#110 - Made it!

#110

                            January 3, 2022

                #110 - Made it!

                        Record visitor numbers, a review against last issue's checklist, and the impending shifting of gears into product polish.

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#110 | 3 January 2022

We made it!

Happy New Year, everyone! 🥳

It's been a wild couple of weeks at StoryGraph HQ, culminating in some of the highest traffic we've ever had in a single day.

Our visitor stats for January 2nd

Yesterday we had almost 200k unique visitors, spending an average of 6 minutes in the app and generating 3.6 million page views. 🤯

Often, with great scale comes great slowdowns (responsibility, too. :P), and Rob and I have been spending hours monitoring the product, upgrading servers, and adjusting our architecture, so that the larger number of concurrent users can enjoy a fast-loading app at all times.

We're super excited for what this year has in store. We've got big plans!

Thank you for following along with the journey this far. I hope you'll stick around for more! 😃

Since last time...

In my last newsletter, I said that these four things had to be done by next time:

Our 2022 reading challenges are live
Users are taking part in buddy reads in-app!
People are participating in our January Pages Challenge
Users can archive their reading challenges

Well, how did we we do?

1.  2022 reading challenges  ✅

These are all live! Thousands of people are already taking part.

We've got our Onboarding challenge, in order to help users new and old explore our features, and then there's our Genre and Read The World challenges for those looking to leave their comfort zone and broaden their horizons.

As voted for by our Instagram community, our Read The World challenge replaces our usual Translation challenge.

2.  Buddy Reads  ✅

There are just under 400 buddy reads happening on The StoryGraph right now. 😍

Users can read a book alongside up to 4 friends, leaving reactions at specific parts.

Haven't reached that part of the book yet? The comments are locked to guard against spoilers.

Not everyone has reading buddies, and that's okay. We can help!

When people go to start a buddy read, they will see suggestions of who to invite, whether that be someone that our machine learning algorithm thinks would be a great fit or someone random in the community who wants to read the book soon.

For Plus users, tell us who you want to read with and we'll suggest which books y'all should pick up:

A couple of suggestions if Abbie and I were to do a buddy read soon.

3.  January Pages Challenge  ✅

We launched it a week before the New Year and over 30 thousand people have signed up! 🙌🏾

Aiming to read 75 pages a day this year.  So far, both days' reading has been completed minutes before midnight. 😅

4.  Archiving Reading Challenges  ✅

Got this one in at like 3am on January 1st. It was still December 31st where most of our customers are based. 😌 😆

So, yes, 4 out of 4!

I'm delighted. 😁

Next two weeks

The number one focus right now is ensuring the stability and performance with our increased load, but then we'll be shifting gears into polishing and enhancing the features we already have.

What I'm reading right now

I'll be starting Jonah Berger's Contagious: Why Things Catch On for a buddy read that I'm doing...

Have a great first week of the New Year,

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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