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July 19, 2021

#98 - Climbing Conversion

Making it more obvious we have a Plus plan, passing a quarter of a million users, a cool media mention, and upcoming features.

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#98 | 19 July 2021

Climbing Conversion


One of the things we've been focusing on, in a bid to build a profitable, sustainable business, is increasing the uptake of our Plus plan.

From user research, we learnt that there were many cases of people not being aware of the options available to them. This ranged from not knowing there was an option to pay upfront for a whole year to having no clue there was even a paid plan to begin with.

So far, the changes we've made have been simple, including slightly improved copy on the Plus marketing page, signposting that switching to annual billing gets you two months free, and an email that goes out informing you that your trial has recently expired...
 
A screenshot of The StoryGraph's homepage on mobile. Underneath the top menu bar is a yellow banner, with a cross to close it on the top right hand side. The banner reads: "Enjoy extra features and help keep The StoryGraph independent by signing up to our Plus plan!" Then there is a link labelled:  "Find out more"
We now also have a banner that shows up for anyone who hasn't at least taken out a free trial before.

And it seems these changes are doing something right!

The number of users on a free trial has increased by 33% in the five days since the banner went live, and our conversion rates are currently at 32% for the last 30 days and 18% for all time!

Hopefully this keeps up as more and more people's trials come to an end! 🤞🏾
 

Since last time...
 

We passed a quarter of a million users! 🎉

It's wild to think that that many people around the world have at some point decided to invest a little bit of their time to see just what this StoryGraph thing is all about.

It was also really cool to see us featured in a Washington Post piece about alternatives to Goodreads:
 
Screenshot of the mobile view of a recently-published article in The Washington Post. The title reads "Beyond Goodreads: Four tools that help readers track their books" and the article is by Angela Haupt. It was published on July 10 2021. The first two paragraphs of the article are shown, with the last line in the screenshot reading: "...or find just the right book to fit your mood".
Wonder who that last line is referring to... 👀😁
 
Product-wise, we've spent a lot of time improving our Goodreads import. It already worked well in the vast majority of cases, but given it's such a key onboarding step, we wanted to improve the experience for as many people as possible.
 

Next two weeks


We've been soliciting feedback for one of our upcoming new features on Twitter:
A screenshot of a tweet from @thestorygraph. The tween reads: "We'd love your help figuring out the next iteration of the "To-Read Pile" page.  In your dream StoryGraph world, how would the "Up Next" section work? How would you like to be able to add and remove books from it?"

I hope to have at least made some headway on this feature and pushed some updates to the stats section of the app by the next time you hear from me! 🤞🏾
 

What I'm reading right now


I'm looking forward to my first buddy read with my co-founder, Rob. I've wanted to read Ben Macintyre's The Spy and The Traitor for years!
 
Screenshot of The StoryGraph book pane for The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre. The book has the tags nonfiction, biography, history, informative, and fast-paced. To the right, the user has marked the book as 'to read' and has added a custom tag titled: 'july-tbr'.

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 app? Consider upgrading to our Plus plan!

Want to volunteer? Apply to be a Librarian!
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