#90 - Product/Market Fit? Still Not Yet!

#90

                            March 29, 2021

                #90 - Product/Market Fit? Still Not Yet!

                        We've still not reached product/market fit, but we have massively improved our progress tracking. Just one more feature and we'll be fine, right? 😅

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#90 | 29 March 2021

Still no product/market fit?

The last time I brought up the topic of product/market fit (PMF) was Issue #62.

PMF: that sweet spot where your product perfectly fits your market's needs and usage skyrockets and then keeps climbing. 📈

And despite the fact that we now have over 170k users, growing by over 1k every day, with 14k users visiting daily, and almost 50k visiting each week, we still don't have it! 😔

How do I know? It's the same story as before:

The trend in our active users over the last 90 days.

We spike, and then it tapers off before starting to plateau.

Something to be wary of when you're seeking PMF is falling into the Next Feature Fallacy trap.

"Just this one extra feature and everyone will love the product and use it all of the time..."

It helps that I'm aware of this trap since of late I've been saying to the team: there are just a handful more things we need to do to really round out the experience and then...

Really, we need to understand what drives people to use The StoryGraph: what all of those who stick around have in common and what insights can be gleaned from those who leave!

Since last time...

We've made massive improvements in how people track their progress through the books that they're reading.

Say you go to record that you're 30% through a book and that book is 100 pages long, head to your stats dashboard and you'll see that your pages read so far have gone up by 30! 🙌🏾

This change is perfect for people who have a daily page target or read bigger books and want to see more evidence of their gradual progress!

Spot the "Add note" link?

Now users can build up their very own digital reading journal on the site! 🤓

Slogging your way through a book and decide you don't want to continue with it anymore?

On The StoryGraph you'll still get credit for any pages read! 🙌🏾

This addition really rounds out our pages goal feature. 😍

Next two weeks

We're starting to shift focus towards the Community aspects of the app.

We've been beta testing our upcoming similar users feature with a handful of our volunteer Librarians and so far the feedback has been really positive. 

We hope to roll out V1 for everyone soon, with an enhancement for Plus users. 😏

We've already started moving things around a little bit...spot the difference?

I also want to get a better handle on our metrics. There are people out there who use the site every day: What brings them back? Which features give them the most value? 

Having an answer to these questions will help us figure out our priorities and get closer to product/market fit!

What I'm reading right now

I'll be picking up Nir Eyal's "Hooked" this week.

Don't worry — we're not trying to build an unhealthily addictive product! We just want to build something readers absolutely love. 🥰

Have a great week,

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 upgrading to our Plus plan!

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