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May 6, 2024

#171 - Talk Preparation to Journey Reflection

Preparing for an upcoming keynote, reflecting on the journey so far, and coding in between!

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#171 | 6 May 2024

Talk Preparation to Journey Reflection


I'm currently en route to Detroit to deliver the opening keynote for RailsConf!

My talk is titled...
Cyan text on a white background reading: Getting to two million users as a one-woman dev team. Underneath in black text is "Nadia Odunayo, @nodunayo".

It's an updated edition of a talk I gave at The Rails SaaS Conference in October 2022.

I'm excited to give this new-and-improved version — thank you so much Saron, Andy, and Rob for all of your time and feedback — and working on it was such a great way to go down memory lane and remember some key highlights from the journey so far:
Screenshot of a tweet reading "book twt can we please collectively start using this instead of goodreads ive been using it for five minutes and it's already so much better plus it was founded by a black woman and it's not run by amazon."
The June 16th 2020 tweet that gave us our first big spike.
Screenshot of a tweet that reads "please get storygraph i've had it for one day and i'm still losing my mind over how good it is". Then screenshots of a presentation titled: "WHY YOU SHOULD USE STORYGRAPH".
The June 17th 2020 tweet that added more fuel to the fire!
Screenshot of a graph with Time on the x-axis and "No. of users" on the y-axis. The chart shows a line that is almost horizontal going from 100 users to 1.2k, then it suddenly shoots right up across the time span of one day to 10k no. of users.
The impact the two tweets had on user numbers.
Screenshot of a page with a cyan background. In white is the text: "Introducing...The StoryGraph Plus. Coming early 2021.". Then there's a white pane with black text on it. It reads "Early Bird Price $29.99" then lists a bunch of features.
The very first Plus page!
Screenshots from a TikTok video. A woman's head is superimposed on StoryGraph screenshots.
When a TikTok video about us went viral...
Screenshot of a StoryGraph tweet. The text reads "We've made it to number 1 in the US App Store Book Charts, ahead of all the Amazon-owned apps". Then there's an accompanying screenshot showing that.
...and led to us briefly topping the US App Store Books charts!
 

Since last time...
 

I didn't have as much time as I hoped I would for coding last week!

Still, I did make some progress towards my goals, one of them being adding the ability to filter down the readalongs page by book title:
Screenshot showing a filter menu at the top of the page. "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" has been selected in the "Book" section. Underneath there's a sort menu set to "Participants: High to Low" and then there are two panes, both showing readalongs for the selected book, but with the first one having more participants.

I also spent some time working on new tooling for our Volunteer Librarians that'll help them keep track of changes on different editions and leave notes for their fellow volunteers.
 

Next two weeks


After my talk on Tuesday morning, I'll go back to focusing on optimising database queries, helping people more easily discover live readalongs and buddy reads suited to them, and deploying new librarian tooling.
 

What I'm reading


I'm currently part way through Noreen Masud's A Flat Place as part of my Women's Prize Nonfiction Shortlist read!
Book pane for Noreen Masud's A Flat Place. The cover is to the left and shows a flat landscape with pools of water, with a blue sky. The middle shows the book tags: nonfiction, memoir, nature, challenging, emotional, reflective, medium-paced, and the right hand side shows my reading information: a progress bar 22% filled, "Started May 1 2024", and a "currently reading" tag.

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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