#56 - The Alternative

When everything exploded last week, we were being labelled as the Goodreads alternative.

Therefore, a lot of new users had set expectations about what The StoryGraph was for. 

Goodreads says it's there to help you "meet your next favourite book". However, based on my research, very few people appear to use it for that. It's mainly used as a tracking tool.

The StoryGraph has tracking features, but the main reason we exist is to see if we can actually help people choose their next book, with a high proportion of the books they discover on the site being ones they love.
 

It's vital that we stick to the product development methodology that has been working well for us so far: getting feedback on how well we're doing on the key pain point of book discovery, iterating based on what we learn, and then going back for more customer insights.

Only once we've properly developed our core differentiator — namely "Ordered for you" combined with our filter menu — does it make sense to then finesse other features.

After all, a lot of the tracking needs are solved problems, but book recommendations aren't. 😎

We didn't meet the goals I set out last week. 😩

But we did make progress! 💪🏾

Now about 1200 people are waiting on Goodreads imports and about 8000 are waiting on "Ordered for you" (OFY).

That's about 8000 people yet to experience the real magic of what we're attempting to do. 😭

We know how to get the site running fast, but we're currently trying to figure out how to keep the site running fast, and not crashing, once we start a bunch of other processes to churn through the imports and OFY.

We're really hoping we can see the back of these scaling issues once and for all!

After that, one of the next priorities will be improving the search results: English books should be surfaced to the top, punctuation should be ignored, and hopefully we can get searching by series back. 🤞🏾
 

We're also seeing a trend of new users doing their Goodreads imports and then realising they'd have preferred to start from scratch. We want to make deleting all of your books and reviews (and your account!) completely self-service.

Very close to the end of The Humans. Maybe I'll have some time to dive back into this epic:
 

 

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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