#68 - All In One

What it looks like after I've watched all of the interviews back, drawn out the key points from each person, and grouped them into themes.

                September 21, 2020

            #68 - All In One

                Findings from the first round of my customer interviews, some more StoryGraph social media attention, and why this week is called "The 3 B's"! 

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An all-in-one platform?

Round 1 of my "people who use The StoryGraph every day" customer research is complete!

And, what did I find?

What it looks like after I've watched all of the interviews back,

drawn out the key points from each person, and grouped them into themes.

The main thing making people return regularly is their need to track everything about what they're reading. And then our statistics are incredibly valuable as they allow our users to make better decisions about which books to pick up next.

But none of these users are tracking on The StoryGraph solely. 

And we wouldn't mind that apart from the fact that there were comments about "wasting time" and doing "double work". 😬

How long do our improved recommendations and stats make this extra effort worth it?

We're still only on V1 of the stats. Can't wait to improve this section!

Perhaps it's time that we pivoted towards fulfilling all of our users' tracking needs as well... 🤔

After all, if we allow you to track everything that you care about with ease, not only do you save time and are happier, we also have more information with which to improve our personalised recommendations! 

Last week

We had just about recovered from our spike after the New Statesman article, when popular book vlogger Leena Normington released a video all about how everyone needs to get off of Goodreads and switch to The StoryGraph. 😅

Click to watch the video. It also features an interview with me towards the end!

We now have over 60k users and have been seeing steady growth:

Average time spent on the site over a week has never been so high! 

There were some exciting product updates too, the main one being that users can now add content warnings to their reviews, alerting other readers to subject matters that they may be sensitive to:

Those aren't free text boxes, they're pre-populated dropdowns!

This week

I'm calling this week "The 3 B's: Business, Bugs, and Birthday"!

Business

The cost of running the site is increasing every day... 👀

We do have runway, but we need to find a business model that's sustainable and profitable.

In the meantime, I'll see if it's possible for us to hook in affiliate links to Bookshop for our US (and soon our UK) customers.

Bugs

While I rethink the roadmap, I plan to look at some long-standing issues to do with duplicates and user timezones!

I apologise to everyone who sees this when marking a book as read on 21st September!

Birthday

Not only is it my birthday and Abbie's 1-year anniversary of working on the site, I have a few smaller features in mind to work on that I hope will make a lot of y'all feel like it's your birthday too. 😆

Oh, series, how hard you are to navigate on The StoryGraph... 😏

What I'm reading right now

I've started reading Cinderella Is Dead in anticipation of my Instagram Live interview with Kalynn Bayron on October 18th:

Will you be joining in on the fun?

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. :-)

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

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