And, thank you for your patience, Android users! You can finally share books, profiles, reading challenges, and more in-app! 🙌🏾
 
Screenshot of a user of the Android StoryGraph app having just hit the cyan share icon on a book's page. A popup has appeared over the book, which is greyed out behind. There is a link to the related webpage and also a title of the page, with a link to the left-hand side for the user to copy the webpage link to their clipboard.
Share icon top right!
 

Next two weeks


Rob has been hard at work at taking our similar users feature to the next level and the latest version of the algorithm might be live by my next issue. 👀
 
Screenshot of the desktop view of StoryGraph's Community page. There are two columns, and on the thinner, right-hand side one are two panes stacked on top of one another. The top one is titled "People You Follow" and the bottom one is titled "Similar Users". Both feature five rows of a user's profile picture and their username.
You can access our Similar Users feature from the Community page!

I've been slowly working through getting in-app purchases set up for our Android app as well as fleshing out our upcoming buddy reads feature.

If you have any ideas for the latter, especially regarding user flow or permissions (e.g. where you go to kick off buddy reads, who can start one with who, the mechanisms via which you invite somebody to join one), then please hit "Reply" to let me know!
 

What I'm reading right now


I'm still reading this 900-page epic. About 30% through and so far it's a contender to be one of my favourite books ever, but there's still a lot of time for things to go wrong. 😆
Book pane for The Eighth Life (for Bilka) by Nino Haratischwili on The StoryGraph. The red, gold, and black cover is to the left. And on the right is all of the book information, including the following tags: "fiction", "historical", "emotional", "reflective", "sad", "slow-paced". It has 944 pages and was first published in 2014. There is a grey 'Track progress' button, and the book is marked as "Owned" and "Currently reading".

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)
 
Haven't tried The StoryGraph yet? Check it out today!
Love the app? Consider upgrading to our Plus plan!

Want to volunteer? Apply to be a Librarian!
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