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August 15, 2022

#126 - Giveaways!

Our Giveaways Beta Programme, improving the UX around adding books to reading challenges, and a viral tweet!

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#126 | 15 August 2022

Giveaways!


Publishers and authors have wanted to work with us for a long time! We've always told them that we'd love to find a way to but that, for now, we have to focus on making the product excellent for our users.

During a conversation with Rob last week, we realised that starting a giveaways section in the app was a win-win for everybody: users get free books, we have a way of collaborating with publishers and authors, and we unlock a new revenue stream that will serve us well in our journey towards long-term profitability and sustainability as a small, independent startup with millions of users! 🥳
 
Screenshot from the mobile app. Two book carousels are shown, with book covers lined up horizontally across the screen. The title of the second one is visible reading: Popular this week. To the right of the title is a green button labelled: "Browse".
We see a new Giveaways carousel in the app's future! 🔮😆

If you're an author or work for a publisher that is interested in being a beta customer and having one of the first ever listed giveaways on StoryGraph, then please fill out our short form to register your interest!
 

Since last time...
 

We finally started work on making it easier to add books to reading challenges! 🙌🏾

The first step was a UX improvement, making it so that reading any edition in the family of an added book would increment challenge progress. For this not to have a big performance impact, we also had to incorporate changes in how the reading challenge panes were loaded.

The result? The reading challenge dashboard and profile pages now load even faster than before! 😍
 
Screenshot of my Reading Challenge Archive dashboard. There are 6 panes in a grid format with 3 rows and 2 columns. Each shows the title of a reading challenge and a green progress bar labelled: 100%.
My Reading Challenge Archive used to take about a second to load. Now it loads instantaneously. 😎

We started to notice increased activity on the app last week: more visitors, more signups, more Plus activations...

Turns out this tweet was the culprit:
 
Tweet from @folkmare. The tweet reads: "while #goodreads is trending, as a librarian, I am here to beg you to get a storygraph account -fractional star ratings -genre, mood, tone (STATS) -mark DNF option -nicer design -not owned by amazon (Black woman owned/founded)". Underneath are a few screenshots from the app showing pie charts and filter menus. Underneath the tweet, the stats read: 2696 Retweets, 386 Quote Tweets, 10.7k Likes.
This is the most-liked tweet about us ever! The stats on it rival the two that kicked off our first ever massive spike!
 

Next two weeks


Apart from product work, we'll be doing customer research for the Plus repositioning I mentioned a couple weeks ago and kicking off our Giveaways Beta Programme.

Also, looks like we're soon going to hit a Plus milestone of 5000 subscribers! 👀
 

What I'm reading


The other day I received an email that my hold (The Kobo/OverDrive integration is amazing!) for Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone had come in so I'll be getting to that soon. 
Screenshot of the top of my To-Read Pile page. Underneath the header and search bar is the Up Next section. One book is in there, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone. The cover is to the left, which shows an orange tissue box on a sky blue background. To the right, is all of the book information. It's tagged as nonfiction, memoir, psychology, emotional, reflective, medium-paced. Above the book pane, top right, is a button to take me to my Up Next Suggestions.

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!
Author or work in publishing? Sign up to our Giveaways Beta!

Want to volunteer? Apply to be a Librarian!
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