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July 20, 2020

#59 - Fast Enough?

On whether The StoryGraph is moving too slowly, site upgrades past and future, and the relaunch of the Librarian volunteer programme!

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Fast enough?

 
They say startups should move fast.

Is The StoryGraph moving fast enough? 🤔

Ever since the user spike, it has all felt too slow, whether it's spending two weeks to catch up with "Ordered for you" and Goodreads imports following the spike, or me taking six days to achieve just one product goal from the week's todo list. (Admittedly, it was a big one. More on that later. 😎)

There are so many improvements and developments to the site that are forever "on the roadmap" and sometimes, especially when responding to customer tweets and emails, I fear waning excitement and momentum.
 

Every time I land on the Find A Book page, I think: must improve homepage experience, must redesign filter menu, must make "Ordered for you" clearer, must add loads more books... 😅

 
However, when you feel like this, there's only one way to handle it: keep going! There'll always be some periods of time that feel slow and unproductive and others where you can't believe just how much you got done. 

After all, the thing that fuels me and the team is our belief in the product vision and the conviction that we will realise it.

And if past experience is anything to go by, I suspect I'll always feel like I could be doing more and better, no matter how much I've achieved. 🙃

Wishing everyone a super productive week!

Last week
 

Search on the site finally got that upgrade!

Exact matches are prioritised, we better handle punctuation, accents, and misspellings, and you can now search by series! 🎉
 

Spelling error intentional, in case that wasn't clear. 😌


I didn't quite get the potential redesign sketches done, but we're mulling on changing the "Find A Book" page to be more of a launchpad into different areas of the site. Think: Oh, you'd like to choose your next book to read? And how would you like to do that today? 🤓

This week


It's about time I relaunched the volunteer Librarian scheme!

I've already got about twenty new users signed up to help us improve our book database. 

Behind the scenes of a TSG book. 👀


Outside of product work, I'll be finessing the onboarding process for that. If you're curious to know more about being a StoryGraph Librarian, hit 'Reply'! 😊

What I'm reading right now


I know I spoke about moving fast earlier but there's definitely something to be said for The StoryGraph's considered, patient approach.

Despite that, I still love reading about the different ways in which companies are built, and given I'll be taking part in a short mentorship series with Chris Yeh starting this week, I figured I'd check out his book:
 
 
Do you enjoy reading startup stories?

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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