It was only two months ago that we had to shut down our beloved Personal Recommendations Service.  😢

We wondered whether we would find a path to profitability.
 

Remember these?
 

"Ordered for you" (OFY) sorts all of the books on the site available via the filter menu. Right now, that stands at just under 5000 books (we have over 100k books on the site, but only 5k have been reviewed by a human!).

Already, the weekly update of OFY takes all night. And we plan to have tens of thousands more books available via the filter menu in the coming weeks.

We've also discovered that a lot of users typically browse their top 30-50 OFY books, rather than doing a range of filter searches against the ordering.

Perhaps there's a subscription model hiding away here! 

Here's what it might look like: we only process the top 50 or so books for each user, but if you want all of the books on the site ranked for you, so that no matter what filter search you do the results are personalised, then you pay a monthly fee!
 

Would you pay to have 50k books sorted just for you?

 

We hit 1000 users! 🎉

Since then, our user numbers have been steadily increasing and we gained 100 users in one night last night!
 

We also managed to fix some of the performance problems the site was struggling with. Search was taking 15-30 seconds and now takes 1-2 seconds! There's still work to do, but the user experience improvements are huge.
 

My tech friends came through last week! 🙏🏾
Here's one of my friends reviewing my code to help me spot the issues. 

 

"Ordered for you" is where the magic happens so we want to take that to the next level!

One of the things we're going to start working on is flagging books that have sensitive content in them and allowing users to set preferences related to that.

The other thing that is due an upgrade is our filter menu:
 

There are two currently on the site — one on the homepage and one on a user's To-Read page — each with slightly different filtering options.

It'd be great if we had an easy-to-comprehend, powerful filter menu, that enabled you to find any book from one place.
 

If I manage to get through Robin Hobb's Assassin's Quest, then I'll be starting The Humans by Matt Haig:
 

 

Have you read this one?

Have a great week,

Nadia

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

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