#45 - Fighting Behaviour

they've already paid for credits —

                            April 13, 2020

                #45 - Fighting Behaviour

                        On whether we keep our personal recommendation service around and our new "Recommended for you" sorting tool.

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Fighting Behaviour

They say that with startups you shouldn't try and change the behaviour of your users. Rather, you should try and fit into how they already do things. 

Thinking of this advice makes me reflect upon our personal recommendation service:

While nearly everyone who's used it has absolutely loved it, getting people to try it – whether it's a free trial or they've already paid for credits — is proving to be difficult.

What we know is that people go online to do research themselves to find their next book to read. Not only do they find pleasure in browsing, this task is not something that they're accustomed to paying for to have it delegated to someone else completely.

We're starting to wonder whether the world in which The StoryGraph is your first port of call when you're looking to spend some time browsing books to choose your next one really does involve personal recommendations at all...! 👀 😬

Last week

We released some new, exciting sorting options on the site.

Not only can you order books by page number, you can now sort books by what we think you, and only you (that's right, each person has their own unique ordering 😎), will like:

We released the feature to just 7 people last week to get some focused, immediate feedback. So far so good!

If you'd like to give this new sorting tool a go, hit 'Reply' to let me know.

If you've been curious to try out the site — maybe you use Goodreads heavily? We can import your library for you! — now is the time to give it a spin!

This week

The main focus will be gathering feedback on the "Recommended for you" sorting and iterating on that.

I'll also be thinking long and hard about product strategy and the business model.

We've got a website with a lot of potential that a bunch of people already love and use every day.

The community is loving mysterious and tense reads at the moment!

However, there's still no obvious path to something profitable. 😩

The question is: how much does that matter right now? Should we be concerned?

Or should we press on with making the website as excellent as possible? 🤔

What I'm reading right now 

I'm enjoying this and have chuckled out loud a few times:

Something that came as a surprise are the amount of footnotes. While really informative and interesting, they break up the flow of what I thought would be a snappier read.

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. If you know a friend who's an avid mood reader or would enjoy following along with this journey, please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)

Haven't tried the beta site yet? Give it a go today!

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