#83 - Launched! 🎉

#83

                            January 4, 2021

                #83 - Launched! 🎉

                        How our launch went — the good and the not so good — and what's next! Another launch, of course. 😅

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#83 | 4 January 2021

Launched!

Well, well, well..it was a wild week, but...

WE PULLED IT OFF!! 🥳

The StoryGraph is no longer in beta — we've officially launched! 🙌🏾

A screenshot from my very first newsletter from 10 June 2019. I certainly didn't know I'd be launching a site with almost 100k users 1.5 years later!

Despite the fact that we didn't deliver as much as we wanted to (and I didn't leave enough time to put together and act on a proper comms/outreach plan 😅), our launch appeared to be a great success. 

Hundreds of people shared the news across their social media platforms and we ended up with the highest number of users ever in one day on the site — 22k! Amidst all of that traffic, the site stayed online and fast!

Stats from launch week. The session duration continues to go up even as tens of thousands more people discover the site!

Thank you so very much to everyone who's been reading these newsletters for a while.

It's been invaluable having your support and reaching this milestone feels awesome!

Last week

So, what has been the biggest change in the product since last week?

The design!

Not only did it end up being a rather complex, fiddly, and painstakingly slow piece of work, I was rather nervous about the change. What if nobody liked it?!

Turns out I needn't have worried! It was a big hit. Phew!!

The page I'm most proud of is the homepage. We went from this:

to this:

Spot the fun progress tracker top right!

We've also got a snazzy new marketing page:

I should say: not everything went smoothly.  😅

For one, we changed the site's URL from beta.thestorygraph.com to app.thestorygraph.com hours before launch. We should have known better! Updates like this often take a while to propagate. Sure enough, a handful of people were left unable to access the site for a couple of days. 😩

On one other occasion, I hastily pushed some code to the live site without thinking about potential side effects and managed to break search for everyone. 🤦🏾‍♀️

But these are all normal things in the world of software development and it's good to go through them and learn from them.

And, most importantly, learn not to be scared of them!

This week

Something I'm disappointed that I didn't manage to wrap up was work on editions — right now, not all books are in the right groups, it's really hard for our volunteer Librarians to edit the groups, and users can't switch their records from one edition to another. It's leading to a less-than-ideal user experience on this front and so I hope to finesse this feature a lot more this week.

Also, we have another launch in a few weeks, remember? 😬

Time to start planning for that!

Early Bird pricing ended on Jan 1. We've had 30 full-price customers so far, taking the total number of Plus pre-orders to 1210.

What I'm reading right now

I managed (with very little sleep... 👀) to get my 2020 reading blog post out!

Please have a read and let me know if we had any books in common last year.

Thank you so much for all of your support in 2020. Here's to a fantastic 2021 for us all,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody 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 StoryGraph yet? Check it out today!

Love the site? Consider pre-ordering our Plus plan!

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