#63 - Money, Money, Money... Part 2

An excerpt from #12. If you check it out, you can also have a peek at what the site used to look like!

                            August 17, 2020

                #63 - Money, Money, Money... Part 2

                        How is The StoryGraph funded? How will it make money? Will there be ads? Also — why did we get a spike on Saturday? So many questions! All answered. 😁

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All things money

Ever since our user base exploded, we've had a lot of people asking us money-related questions: How is The StoryGraph funded? Will there be advertising? Can we donate?

Even though the business has come along a lot in the last year, not much has changed with respect to what I wrote in issue #12, "Money, Money, Money..."

An excerpt from #12.  If you check it out, you can also have a peek at what the site used to look like!

The StoryGraph is being funded by myself and Rob and the dream is to run a profitable business that directly provides value to our users. 

We don't want any ads on the site and we don't want to accept donations (but thank you to everybody who has offered! 🙏🏾 ).

We want to focus on iterating on the product, getting it to excellent, and then providing y'all with options that you think are worth paying for. 

Who remembers our personal recommendation service? 🙋🏾‍♀️

Fear not — we won't be putting any of the features you already know and love behind a paywall. We'll be looking out for opportunities for special additions and enhancements. 😎

Last week

We suddenly noticed an increase in traffic on Saturday and we couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

Then Rob was casually scrolling through reddit and saw:

It had a lot more than 1000 upvotes by the end of the day! Thank you, coffeemojo, whoever you are!

We had over 20k people come onto the site on that day alone, and we had a mini-spike in sign-ups, meaning we've now got over 40k users!

We also started onboarding people to the Librarian programme!

A little snap from Friday's onboarding call!

It's amazing how friendly and global this little volunteering team we're building up already is and myself and Abbie are excited to work with them! 😍

This week

Over the last year, we'll get the occasional request to be able to see a friend's To-Read Pile or the books they own.

If we were to add those options to the Profile Page, it'll become even more similar to the Your Books page than it already is.

Snippets from the two pages

I decided to go to our social media channels to see what our users wanted:

82% said "Yes, do it!" over on Instagram

One of the tasks for this week will be exploring what a new, combined page might look like.

Can we develop something that's intuitive, easy-to-use, and doesn't feel cluttered?

What I'm reading right now

Finally getting around to this Atwood that I've been carrying around with me for about a decade now:

Are you a Margaret Atwood fan? If so, which of her books is your favourite?

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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