#112 - Cutting Costs

#112

                January 31, 2022

            #112 - Cutting Costs

                More efficiently serving our book images, a status update on the end-of-year wrap-up, and starting customer interviews with our Early Bird customers.

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#112 | 31 January 2022

Cutting costs

We've had a long-standing todo item to more efficiently display book cover images to the user. Up until now, there was always something that we deemed higher priority, but spikes in usage and page views — and therefore costs — made the matter more pressing! 😬

So, last week, we finally set aside the time to change how the images were uploaded, resized, and served to the end user.

In the chart above, Jan 22-24 show that our bandwidth costs were just under £100 per day. January 25th-27th was when we processed all 20+ million images and since the 28th these costs have been about 80% lower per day. 😍

And for a double win? Pages should now load even more quickly for everyone! 🙌🏾

Since last time...

Last time I mentioned that we had some changes that we wanted to make to our infrastructure and architecture. We managed to carry out the bulk of this work over last weekend with hardly any hiccups! This was another huge step towards the long-term sustainability of The StoryGraph! 🎉

So...with all of this talk of cost-cutting, maintenance, and performance work, was there any progress on the 2021 Reading Wrap-Up...?

There was!!

But we're definitely behind schedule on it. It was meant to come out in January, but now the first day or so of February is looking more likely... 😅

If you have at least 2 books marked in 2021 on StoryGraph, stay tuned for an in-app notification soon! 😁

Next two weeks

It's time for me to get back to customer research! The 1100 users who pre-ordered Plus will be due for renewal in a month. I'll be jumping on calls with a bunch of them over the next couple of weeks to understand more about their use of the product, especially having experienced the full evolution of the Plus offering to date!

We'll also be drawing the 5 winners of our January Pages Challenge! When I checked the other day, 8771 people were still in the running! 🤩

My 75 pages-a-day goal is going really well so far!

Apart from the 19th when I fell asleep, just before midnight, at 73 pages. 😩

What I'm reading right now

A rare one for me — I'm reading a book that hasn't been published yet! I really enjoyed Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves several years back, so when I saw the opportunity to request an Advanced Review Copy of her upcoming novel Booth, I jumped at the chance!

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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