#74 - What Works For Now

A reading challenge is where you have to read a certain set of books within a specified time frame. The books are often directed by a list of prompts.

On each of the reading challenge pages on The StoryGraph, there's a helpful box telling you the start and end date of the challenge.

Of the thirteen live challenges on the site, all of them have the same start and end date.

And, until very recently, those dates were redundant.  😳

Sometimes, and especially when you're building a startup, you have to do "what works for now". 

For reading challenges that meant: "Given we're only going to have one format of reading challenge on the site to start with (a set number of prompts, lasts a year), why bother building anything more than something that only checks if you read the book within the current year?

So that's all we've been doing for now. 😅

But as the product matures and we head towards launch, this setup is no longer good enough.

And so, I spent some time last week making this work properly and now I'm delighted to say that The StoryGraph has the capability to host reading challenges of any duration at all, from one day to several years, to a never-ending challenge that you complete in your own time.

Soon we'll be bringing this capability to our users! 😈
 

That's right — we finally have custom tags!

Each tag comes with its very own searchable, sortable, and filterable (is that a word? I'm going with it!) page. 🤩

And there's a lot more, including the fact that you can spin out public list pages to share with whomever you want to.

I'm sure y'all know that it's November now, which means that there's not a lot of time before January 1st. 😬

I'll be reviewing our strategy to try and make sure that December isn't super stressful!
 

I've heard great things about this collection of essays from women reporters across the Arab world:

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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