The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Taking on Goliath (Interview)

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

This week on The Changelog we're talking with Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph. Nadia started out as a one woman dev and product team — she's had to adjust and maneuver along way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide product development, the technical challenges and learnings she faced while building StoryGraph, for example at several points they've faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of StoryGraph and how they generate revenue through Plus subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways.

Welcome back friends. This is the changelog. I'm Adam Stachowiak and this week on the changelog we're talking to Nadia Ottoayo, founder of Storygraph. Nadia started out as a one-woman dev and product team and has had to adjust and maneuver along the way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research, and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide product development, the technical challenges

and learnings she's faced while building Storygraph. For example, at several points, they faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of Storygraph and how they generate revenue through plus subscriptions and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways. A huge, massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io, the home of changelog.com. With Fly, you can launch your app near your users. Fly transforms containers into micro VMs that run on their hardware in 30-plus regions on six continents.

And Antarctica is coming soon. Wink, wink. Launching now for free at fly.io. What's up, friends? This episode of The Change Log is brought to you by our friends over at Vercel. And I'm here with Lee Robinson, VP of product. Lee, I know you know the tagline for Vercel, develop, preview, ship, which has been perfect, but now there's more after the ship process. You have to worry about security, observability, and other parts of just running an application in production. What's the story

there? What's beyond shipping for Vercel? Yeah. When I'm building my side projects or when I'm building my personal site, it often looks like develop, preview, ship. I try out some new features. I try out a new framework. I'm just hacking around with something on the weekends. Everything looks good. Great. I ship it. I'm done. But as we talk to more customers, as we've grown as a company, as we've added new products, there's a lot more to the product portfolio of Vercel nowadays to help pass that experience. So when you're building larger, more complex products, and when you're working with larger teams, you want to have more features, more functionality. So tangibly, what that means is features like our Vercel firewall product to help you be

safe and to have that layer of security. Features like our logging and observability tools, so you can understand and observe your application in production, understand if there's errors, understand if things are running smoothly and get alerted on those. And also then really an expansion of our integration suite as well, too, because you might already be using a tool like a data dog, or you might already be using a tool at the end of this software development lifecycle that you want to integrate with to continue to scale and secure and observe your application. And we try to fit into those as well, too. So we've kind of continued to bolster and improve the last mile of delivery.

That sounds amazing. So who's using the Vercel platform like that? Can you share some names? Yeah, I'm thrilled that we have some amazing customers like Under Armour, Nintendo, Washington Post, Zapier, who use Vercel's running cloud to not only help scale their infrastructure, scale their business and their product, but then also enable their team of many developers to be able to iterate on their products really quickly and take their ideas and build the next great thing. Very cool. With zero configuration for over 35 frameworks,

Vercel's front-end cloud makes it easy for any team to deploy their apps. Today, you can get started with a 14-day free trial of Vercel Pro or get a customized enterprise demo from their team. Visit vercel.com slash changelogpod to get started. That's V-E-R-C-E-L dot com slash changelogpod. We're here with Nadia Ottoayo, founder and CEO of Storygraph. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. We are excited to have you. Not just founder, not just CEO, but pretty much solo dev, right? One woman dev shop building this, what I will describe as like a Goodreads competitor or killer. Let's call it a killer,

shall we? She wasn't ready for that one. She's like, well... But it sounds good. Let's go with it. We tend to say alternative. That's the first time. Alternative. That's because you're being polite. Very British of me. Very British. This is a really cool thing.

Before we get into the details, I like this idea. This might not be your idea, but I like it anyways, which is there are cool web products that people love and then they have so much success that they eventually get purchased by big tech. And then over time, people love them less. Let's just say that that's a trend of which Goodreads seems to be an instance of the trend. And I just

feel like that's a place where entrepreneurs can just like look at that situation and then be like, Hmm, what if there was something like this, but good again. And you could like have a bunch of founders just go after that, like meetup.com just throwing that one out there. But let's talk about you. Let's talk about Storygraph. I'm just thinking somebody should disrupt meetup.com. That's my point there. But is that what you were thinking with Goodreads? Like, Oh, I used to love Goodreads and now I don't anymore. And so let's build something. It's actually pretty funny because it wasn't like that at all. At all?

Okay. In fact, okay, maybe at all is, you know, a bit far. Stretching it. Okay. Maybe a little bit like that, but mostly not. A little bit. But I purposefully, for a long time, I even fought the notion that I was building a Goodreads alternative.

Mainly because when I first, so I have used, had used Goodreads since 2012 and I loved it. There was a time where it was my favorite app. The thing is, I didn't use a lot of, I was very simple with my usage. I found the book I was reading. I marked it. I added a star rating. I rarely even added text with my usage. I found the book I was reading. I marked it. I added a star rating. I rarely even added text to my reviews.

So for me, Goodreads did everything I needed. It wasn't when I got into tech. So I went to a software bootcamp in end of 2013. So as I was becoming a developer and getting more immersed in the tech world, I did start to notice or think, wait a minute, Goodreads has not changed once since I've been using it. You know, when you get into tech and you learn about how websites and apps are developed and you notice with other products that you use, oh, that's a new design. That's a new feature. You know, I would pay more

attention to release notes, things like that. There was never anything with Goodreads. So I do remember thinking, it's a bit strange that it's not developed at all, especially since it's owned by Amazon. Like I would think that, but I wasn't angry about it. I wasn't mad about it because it did what I needed it to do. And then fast forward to 2019, when I started working on this product in earnest, originally it was just one of my side projects and it wasn't even a goodreads alternative it was a goodreads companion app oh so i was hooking into

the goodreads api to pull out to basically create a nice dashboard of all of your shelves and you could see your percent through of how much you'd read of each of the shelves. That's what it was because Goodreads didn't do that. So it wasn't even meant to be an alternative. But then when I started doing customer research, because I was having such a blast and I was like, oh, I'd love to build something in books full time. Let me see if there is a need or a pain point. All of the pain points I was getting from the people I was speaking to were all Goodreads related. So now I'm putting together what would I need to build?

And it starts looking a little bit, originally just a replacement of the recommendations portion, and then eventually a more fully fledged alternative. But for the longest time, I told myself, especially because throughout the first year, I was genuinely solo, like my co founder, Rob hadn't come into the picture yet. So it was genuinely solo. And I thought to myself, don't just change the project or product to be a Goodreads alternative for several reasons. One being, it's very easy to get intimidated by that, especially when I've got nothing right now. And it's just me and I'm building an alternative to an Amazon product that's huge and has dozens of developers, if not more. So that's one. Two, it's going to end up being very limiting for my product vision because I would just end up

looking at Goodreads and trying to do what they did, but better, which isn't compelling enough. And so I would rather, I wanted to look at it as I'm building a new product in the book space for avid readers, or maybe to get people into reading. And I will follow the pain points and see what comes out of that. And it wasn't until we got to a certain size that it made sense to be like, we're a good reads alternative. Because at that point, it was like the core of the product. We had our niche, which was the moods and the pace. The core of the product had been fleshed out. And so at this point, now we need to advertise ourselves as a Goodreads alternative so that people see it and go, oh, yeah, I don't like Goodreads.

I'll try this thing. A lot of direction we can go there, especially with the alternative section of it. I'm curious about the, and I do want to dive into that as well, but I'm curious about the customer research aspect, because in the pre-call you mentioned, like the skip that part. And I know that I'm definitely one of those people because I just want to get to the thing, right? I want to microwave this product into existence and suddenly be hitting product market fit and being amazing, right? Like that's what we all want. can we just get to the millions quickly please and that's not how it works and sometimes i think even with like what we've done here with the change like over the years we've

just we've found our way by finding what we love about what we want to build and we don't know that until we talk to the people that we intend to serve, right? Like a product isn't just simply you creating something and people loving it. It's you understanding what they want and giving them what they want. So how did you find out how to give them what they want? So I was super lucky in that my first and only real job in software was at Pivotal, Pivotal Labs. And so I worked there for a year and a half and I met people who were at the top of their field in software engineering, but also product management and design. So from that, I'd already picked up the importance of customer interviews, approaches to do customer research, things like that. So I already had a base there. And then I'd also read, you know, the standards.

I'd read The Lean Startup. I'd read The Mum Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. So I'd also read a few books that helped me be very cognizant of the need and importance of customer feedback and iterating on that, but also the pitfalls that people fall into. So when I had that first week of working on my side project and loving it, oh, sorry, also before that, I'd also had experiences of when customer research was not done well in prior products, or I ran a business for a year and a bit before starting this. And I saw what happens when customer research isn't made important, or when the whole team is not bought into that. And so I remember that when I was getting excited

about building something in the book space, my first thing was, stop, pause, gather everything you know about customer research, this has to be important. Because the worst thing, especially because I was just I didn't have a full time job job and I was just living off of my savings. I had five years of runway at the point at which I started this, I had four years of runway. So it was very vital that I didn't waste my time. So from the beginning, I had to fight the urge to just build it and hope that everyone would love it. So I immediately was like, right, I need to do customer research and the things that I knew then were I need to have a clear hypothesis of what I'm doing I need to have a like a script because a script is what stops you from going off on tangents accidentally asking leading questions things like that helps you you

know before you go into it that if you get the answers to your questions then you'll be able to figure out if what the results of your hypothesis. And I knew that I needed to have an effective synthesis method, so a way to analyze what I'd heard. And so my first round of research I did, the very first round was demoing actually the product that I'd already built, which since then, I very rarely do product demos and interviews now, because I just think it's kind of leading, you know, you're showing someone something and you're kind of like, would you use this? You know, do you like this? And actually, it's very easy for people to just say, yeah, sure, I would. And actually, I was that's what basically happened in the first round of interviews I did. And through my learnings of,

from the mum test, I learned that that was people being polite. And actually, I needed to put a product aside and just figure out pain points with avid readers. And so my first round of research was, well, I think it was just more discovery phase of are there, do avid readers have any pain points? And after I interviewed about, I don't know, five to six people or so, I was able to go through everything they said. I record all my interviews, I watch them back, I take out snapshots of thoughts, phrases, things like that, and group them into themes. And there was a key theme of, I don't have one place to get consistent, high quality recommendations. So then I take that piece and I think, what's the next round?

And the next round is, well, how do people try to figure out how people currently find books or what are their current pain points with recommendations now? And so then I do that round. And then I basically, I get to the point after doing a few rounds of, ultimately, people want to find books based on mood, sentiment, vibe, and there's no way to do that. And it's like, then I keep going until I get to the point where I'm like, here's a very basic feature set. And this basic feature set is people can key in the mood that they're looking for. And then they get a book recommendation, you know, and then so I built that very basic version. And then I let people use it I

go back to the people I interviewed I put it in front of them and a week later I book in calls with them again and I asked them like did you log in to this app tell me more about so I just try and ask questions about their behavior as opposed to like did you like it or you know what I mean just really trying to basically treat it quite scientifically as much as possible. And so it's just through this like iterative process of always having a hypothesis or a key question that I'm trying to answer, interviewing about five to eight people, synthesizing that, breaking down their learnings and just using that to guide the next step and just continually doing that. And I've continued to do that to this day is what has a big factor of our success in that we are building what people want

those questions you answered or asked seemed very open-ended versus closed like do you like it is yes or no right you can just get a yes or no or some version of politeness. But if you say, explain to me how you feel when you do X, you get an explanation, not a yes or no. Which even with a demo, I wondered if you felt like you were almost kind of selling it. Because you're demoing it, it's almost like, would you use this? That's kind of damaging to the process because they probably feel like you're done and you're looking for users, not feedback, unless that's actually what you asked for. But the open-ended questions makes a lot of sense because you're going to get a lot more from that versus simply a yes or no close-ended kind of question. Yeah. And so, yeah, after that first interview with the demo, I stopped doing demos. And I would say that the questions are the power of having them be more open ended. So they might

say, I might say, I would say they're kind of the middle ground between yes and no and completely open ending. Like, how do you feel? I guess it might be like, how would you describe this product or what's your biggest pain point or, and they could say anything. I think that's why when you do your synthesis and you break down, how did each person answer this question? And despite them saying different things, if you can say, wow, these three people ultimately said the same thing, that's a key insight because the question was open and yet they all expressed a pain point with recommendations or, you know what I mean mean and that's why you gravitate towards those things that a handful of people have all said the same thing despite the question

being very open with questions like those small sample sizes right five to eight people per round so it sounds like synthesis i was thinking like how do you synthesize open-ended questions because i have a similar situation, not on a product, but on a survey we do for front-end feud. We're trying to get open-ended questions. This is like family feud. So the question is like, you know, how do you feel about AI?

Well, we want to be able to categorize those and actually synthesize them down into groups. And we can't put multiple choice because that ruins the whole game. Like you have to guess what the audience was going to say. And so it's a text input, but I'm trying to group by in my SQL query eventually, you know, and that's difficult.

And so I've learned tricks like say like in a word, how do you feel about this? And now they're going to give me one word and I can actually work with that better. But this is a sample size of 100 to 200 people. And with five to eight, I think you can just read them and like in your brain be like these are actually saying the same thing so you don't have to actually do any data normalization but i wonder how you handle biases in in participants is it always somebody new i mean because if you're asking the same person they're the easiest person to go back to right because they already know the process and maybe they provide a good feedback how do you handle that because small especially when you're starting, there's very

few users or it's all your friends. That's the hard part with questions like, would you use this? Because your friends want to have your back and be like, of course I would, but that might not be true. How do you deal with that? That's actually a key part of the process, which I neglected to mention. Part of when you're setting up a round is also deciding who are you interviewing what qualifies them the first rounds were just friends people I knew but to mix it up a bit I also cold dm'd book bloggers from Instagram just to have some you know some strangers and things like that so I did that so I had the earliest rounds were a mix of friends and strangers from the books community. So that was kind of adding some variety. Plus maybe a little grassroots marketing,

right? You get some enthusiasts to know about the story graph through that. Yes. And then I had people obviously following the account as well, which I was just building up. And again, no product. I was just posting my own book reviews of what I was reading and then DMing people saying, I'm actually working on a product. There was a lot my own book reviews of what I was reading and then DMing people saying, I'm actually working on a product. There was a lot of that in the early days, lots of Twitter and Instagram DMs. So that's one. But then I also had this landing page up where I said, we're building a tool for avid readers. And I put a subtitle being like, if you read 52 books a year and you're interested in this, put your email here.

And the reason why I said that is because I thought the longest I'd want to wait for feedback on anything like a recommendation is a week. So if I'm getting someone who's reading 52 books a year, if I recommend a book to them, they'll hopefully read it in a week and then I can interview them or just check in, send them a survey. Like, was this actually a good recommendation to see if the product was working? Since we've been bigger, I have all, depending on the research round, I'll have different criteria for who I want to interview. So for example, there was one point where I felt stuck in product development. I

wasn't sure what to focus on, but I was seeing now and again, people tweeting and saying things like, oh, I love Storygraph. I use it every day. And we had not built the app to be used every day. So I was like, what is it about these people who use it every day? What is Storygraph doing for them? What are their behaviors that make them use it every day? And can we use that to learn about what are the most compelling parts of the app? And so I just did a tweet and Instagram post saying, we're looking for people who log into the app at least once a day. And that was that, you know, at the end of 2022, I was doing a big redesign. And so now I need to make sure that the redesign works across desktop and mobile, But also, I needed to make sure that it handled

all of our common UX pain points that made people drop off or struggle to use it, but also didn't upset the people who are happily using it and had a great time. So I actually had six cohorts. And it was across the matrix was desktop and mobile. And then it was like predominantly desktop, predominantly mobile. And so then when I was sorting out my research rounds, I would just filter that and be like, right, I'm trying to test the mobile design now. So mobile, blah, blah, blah. And we made sure that basically by the time we implemented the design, it had passed to the research rounds for all those categories.

So a key, key part of customer research is talking to the right people. And also, another thing is at the beginning of my scripts, I always start by saying, I'm doing a customer research round. And for this round, I'm speaking to insert identity here because it always gives the person a chance to go, that's not me. So in case for any reason they click the wrong box or whatever it's just like a no I sometimes get people reply to my asks and say I don't use the app every day but I would love to talk with you for half an hour and I'm like yeah I'm sure you would no so because I really stress like this is who you must be I haven't actually had a case of someone yet book in and say oh I'm not that person but I want to talk to you but I have had people email

to check to be like I'm not that person but can I and I'm like no that's very not useful to me and I will end an interview I have actually I think I have ended an interview maybe once or twice where it's kind of been like oh oh, I don't think this will be valuable for either of us. So I rarely interview the same person twice unless they're part of a specific. I had specific, very structured alpha and beta rounds. But beyond that, it's always different people. You're doing all this yourself? Mostly.

More recently, I have Abby who works for us part-time. I kind of taught her or showed her how I did my synthesis and kind of passed that on to her. So she has been helping me with the synthesis now, but I still do all the interviews. And I'm probably at the point where, especially because it is a script, I will probably get to the point

where I'll be able to hand that off to Abby, but there's no need right now. And I think as I'm the dev, it's working very well for us that I'm so close to our customers and so close to the research. And so close to the social media and so close to everything. You're very close to everything. Yeah, I'm on the Instagram and Twitter. And the funniest comments I get are when I see, I get comments like in the app or the Play Store reviews, and it will be people like, the founder's so nice. Sometimes she comes on Instagram and does an Instagram story. And it's always me.

It's just that sometimes I'll do a video. And I'll be like, hi, everyone. This is what's happening. But it's always me. The other funny thing in the dev side is people who assume I'm like, just just a social media person. And they'll say something and they'll say, pass this on to your dev team or and but they'll talk at me and they'll often be a dev themselves. And they'll try and explain something to me as in this person probably will not understand what I'm saying.

So let me explain it very clearly and slowly so that then they can pass it on to the dev team. Or they'll say, can you pass me on to someone who can explain this thing? And I'll be like, oh, I can explain it because I built it. So like, go ahead. And they're always like very surprised. Well, it is surprising to have one person do all that. That's for sure.

Oh, it is. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. How long you've been doing it and how often do you do it? And tell us a little bit about the growth story because this started as a side project. Seems like very successful growth so far. Many of us solo devs are probably envious of the traction that you've gotten because it's enviable. Tell the folks how it's been going. Yeah. So I started this, it was 2019 was that year where it was a side project. So I entered January of 2019 with four years of runway and I'd always been entrepreneurial and always wanted to do my own thing. And I was coming off the back of two failed co-founder partnerships.

So I was like, I'm just going to code by myself. I don't need anybody. I have runway. I don't need to get a job. I'm just going to build stuff. And so I just started working on that. I explained how I got to the point where I was like, right, this is interesting to me. That was the founder product fit side.

So I got the founder product fit very early. And that's what made me properly say, let me do customer research properly. Let me start up an Instagram account. Let me see what I can do here. So after three months of just customer research, so after I first showed that demo to people and I thought, no, you can't be showing a demo to people. You need to do this properly. I put the product away. I spent three months doing customer research. That was just talking to people. And I got to the point where I said, okay, I have enough to build an alpha.

And the alpha was literally just a personal recommendation service. And so it was a whole basic Rails app, but all it was was really sending emails to me and I would like send emails back essentially. So someone would fill out a form and it'd be like, your recommendation will come soon.

I'd get an email saying, this person needs a book that fits this, this, this. I'd spend however long it took trying to find a unique find. And then I would do something in Rails admin or on the console or something to just generate an email being like, your recommendation is ready.

No, actually, I think I had a backend in the app where I would put it in and then it would send an email to them to check for their recommendation. So that was that. And then I did that for about a month or two. And then I felt like I'd exhausted all of my learnings from the alpha.

And here's the thing. Remember how I said, I was looking for people who read a book a week because then they would read the recommendation. Well, what happened? I check in with the people and they'd say, this recommendation you gave me looks great. Unfortunately, I've got to finish the book I'm reading right now. And then I've got the stack by my bedside table. And that's when the pain point transitioned from, I need a recommendation to how do I know what to pick up next? Because actually I do have a lot of choice and I want to make sure that I'm always picking up the next best book for me. And that's when I realized,

okay, I need to build a more fully fleshed out app because just a recommendation service on its own is not going to stand because people, you know, they get a recommendation, but they're not going to read it for months. And really, they've got they need help getting through that pile that's been sitting by their bed for months and months and months. So that's when I started, I spent a couple months just heads down building a beta, still just me completely one, like solo. And at the same time that I said, I'm going to start building a beta, I started a newsletter because my worry was I'm going to spend two months building a more fully fleshed out product. And I'm not going to talk to anyone. I'm going to lose all the momentum from all the people I've spoken to over the last nine months. And I also don't want to build

something and then have nobody ready to try it when it's ready. So I started a newsletter and it was a hundred people who I'd basically interviewed or had heard of the product or something like that. And I sent, I just started sending a weekly, it was like a weekly, as one of my friends said, it's like, it's your weekly standup and you are just like sending out the email because it's just you doing standup. And I was like, yeah, it's holding me accountable, but it's also keeping up momentum. This is what I'm doing standup. And I was like, yeah, it's holding me accountable, but it's also keeping up momentum. This is what I'm doing this week. And also it wasn't much, it was a bit like,

I have to send this email every Monday. I can't get to next Monday and have done nothing. So it was a very, it really kept me accountable to just keep doing stuff each week. So I had something interesting to say. So two months, launched the beta. And that was just general, like sharing it on Twitter, things like that. We got to 100 users at the beginning of Jan 2020. Then I was talking about it more.

Some bookstagrammers got started talking about it more. When I say bookstagrammers, it's the term of like bloggers on Instagram. It's called bookstagram. Bookstagram. Yeah. And so Bookstagrammers would talk about it. And we got to a thousand users in June of 2020. And also we're in the midst of a pandemic. There's a whole story there. I live alone as well. So there's a whole piece of going through this product, growing and growing, and just in the midst of a pandemic, stuck in my

flat, just doing this thing. Actually, you know what? It was actually, obviously the pandemic was not great. Don't wish that we had a pandemic, but it worked out really well for me in terms of that I didn't have to, I listened to a lot of how I built this and you always hear stories of like people saying, I became such a bad friend.

I missed weddings. I missed parties. I canceled late all the time. And that really, even though I'd never had any sort of success like that, it really freaked me out because I pride myself in being super reliable. I'm always there. I'm always on time. And the thought of, would I ever have a product that meant that I would like cancel on people or be flaky or whatever. I hope not. But we did all of our exploding in 2020. Like the, like some of the biggest part, lots of it was in 2020. There was nobody to cancel on, no like being out and page of duties going off. I didn't have to deal with that, which was nice. I didn't have to let anybody down or anything like that. So what happened was mid 2020,

there were some viral tweets. And it was funny because the people who tweeted just, you know, they had, they weren't anybody like famous or well known. They literally had about 200 followers, but the tweet just like hit, the tweets just hit. They just resonated with a bunch of people because essentially they were calling out a bunch of people um because essentially they were calling out a bunch of factors the main tweet that kicked everything off it essentially like hit on a key points that were very salient at that time so one was it you know appealed to the book twitter book twitter community so it was calling out to book twitter and it basically spoke about we all hate goodreads it's so annoying it called out the fact that so

there's a great independent alternative nice it referenced the fact that it was run by a black woman which this was like a week after george floyd's murder so at this time everyone there was this big push to support black creators so that was mentioned and that was jumped on. And then also it was mentioned the fact that Goodreads owned Amazon. And at the time in the pandemic, there was a lot of anti-Amazon sentiment because of, I think Amazon's profits had been released or something and everyone was struggling in a pandemic. And it was like, ah, and look, Jeff Bezos is still rich and getting richer. And in general, in publishing, there was a lot of anti-Amazon sentiment because they have a monopoly on huge swathes of the industry. And so this one tweet, which had all of this packed in, just exploded.

And we had like thousands of likes and retweets. And I'm, you know, minding my business, cracking on with some code. And I see these emails coming in because back then I got an email every time somebody signed up and kicked off a Goodreads import. So at the time, the maximum we'd ever had was eight. And I'm seeing like eight emails, dozens of emails coming in. What's going on? Going to Twitter, seeing what's going on. This system was not made to handle more than about eight at a time. And it was actually, with over three days, we got tens of thousands. And the other thing was that the email said, your Goodreads import is underway.

But to 20,000 people, this was a lie. 20,000 people got an email saying your Goodreads import was underway. It was not underway. It was on a sidekick queue. And this was the first time I had to deal with a sidekick queue that had... The queue never had anything in it. And now it had... Lots of stuff in it.

18, 20,000 things in it. So we also had to stop the imports while... At this point, my co-founder Rob had joined me. And we had to stop the imports because we needed to re-architect everything he needed to he was managing some servers on his side so he needed to re-architect all of that i just needed to sort out my code because it was not ready to handle lots of like it just wasn't performing i can't even remember some of the stuff i was doing but some of the loops some of the it just was not ready for this scale so that was that we

took two weeks to get the app back up and running again but from that time we just kept on growing by like you know at least a thousand users each day signups and then since that time so that was 2020 from middle of 2020 to now essentially it's been steady growth with the odd spike when some social media, especially a book influencer, makes a YouTube video about us or a TikTok pops off. And then we've had the odd media. So we had an article in the New Statesman, which is a newspaper over here, about the headline was why good reads is bad for books. And so we were mentioned as an up and coming alternative that brought in thousands of users. And yeah, we've just been steadily growing since then. And behind the scenes, I'm still sticking with my customer research

focused approach. I love it. That's intense. Very intense. The cue would have like just, it had crushed me. You just said something that reminded me of a point I wanted to hit on. When you asked me the last question, you said I wasn't in an enviable position. And actually, there's a key part of this story. So I always felt was entrepreneurial and I always wanted to have something successful. And I remember, you know, following all the indie developer forums and things, I was like, I need to start a B2B company because that's how I'm going to make money fast. I can start charging from day one. It suits not getting venture capital. There was a

time in my past where I was all about, when I was younger, I was all about like, yeah, VC, venture capitals. And then over the years, reading more about it and seeing certain stories and just understanding more about the world, realizing that's not the type of company I wanted to build. So I was like, B2B is the way. And so I always felt like I fell into a B2C company because a freemium B2C company used by millions of users is not what you want as a solo dev who doesn't want funding. It's just not what you want.

And I remember when we had that first initial spike when the um we had those tweets we had all these tens of thousands of users trying to use it i felt stuck for a while because i didn't know what to do i just didn't know what to do with my code and i was worried and i remember you, I had to take a step away from my computer. I remember going into my dark bathroom and like sitting in there and literally saying, I thought I wanted this. I don't want this. And also saying to myself, is this it? Like, is it, are you going to die now? Because you actually got the users you wanted and you can't handle it. So now the product dies. And also I always say that

I never actually said this, but I feel like it was on the tip of my tongue to just be like, oh, I can't do this, but I wouldn't allow myself to actually say it. So I remember saying like, nope, that's not you. You're not going to say that you're going to get out of this bathroom and you're going to go back at your desk and you're going to fix it. But for a while, for that, there was a period of time where I thought, I don't want this. This is awful. How did I end up in this situation where I'm building a company that's not making me any money so I can't survive like this? I don't want to get VC funding. And I felt like I was trapped in it. And we are profitable now, which is great. But for years, especially as it was growing,

I was like, I feel like I'm stuck. What am I going to do? Because my money is going down and the costs are going up. Right. what's up friends i'm here with one of my new friends zane hamilton from ciq so zane we're coming up on a hard deadline with the CentOS end of life later this year in July, and there are still folks out there considering what their next move should be. Then last year, we had a bunch of change around Red Hat Enterprise Linux

that makes it, quote, less open source in the eyes of the community, with many saying, Red Hat is open source, but where is the source and why can't I download and install it? Now, Rocky Linux is fully open source and CIQ is a founding support partner that offers paid support for migration, installation, configuration, training, etc. But what exactly does an enterprise or a Linux sysadmin get when they choose the free and open source Rocky Linux and then ultimately the support from CIQ if they need it. There's a lot going on in the enterprise Linux space today. There's a lot of end of life of CentOS.

People are making decisions on where to go next. The standard of what enterprise Linux looks like tomorrow is kind of up in the air. What CIQ is doing is we're trying to help those people that are going through these different decisions that they're having to make and how they go about making those decisions. And that's where our expertise really comes into play. A lot of people who have been through very complex Linux migrations, be it from the old days of migrating from AIX or Solaris onto Linux, and even going from version to version, because to be honest,

enterprise Linux version to version has not always been an easy conversion. It hasn't been. And you will hear that from us. Typically, the best idea is to do an in-place upgrade. Not always a real easy thing to do. but what we've done is we have started looking at and securing a path of how can we actually go through that? How can we help a customer who's moving from CentOS 7 because of the end of life in July of this year? What does that migration path look like and how can we help? And that's where we're looking in ways to help automate from an admin perspective. If you're working with us, we've been through this. We can actually go through and build out that new machine

and do a lot of the backend manual work for you so that all you really have to do at the end of the day is validate your applications up and running in the new space. And then we automate the switch over. So we've worked through a lot of that. There's also the decisions you're making around, I'm paying a very large bill for something I'm not necessarily getting the most value out of.

I don't want to continue down that path. We can help you make that shift over to an open source operating system, Rocky Linux, and help drive what's next, help you be involved in a community and help make sure that that environment you have is stable. It's going to be validated by the actual vendors that you're using today. And that's really where we want to be as a partner from not just an end user perspective, but as an industry perspective, we are working with a lot of those top tier vendors out there of certifying Rocky, making sure that it gets pushed back to the RESF, making sure that we can validate that everything is there and secure that needs to be there and helping you on that journey of moving. And that's where we CIQ really show our value on top of an open source operating system is we have the expertise.

We've done this before. We're in the trenches with you and we're defining that path of how to move forward. OK, ops and sysadmin folks out there, what are you choosing? CentOS is end of life soon. You may be using it, but if you want a support partner in the trenches with you, in the open source trenches with you, check out CIQ. They're the founding support partner of Rocky Linux. They've stood up the RESF, which is the home for open source enterprise software, the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, that is. They've helped to orchestrate the Open ELA, a collaboration created by and upheld by CIQ,

Oracle, and SUSE. Check out Rocky Linux at rockylinux.org, the RESF at resf.org. And of course, if you need support, check out our friends at CIQ at ciq.com. Did you have a business plan, though? I think you have alluded to quite well that you've had a product plan. Yes. And a product plan yes and a product plan is not a business plan so do you think about the business while building the products I did I

did think about the business while building the product and pre-building the product my plan was always oh because I was still like how can I make this b2b somehow? So I said, oh, what I'm going to do is publishers, I'm going to make like, give publishers a platform to connect to their readers so they would have a space on the app. And also maybe there's a way that I can do these reports, like these industry reports or reader reports where it's like all anonymized data,

but publishers can see trends of everyone is looking for like a dark fantasy romance and it doesn't like there are only there's not like commissioned dark more dark fantasy romance books so things like that where it'd be like insights and because we had the moods which no one else had we would have different insights unique insights to specific things that people were looking for. Yeah. But two things. One is I wanted to kind of avoid anything that was data, even though giving user data, even though it would have been anonymized and would have been more trends.

But two, I had a chat with a friend, colleague, kind of sometimes mentor, Tana Sulla. And he said to me, the best businesses always make money or get value directly from their customers. Like they don't have a middle person, like a middle entity. And if you're going down this publisher plan, you're going to have a middle entity. You're like, it's not direct. Oh, sorry. The other thing is I didn't want to do ads. That was another thing. I didn't want, if I could avoid ads, that would be great. One of the things that people hated on Goodreads were the ads.

So I was thinking, okay, maybe it is freemium then. And so really the thing that made us start to build out the paid plan was just our costs. We were spending thousands of dollars a month to keep everything running, on the highest Heroku plans and the database. Every time we had a spike, we needed to upgrade to the next database. We were getting to the highest tier. What happens when the highest tier runs out? What do we do?

And it felt like every time we got an influx of users, like just our costs went up. So we needed to do something about it. And so that's when I just made up a paid plan. Like I literally made a page, but it didn't exist. I said the plus plan coming at this point, it would have been 2022. So it was in 2021. Oh, wow. I'm like, is it 2021 or 2022? It must've been 2021 because we became profitable in 2022. So in 2020, at the end of 2020, October, I made a page that was app.thestorygraphorygraph.com slash plus and I said hmm and I

went through and I looked at the features we had and I thought how can we enhance these and I was like okay similar books we're going to give you personalized similar books so you have a unique page just for you that takes into account your unique preferences your unique themes topics and tropes that you've told us you've liked and shows you the books similar to this one, but also highlighting the ones that have the things that you like. Okay, cool.

And then it was like stats. Everyone loves the stats, but what if you could compare two of the stats pages side by side? So I was just taking the features we had and just like made up a list of features. And then I said, we're also going to have a public roadmap

on which you can vote and post. You're going to get priority support. So we're going to like put your support. And I just, I said, pre-order now $30. After that it's $50, made it up. And we got over like three months, we got 1,400 people. 1,400 people paid $30 for something that didn't exist.

Wow. So then it got to the point where I said, okay, well, we have to build this thing now because I don't want to give all this money back. We have to build it. Right. And so I spent a month building it. I remember because we had January, which was a big January of 2021.

We hit 100,000 users. And then I remember saying, I told these people early 2021. I don't want people starting to get mad and say like, when is this coming out? So I just changed it to say February 2021. Just back myself. And it came out. It's funny. I was up. to say February 2021. Just back myself. And it came out. It's funny. I was up that February was wild,

but it came out. It was March 1st in the UK, but for most of America, it was February 28th or 9th. I can't remember. There you go. It's February somewhere. It was February somewhere.

That was the title of that week's newsletter. So like the next week's newsletter, it was February somewhere. That was the title of that week's newsletter. Like the next week's newsletter. It was February somewhere. That was what it was called. Love it. Love it. That's awesome. What percentage of your user base is on Plus?

Like a small percentage. I'm saying a because we've just had a big spike and I haven't done the maths again, but normally it's less than one percent it's like sometimes i think it's 0.01 or something we have right now 10.5k plus users and 2.3 million almost 2.4 million registered users so it's like what's that like 0.0 it's small yeah you mentioned businesses though and the next best thing to a b to c would be a b to g business to group right like you've got book clubs are super popular and a team of people paying x dollars a month is totally plausible because they're buying wine

they're hanging out it's groups like how does plus factor into book clubs those are super popular like i had to uh message my wife because my wife is a group club leader she's very good at it and she's got some serious like friend groups from book clubs and so i said hey have you heard about this babe and she's like no so i asked her for some feedback. I could share that with you in this call. But I'm curious what you think about B2G, you know, book the groups, you know, or business a group kind of thing. I know you have a book club feature, but how fleshed out is it? Oh, my gosh. We don't know.

Like the book club. Yeah, I'm triggered right now. It's a fake feature. Is it a fake feature? No, I'm triggered because book clubs were meant to be out by December 31st of 2023. The years were a mess. So they didn't come out. So I said they'll come out in the first week of January.

We had a wild January. Two weeks of downtime. We couldn't handle the demand. There's a whole thing there. We had to re-architect a bunch of things and we're still you know we still have some plans for re-architecting how our database works I don't know if we'll have time to get into that in this conversation but so I have only recently been able to pick up book clubs again I think there was in one of the ideas that I was throwing around there was a plan that that essentially I thought that plus users would be able to host book clubs and my thinking was that

I didn't think you could have a model where every member would pay for a book club because people can run book clubs for free on several other platforms but I thought oh if we have it such that plus members could host book clubs that would would be great. However, my customer research revealed to me a few things. And this is customer research of people who use Plus, customer research of people who run book clubs, all these things. And what I learned was Plus is not working. We have product market fit with the free product.

We do not have product market fit at the moment with Plus. Why? Because today, two years later, the Plus plan is still that grab bag of features that I made up and so what happens is most people who originally who take out the plus plan it's because they want to just support an independent alternative to goodreads and they probably have one of the like eight features that they use and most of them gravitate towards the key what the stats features and so i did this whole customer research and i said we need to completely change how the plus plan looks so i'm currently in i say currently it's been on

pause for a while but i should be picking it up in february i'm currently in the process of completely changing the plus plan to be an advanced stats plan. So it's all it's going to have is going to be just all the extra charts, you're going to be able to create your own charts. Because we I've discovered through my research that the power users are the ones that care about the stats, they have their own Excel spreadsheets. Separate to that, I've been doing customer research around with book club people, but also just seeing, thinking about the vision for the product and what works well. And it's far better because there are a bunch of features within the plus plan right now around buddy read book suggestions, where you can put in the usernames of people that you want to read a book with. And we have a machine learning thing that will tell you the best books to read for this group, which will obviously be part of that will be included in our book club feature. Those features in terms of like network effects, it's better that those are free and that they actually more people can use them and come on board. And then maybe the power users in the group or the ones that care about stats

might upgrade their accounts to plus, but now the group and no one stopped from joining. Because the other thing I realized is that with that plus plan, someone might be into stats. Someone else is into running a book club. Someone else is into, you know, running a buddy read or whatever it is. And so I definitely need to separate out the identity. The identity of the plus user is going to be the advanced stats power user. And then book clubs, buddy reads, read-alongs, all our social features, you can opt in. It's all

free. If you're a plus user, you will get advanced extra stats, insights into any of the things you do. That's going to be the core of plus, but it will be free to run your groups. And I had to change the estimate to end of January, but it's 31st of January. There's a reason I chose to do this interview on the 31st of January in my evening. I thought by this point I have everything done that I wanted to get done. It's still not done.

So you need to tell your wife to check it out again when book clubs are out. I'm sure she will. The one thing she did say, though, was that in quotes, Goodreads, and my wife is a designer, an interface designer even. She says in quotes, Goodreads has a terrible UI. It's clunky and not very intuitive.

She says, we like to make a group in Goodreads and then suggest books to each other. I like AI, but still like people too. And so I know that a lot of things that she does is around this group of folks she's with. And they're always talking about like what books coming next, which is like core to the help you give to an individual. But then you kind of move that to a group. I mean, I'm not designing your business, but I just think there's maybe some fruit there with, because groups tend to be more invested, right? An individual will just be not so much

not invested, but groups tend to invest further emotionally into a product and be daily active users or at least monthly active if they're a monthly book club you know and she's been doing this for multiple multiple years like these friendships are deep and they are super meaningful to her and like being a leader of this group is super important to her because it's her friends you know it's not just people it's her her girlfriends and so I just wonder if that's like uh how much deeper you can go there if there's like that's where the crux of the business is i don't know in terms of oh sorry something i didn't mention is i asked when i did my custom interviews with the book club hosts i asked like money questions to say like you know what do you spend money on are there any membership fees do you know do you pay for the tools you currently

use and it's basically there's nothing there right So that's not to say that there won't be something in the future, but I think that I'm trying to focus on kind of what you said, which is giving people a digital space to have to host their book club, which is an all-in-one solution. So for example, I'm so excited for the, I spoke to, when I did my research round, normally I mentioned how I speak to very very specific groups of people but this time I on Instagram and Twitter I asked for anyone who runs a book club and I asked is to ask them to tell me is it remote or in person how regularly do you meet is there a theme or not and then I said to Abby can you go through and choose 10 people who are as different as possible? So I want small, remote, large in person. And I wanted to start there because I said to myself, it might not be possible, but if I can, based on these interviews of interviewing wildly disparate styles of book club groups, if I can build a feature that helps all of these, then that would be awesome. And so I have developed a feature set that will cater to whether it's an in-person, whether it's

a hybrid, whether it's virtual, in that you're going to basically be able to invite people. You're going to be able to have Storygraph help suggest books for the poll to have the community vote of what shall we read next, but also the host can just choose if that's how they currently do it. You're going to be able to have an agenda where you can add photos from the meeting. You're going to be able to like add links and you know, everyone's rating will show up and all that kind of stuff. Then you'll, that will be feed into having this journal, this digital journal that have the history of all your meetings, what was said, the photos, whatever. So it's like a digital journal. You'll also have a leaderboard for your club where it's like, oh, these are the top 10 books that

we've ever read. So even if someone joins, they can go back and say, oh, this is what this club likes. Let me go and read these in the times when i'm not reading the book club pics or just you know just so that you have that history as well and we want to look into actually being able to host the meetings on the app for the digital ones as well so basically just having this one space so we are really looking at trying to create a space where people feel like ah finally my book club has a home on Storygraph. You said you have 2 million users? Registered users. What's the activity of those 2.4? Is like half of them pretty active?

A quarter of them pretty active? I need to review it because around this time, it's really hard because we have this spike and it kind of needs to settle down again to see where we even out. But historically, we tend to fluctuate between 25% to a third typically are like active um and that's like we look at monthly active users because most people

read a book on average a month and we look at checking in their dashboard adding or removing like doing something to a book in a library like we have i have a list of key actions which counts to that classifies you as active. And so we typically have about a quarter to a third active users. As I was sharing with you about this whole business to group idea, I was like, biting my tongue, because I'm like, gosh, there's like 2.4 million people that have a problem that have already given you their opt-in.

Why just focus on the groups in terms of like discovering your value to that many because like you obviously have a value to individuals i mean with that many users like what problem do they all have right versus just the groups who decide to meet together and share their their fascination with their books you know like a lot of people are just like introverts and don't you know share aside from you know the folks that are blogging about it or books to grammars etc they're the ones that are sort of being extroverts with their process and what they read you probably have a lot of people just like i just want to organize how i read better and have my own personal journey not my collective journey so i was like kind of biting

my tongue on like suggesting that you should dig into groups when it could be more just like you've got 2.4 million. What do they all have in common in terms of a problem that they would pay to solve? And this is two on this. One point is to say we haven't yet done this transition that I believe will accelerate the adoption of plus. So I feel the reason why the adoption of plus right now, what you see people saying is, I don't even need to get plus because the free product does everything I want. And it's this grab bag of features that adds little enhancements to a whole range of features of which most people are not interested in all of them. And so what I'm curious to see is when we transition it to, you can literally create your own charts, you can create your own,

let's see what adoption looks like then. But we also have another revenue stream, which is giveaways. So publishers and authors pay to list competitions for their books on the app. And we've got two tiers there. We've got a standard tier and a premium tier. And with the premium tier, your book is on the home page and it's like there's a link everywhere your book shows up there's like a clear gold link of like enter giveaway and things like that there's extra features you you get a custom notification so you can because you would have like tens of thousands of entries so when the giveaway ends your personalized message gets sent to all of those entries and And essentially, this is a win-win-win because it's a win for the publishers and authors

because they essentially have a way to advertise their books to our community, millions of users. It's a win for the users because to them, it's not really ads. It's a chance to win free books. And then it's a win for us because it's another revenue stream. And right now, we're getting more revenue from Plus, but I do see a world where, depending on how it goes, the giveaways overtakes that. We'll have to see.

It's hard to tell right now. But we do have that other revenue stream, which is our kind of B2B kind of. Do you know how many users Goodreads has? It's rumored around 80 to 90 million, I believe. So I was doing the math. 10.5 on 2.4 million is 0.4 of a percent. Do you know what typical is on Framium?

I would expect 1% in terms of upgraders. It is about 2% or something. Oh, in terms of converting? Yeah, like a typical convert. I feel like 0.4% is low. Yeah, it is low. I think you're looking at 2% to 5% or something like that. I think that's the standard rate.

Yeah. I'm just over here thinking, what's the best use of your time? Cranking that percent up or just trying to get to 80, 90 million? Because a small conversion rate on 80, 90 million is still a lot of money. Or converting that rate. Obviously, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. but if you're a solo dev, you kind of can't, right? You're working on one feature or the other. Yeah. And you know, our intention is to keep the team small because it has a lot of benefits because the other thing is what 80 to 90 million

users look like in terms of customer support, in terms of, you know what I mean? Right. Cost. Operational. So there's that to keep in mind. I would hope that, you know, part of the reason why we can, if we could grow to 80 to 90 million, it's because a lot of the UX pain points have been sorted out. Everything's super intuitive. You know, we've got a very helpful help base or whatever for the, you know, things like that. So it's hard to tell. Yeah. So how do you pick on what to work on then? How do you choose? I'm starting, what I'm currently working on is getting that percentage up. That's what I'm currently working on, right?

Well, how did you decide that then? Like versus the other stuff? Honestly, before we became profitable, this is actually what happened. It was more about me and being like, I don't have a salary and I'm on my last year of runway right so it got to the point where I'm like for StoryGraph for us to not get funding and for it to stay independent I need to start getting a decent salary from StoryGraph Rob needs to start getting a decent salary from StoryGraph well we've always been paying Abby a decent I've always been paying Abby a decent salary from story graph well we've always been paying abby a decent i've always been paying abby a decent salary from day one and we were like what can we do so this is pre giveaways plus was there but it was kind of just you know zero point it was a 0.01 at one point and so i was like could we do ads in a smart way because of all the page views we have

and the thing is even when we thought we were being smart about it, we always just came out at, even if we weren't sending any user data to publishers, like if it was just a behind-the-scenes matching process that the publishers had their inputs and then we matched behind the scenes to make sure that users were seeing relevant ads, we just thought that even just the thought of users thinking we'd given their data to publishers just didn't sit right with us so there was this one like series of formative conversations with rob and with saran my friend

saran his his wife where i was like okay that's where i kind of thought oh giveaways that's how we get another revenue stream and then i said we don't have product market fit with plus. How do we get product market fit with plus so that that percentage goes up? That was kind of the journey to just choosing to do that. Yeah, makes sense. It came from a personal, like, well, my runway runs out in two years.

So this is something that needs to change. Yeah, right. I like the giveaways idea. think it is it can be more of a win-win-win because you have you know there's something there the user not just hey look at this book that we even if we've better the book yes and it's like well we've entered the book the person's paying to promote it but you know here's a chance at a free copy it's like everybody likes free stuff so yeah that's a good idea that's a good way of doing it so that it's's a chance at a free copy it's like everybody likes free stuff so yeah that's a good idea that's a good way of doing it so that it's not a win-win-lose for the end user which

ultimately you know drives down enjoyment and satisfaction right and drives people away if it becomes egregious less so i think if it's a really good fit i mean we are advertising based company here at changLog. We are sponsored. We also have a membership so you can opt out of that. I don't know, Adam, 1%. What do you think is our percentage? 0.001? Pretty small. We don't know what it is. It's pretty small. Yeah. But that's what we're optimizing for either, at least now. No, it's not. But the point I was getting to was that we are very intentional with the sponsors that we work with and the way we produce the ads and all this kind of stuff so that

we think it's a decent trade-off for keeping the podcast free for everybody. And our listeners, even sometimes ones that sign up for Plus Plus are like, can I sign up for your sorry, it's better than yours, Nadia. Yours is Plus, ours is Plus Plus. Oh, it was actually Plus plus changelog plus plus you know because we're nerds and so

we like to increment things i love it plus plus love it yeah some people sign up and say hey can i keep the ads in there because they're valuable to me i enjoy it because we're exposing them to new things and so if done right i think you probably could crack that nut. But if you can figure out even more interesting ways, like giveaways of doing the same thing, then more power to you. When we were sketching out what introducing ads to the platform would look like, I said to Rob, what we should do is have it such that if you pay for plus, you can turn off the ads, but I want it such that most plus people do not turn off the ads. But I want it such that most plus people do not turn off the ads because they're that good.

That was like the goal. That was literally what I said. That's kind of how we think. That's great. Yes. But then of course, we do have people that say, I signed up because I don't want the ads anymore. So there you go.

I mean, it's not like everybody, but they're good enough that some people find value in them. And so we treat them like content as much as we can, which is a lot of hard work. So I'm sure giveaways probably some hard work as well at this point. Yeah. It's a whole other product that I'm building. Yeah, exactly.

It's a whole other platform because there's a whole backend dashboard to that. And it's still in beta because there's still some manual parts of the process. And I really hope that we can make it live today. Just on the plus thing, a couple of points that I want to mention that I think are cool, but they could also factor into lower numbers in that actually not really. Anyway, the point that I want to make is we don't take any payment details when you sign up for the trial. And also the trial, the trial is also 30 days. And so on one hand, I think the trial is quite long and that it's very easy in 30 days for someone to like not feel the pressure to use it. Then they kind of don't use it. And then when it comes to try and sign up, then they're

like, I didn't really use it. I guess I don't need it. And so they don't. Whereas maybe if it was shorter, they might immediately try and explore all the features and then sign up. But the cool part of all of this is knowing that when we look at our subscriber number, when I look at that 10,570, whatever it is, knowing that every single one of those people actively, their free trial expired and they actively came back on and said,

yes, no, I want this. And they put in their card details. That's really cool. No one's a mistake there because it's just not possible. Right. If I have a lower turn that way because the people are very intentional

about signing up. Yeah. How many conversations have you had with those 10,500 folks to make Plus better? To give them more value? Dozens, I would guess. So, no, dozens. It would be more than,

yeah, probably dozens up to a hundred because I've done a bunch of like over the years, a bunch of summer conversations. So I've had reset rounds where, you know, there was one where I figured out, oh, no one really cares about plus, they're just paying to support, you know? Oh, what do the plus,

what do people have in common? The power users, oh, they do the plus, what do people have in common, the power users? Oh, they love stats, like things like that, which helped me get to the advanced stat transition. But there's also been surveys and stuff over the years to not always direct conversations. Sometimes I'll send out a survey of checking in, maybe testing the waters for a particular feature I'm thinking about things like that. So I've spoken, every single plus user, well, not the 2,000 who joined in the last month, but that was great. But no, the 8,000, whatever, they've heard from me in some shape or form, whether it's

just a form or a survey saying, hey, we're thinking of doing this. Like, how do you use this currently? What does success look like for this for you? Like, do you have uh some sort of thing jotted down where you're like if this gets to some point because you don't you want to stay small so it doesn't sound like you know total world domination is what you're after necessarily or maybe you are but just with a small team maybe i'll leave it no so it is definitely world domination but i think i would love for us to be

almost the default place that people, when they're thinking about book recommendations or finding a book, we're like the default place to go. Like people are just like, oh, check it on Storygraph or go to Storygraph. Another, I guess one other measure is whenever we have a spike, like a big spike,

we end up getting to like the highest we've ever number two so we've been number one in the app store once but we've hovered between two and five right in the in the books category and i think goodreads is basically entrenched at number one pretty much apart from that one time where we were briefly above them. That was when we basically launched the apps and then this TikTok went viral. So I would love, basically, I'm imagining us being up there, like entrenched, like one and two,

just being there and being known as the kind of default main place. Personally, feeling like, I do see StoryGraph as my life's work, assuming, you know, assuming things kind of continue, I would love, I would just keep doingoth as my life's work, assuming, you know, assuming things kind of continue. I would love, I would just keep doing this as long as it stays fun. And I feel like that is a possibility that I keep doing this.

In which case, it would need to get to the point where I feel like I can get a salary that would support whatever, like, life choices I want to make. Whether that's relocating, whether that's having a wedding, like, whatever it might be. Because right now, I don't feel like that. Like I've got a decent salary now and Rob has too, but it's not, for me, it's not enabling my savings. The savings that I drew down over the last five years, they're not growing back up right now. Right.

So it's things like that where it's like, there's a personal lifestyle where it's like, okay, StoryGoth is supporting me and my lifestyle and any future changes that might come to that lifestyle and also we are just known as like the de facto default you want books storygraph i have an idea for you oh yes please i don't even know if it's good just thinking out loud here you know i love problems i love problems i could tell you've been steering away. Like even with the groups things, I could just see your face. You're like.

Well, you know, because there's no right way to success. Like even as Jared asked that question, you really have a not struggle to describe it, but it just seems like just don't die is your success. Like just don't die. And if you can really succeed well, that's obviously a plus. No pun intended. But I wonder if you want to be the default for a good book recommendation, then don't put it behind a sign up. Give somebody someplace to go, ask them three questions, give them a result, and they're going to love you immediately. I don't know how your recommendation works, and they're going to love you immediately. Right.

I don't know how your recommendation works. So take this with a grain of salt. But what if that recommendation was so compelling that they were like, I have to sign up afterwards? Or maybe you really don't struggle with signups. But if you want to be the default, find a way to give them a result that's worth their attention without any friction in the process. Right. The signup process is always pushy because you're like, what am I signing up for? And then you get a form to fill out to give somebody some information. And maybe the thing that came from like the TikTok video or the YouTube

video, or maybe that was the compelling artifact that doesn't make that part of struggle for you. And I don't know, but if you want to be the default, you have to kind of give that thing away ad nauseum for free, like just give it away for free. And everybody's like, man, this is the place to go. And they have no problem with giving you more keys to their kingdom. So here's the thing we have to treat this current spec, right? We had about 2 million registered users, but we were getting four million unique visitors every month so there's like double are just someone's linked them it could be a giveaway page which you can view all the giveaway pages without you know signing up we also have oh you can view all the book pages too like sure we also have uh a browse all books page which has a filter menu it's not like the recommendation

engine where you actually put in your preferences but you you can say oh i want something funny fast-paced whatever and you can see you can order by last updated or um page size or whatever it is sorry yeah book size but there is a feature that we released recently that we have been talking about and saying like can we make this free as in such that you don't need to sign up which is that we currently have something called the a story graphs preview personalized preview and essentially it's an ai generated summary of you know readers the book would be good for and also it's if you have the personalized version which is currently plus because originally it was we thought it was going to be too costly to offer it to everybody.

The personalized version tells you if we think the book is going to be good for you. And it's a text, it's a completely in-house solution. And there was a world where we're excited for it to be free to everyone. Because then it's like, wow, even if your main tool is Goodreads, if you're in a bookstore, you want to be looking at it on Storygraph because we're the only place that are going to tell you, oh, given your interest in so-and-so themes, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, you might like this book. But what we also do is if you've specified any type of thing you don't like reading about, like if you don't like reading sad books or if there are certain triggers and things you don't want to read about, we'll alert you to say, be warned, it deals with themes of blah, blah. So be careful, proceed with caution, right?

So this is this new feature, which we're hoping to make free for everyone, but we have discussed, is it possible to just have this be on the pages? And we need to talk about it some more because there's something about whether it's to do with AI opt-out or whatever, we need to like discuss, we need to just about some more because there's something about whether it's to do with AI opt-out or whatever. We need to like discuss, we need to just look into the implications

cost-wise, resource-wise, you know, because we're getting 4 million users a month and just checked. Yeah, just like review if that is actually a possibility, but that would get at what you're talking about, which is giving people a result

without needing them to sign up. So I don't have the answers, right? Obviously, because I'm not deep in your team. I don't know what's required to give this thing away, but I just wonder if that could be compelling because if anyone could go to a non-friction page and get some value, then they're willing to give you more of their attention and time. It's just my rough thought on that. And that could be plausible. It could not be plausible for you to accomplish. But if you want to be the default, you kind of have to give somebody a taste of what the goodness is, right? As some sort of tantalizer to get in. It could be a landing page.

It could be an A-B test. It doesn't even have to be to everybody. It could be, let's test this out on an ad campaign that we do or some way we drive and funnel folks to this one page that test out this theory in a 20,000 person spectrum versus a 200,000 spectrum because you're getting, you know, 4 million visits a month or whatever the number is where you really can't spend the money on that and say, okay, wow, what was the conversion on 25,000 folks? Does it make sense to scale that? Does that really bring us in high quality people who really love to read and really can find value, not only in our platform and the recommendations, but then are a high candidate for whatever Plus evolves into? Yeah.

That's how I think of it. Definitely something to think about. If you're listening, you may remember the early days of the internet where open networks like HTTP and SMTP led to an explosion of websites and online communities. Building a fan site and connecting over shared passions led so many of us to careers in software. Back then, it seemed like anything was possible because the internet of the 90s was built to democratize information, not consolidate it with a handful of big tech companies. Read, Write, Own. Building the Next Era of the Internet is a new book from startup investor Chris Dixon that explores how network architecture plays out in our online lives and the decisions that took us from open networks governed by communities of developers

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an acquisition no as in i know the answer right now is no like no you haven't and no you wouldn't the thing is i'm just in general with life i'm wary of saying never say never because i don't know what's gonna happen in five years ten years am i still gonna be having fun am i i feel like i'm pretty good at looking after myself like everyone's always worried about my well-being and i'm like i'm so far away from burnout. Like I really look after myself. I, you know, so the answer right now is like, no, definitely not. We couldn't, but I'm not going to say never because life is long and hopefully. And so, yeah, but the answer right now is no. And that is not in my plans and it's not in my intention. My plan is to continue running

and owning Storygraph forever. But let's assume success then. Let's go down the road five years, maybe 10, but let's at least go down the road five and say that Storygraph has displaced Goodreads in the zeitgeist of human knowledge and you're number one on app downloads and you have more users than you know what to do with and everybody loves the product

and here comes Amazon and knocking. No, Amazon's not. No, let's not make it Amazon. That's too easy. Yeah, Amazon's just no. Like that's like, that would almost be like betraying our users. Adam has an opinion though.

Like my dad. My dad has an opinion on that. Okay. Yeah, I bet. All all right amazon doesn't come knocking but somebody else does who has goodwill in heart then you're thinking about it then you may be like well sell if it's going well and we're running it then no reason to sell all right all right i like it yeah i think right now i would say that the only... VC? No. Because it's, again, we're profitable now.

So if we say, why go on that VC train? I feel like it will only bring bad things. The focus... Because once you bring VC on, it's almost a... What's the word? Like a race to acquisition or IPO. And I would hate to feel pressured to do either of those things. Yeah, because you usually get paid at an exit.

See? Yeah, unless that's a venture capitalist that comes in at a profit share versus a exit share. That's a different venture capitalist. There's lots of people who would invest based upon their return over multiples, based upon trends. That's plausible. Yeah. But then, so you're talking about an investor coming along.

What would be... Aligned. Yeah, that kind of investor would have to be not only money, but smart money, like connected, networked. It would have to add value to the giveaways. Can you help me connect with better publishers, have deeper relationships with publishers, have longer contracts, more reliable revenue, et cetera. That's how I would view that kind of investment. Or like the, who's the most famous, like who's the Oprah of bookstagram, you know?

Ooh, dang, yeah. I know, but the way we're growing, it's like. What if Oprah comes along? Truth, I like this, I keep going there. It's pretty good. I always talk about Oprah tomorrow. I'm like, one day Oprah will notice us. Do you?

Okay, so I'm hitting on something here. Well, cause I just think of Oprah's book club. I was kind of thinking of like Nadia's book club club like what if you did that because like you could grow that audience and maybe have your thing be you know the new oprah's book club eventually but if oprah did come by and was like interested like that seems like i don't know about spiritually aligned but at least in terms of product and the things she's good at she obviously has the money like maybe that would be a yeah she could value add is just my only point i don't know i'm going with this but she can just interview somebody or mention it and that's great she literally just

mentioned let's put it out there oprah if you're out there and somebody listened to this in your network get in touch if you're oprah's software developer, IT person, and you listen to this. That's right, Jerry. Good job. If you're handling Oprah's DNS. Yes! Next time she asks for a book link, send the story

graph one. I like that idea. I think if I were you, that's how I would align it. Because I would not sell out to the other Goliath, like an Amazon, even an Amazon competitor. I would, because like you said, you're profitable. And for now, you're enjoying it, right? Like you said, you're not sure in five years or 10 years how you feel, because none of us do. But you assume you will. Yes. you will yes and so and it's to stay on stay on the what's the good the gymnasts who are on the the walking like a plank kind of thing whatever that is to stay on the bar don't fall off you know don't look down the balancing beam are you talking about the balancing beam you make it make it sound like it would be stressful and like it's tenuous yeah like you could fall off and die

exactly well it's just a few feet. It's not like there's no sharks down there. It's more like a walk in the park, no? It doesn't feel like that. It feels like a walk in the park for you? Well, not right now, but I see the future of it feeling like a walk in the park. Right. Yeah.

Hang on a second. There's this idea that Jared just mentioned that I think has legs. What if there's a book club for everybody? What do you that's just there to join right groups to find in a way oh like pre-made book clubs well the nadia book club is there that you like hey everyone's welcome here and then it's like the the bees and honey kind of thing like you know it's sweet so you come and then wow there's a recommendation engine here. You want to be the default of that. So rather than say, come get recommendations, it's more like, come find your group. Maybe this is the group for you, but something where everybody's invited. Yeah. Pretty funny because we launched a

read-alongs feature at the end of last year, where you can read a book with up to a thousand people. And it's basically for people who don't want to be in a regular book club, but they can opt in and you can choose a book. And I was running it from the StoryGraph account, but it was clear that Nadia was running it. And we had a thousand people join and we all read Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and it was awesome. And at the end, I made a forum that was like, share your feedback on this feature, given that it's new. And, you know, one person wrote something like, I feel like running one of these is not for me. It's more for influencers like Nadia.

And I just remember laughing. I don't see myself as an influencer. But you are. I think you are. Here's a different angle. I would be friends with somebody based upon particular books I know I've read that I've enjoyed. And if they've read and enjoyed these books, then I could be better friends with them. As a matter of fact, that happened this week. I like Nick more because I know specific books heisi from J.S. Party by the way okay if I was Nick's literal neighbor I would like not that I'm not his friend because we're far away but I would be more willing to like hang out with Nick because I know he's

read the Babaverse you know uh quintology book or whatever like that that series or because he would take a recommendation you know, so like the finder group people or the finder friends in the world of the internet is similar likes. And that similar likes kind of comes from a book. So this is a whole new direction for you, Nadia. It's like Tinder for book lovers, you know? Oh, don't get me started on the Tinder for book lovers.

As a single person who has been dating for years trying to find somebody, the number of times people have said like oh you have you thought about a dating app spinoff and it's like i wish i had the bandwidth for a dating app spinoff because it would be incredible to find a man who loves books and that we can bond over that so it's come up a few times over the years this dating app spinoff this is why you take money in you know know, if you hire a dev, they're working on that.

You keep working on plus and then good things happen. It's called lack of focus is also what you call it. And then it's that dev that ends up being my husband. Oh my goodness. Now we're on a homework movie.

Oh my gosh. We're like matchmakers. Look what we're doing for her. Nadia, are you a homework fan by any chance? Are you a homework movie junkie during the holidays? No, but I know the reference. Okay.

You laughed really hard, so I was thinking maybe you were. I was like, wow. Not only... Well, I kind of was part of one last year. I was part of one that was basically like a Hallmark movie, but it didn't end the way a Hallmark movie ends. Oh. I get sucked into Oh. There's a

I get sucked into it. There's a framework to every one of those movies. I get sucked into it. My wife watches them. Sometimes she has friends over and I'm watching them with her just because I'm in the room. Then I'm the guy who's like, don't do that. Oh my gosh. I'm like in it. Somehow I get invested in this. You're the husband at the back. He's like,

I'm not watching this. Oh, but you're watching this. But I am watching it, yes. That's half half the reason i'm like don't turn it on because i if you turn it on i will watch it and then i'll get invested and then i'll be one of the girls you'll have a scooter your way in the front you're crying crocodile tears tissues out and stuff like that can you believe how he treated sally she did not deserve that the point is though is we all bond over stories, right? And I was just thinking like going back to the default, it's maybe the way to being the default isn't to put the default out front. So maybe my recommendation was incorrect. Maybe it's just helping people find the platform. And then, wow, there's this recommendation engine that

should be the default for everybody. And I just want to tell everybody I know or find more people that have read the same books I've read and this is why by the way I think it's very important that all the social reading features like buddy reads like read-alongs and book clubs are free because you get people who don't even intend to move or use a book tracking app but their book club host says we're trying this for this meeting or we're doing this one thing. And then they try it and then they say, oh, what is this thing? That was awesome. I want to do this again. Oh, it's just easier if I have all my stuff on here.

And we have seen that journey a little bit, but there's definitely more that we can do in that space. Is there any more technical stories you can share with us? Like your queues all jacked up? How's your servers doing? What are you doing for observability? Do you do observability? Like what's your S jacked up? How's your servers doing? What are you doing for observability? Do you do observability? Like what's your SRE stack? How do you deploy? We're off Heroku now. That's a big story. We migrated. Rob manages all of our infrastructure. So we were on Heroku. It was getting, we were on the database plan that was costing us like

eight to $9,000 a month on top of all the other costs. Oh, my gosh. And at this point, the plus is like, you know, we have a few thousand users, not enough. And so we, you know, Rob, who had 15 years in infrastructure experience, said, Hey, Nadia, I think we should move off Heroku. Me, who is a boot camp graduate, all I know is Heroku. What do you mean we're moving off Hiroki? No, no, no, no, no. And he did all the research.

He laid everything out for me. He answered all of my questions. It was a month long process of this is the way to go. And so eventually we did this big migration at the beginning of 2022, January, 2022. It was like months and months of research, lead up, planning. You know, we told everyone we're gonna

have this is one of those we're gonna have scheduled downtime from this time to this time we were like down gonna be down for five hours moving everything over so we we did everything we followed our steps we turned the app back on everything's working and then the emails start coming in to support account deleted my account's deleted my we were like oh my like my heart sunk like it was awful eventually we realized that what happened was in the process of the upgrade everybody had been signed out and some people had not had to sign in for like three years so they a lot of people had like two accounts or something some people to account so they just couldn't remember their login details,

or they didn't realize they weren't signed in. Basically, we were able to match every single person back to an account eventually. But it was that initial minute of when we turned it on, and then the email started coming in, being like, well, my account's deleted now. My account's deleted. That was scary.

We had backups, but you don't want to be dealing with that. You're like, I trusted you, Rob. No. Yeah, so that was that. That's one story. There was, Oh, we had so many issues with the last with, with, um, search. And I started the app with PG search and it was just searching for a book took like 10 seconds. It was awful. And, you know, I would tweet out saying, what can I do?

A lot of people eventually got to the point where I was like I feel we need something like Elasticsearch even just working out with Elasticsearch that eventually had its own performance issues and I realized oh I need to shard now like I just learn things as and when we have problems and it's like oh now I need to shard I need to add I need to index it this way like I'm just just learning on the job. One day, our Elasticsearch, the server running our Elasticsearch just died or something. It was run, it was a managed,

we were still in Heroka at this point. And it just, we were using like the Elastic plugin or plan. And it just suddenly just search wasn't working. And it's very key for search to work like no search nowhere was working you couldn't search for books because i mean we were like what's going on we couldn't see anything we emailed the support and we were paying we were on there like like what's the word for the opposite of penultimate i.e the second from the highest uh i think it's just called second.

Penultimate is one of my favorite words to use. I do like that word, yeah. So everyone, whenever I say it in conversation, everybody always says, you know, my friends, they'll say, oh, penultimate. And I'm like, but you knew exactly what I meant. And it's like, yeah. I feel like everybody knows it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah exactly everyone calls it out as like a fancy word but you know what i mean so i i just was hoping that there was another one but actually there might be second

highest plan yeah exactly second and the support was just like oh yeah it looks like that server just failed like we can spin it up for you again, but it's going to take like X hours. And we were like, right, we're getting off of Elastic. We're going on to Bonsai. That was a wild day because it was eight hours of like, well, not quite eight hours because we were slowly indexing the millions of records again. But it was like, that was one thing.

I guess one of our biggest kind of tech learnings was when we had the first initial spike, you know, the response time graph on heroku we'd be like okay okay and then bam it would like spike up and we we tried so many things we architected bits of code we even at one point you know my friend andy qual he texted and said you know you're you're very right heavy like which database planner you want and at this time i was on the 50 database plan and andy said well that's never gonna work like you need to upgrade like this is actually a case of throw more money at it you're graded to the 200 database

and you know that felt at the time oh my gosh 200 a month on the database that felt very wild i mean especially because at this time it's money from my pocket and eventually Rob's as well. It got to the point where even when we upgraded database, it worked fine for a time. And then bang, we had the response time issues. We were looking at the logs. We were trying to go through everything. And that's when we learned about IOPS and burstability.

Like we didn't understand, we didn't know about any of this stuff. So we learned, oh, now we see what's going on. Like our right IOPS are like over what the database can handle. So we now know we actually need to upgrade to this plan, whatever that plan was. Also, the reason why it works for a time

and then fails is burstability it's basically giving you you can go this amount of time going over your IOPS rate and then we're gonna say no so like that was another you know so many like learnings over the years of like technical like I said sharding with Elasticsearch IOPS on the database like even just setting up Elasticsearch, IOPS on the database, like even just setting up Elasticsearch and optimizing that. And yeah, it's been a real amazing technical journey for me. When I was at Pivotal, you know, I always had my pair. And so I could always, there was always someone and even I came straight from a bootcamp, there was always somebody who knew more than me sitting right next to me. Or if they didn't know more than me, they would, you know know kind of have a sense of what to look for if we were stuck and a lot of this is just like figuring out while you're

putting out the fire so yeah there could be a whole other episode on like technical fires and learnings and well we might have to have you come back at some point and tell us all these stories because we didn't dive into the technical very much at all. Go ahead. I was going to say we're on the verge of something that I'm scared of, but I'm less scared of now. We're going to go for a distributed database because we had all these issues at the beginning of this year and we thought having a replica would be the solution. But that given like the right heavy nature of the database, because essentially when we have a spike, it's also a spike in Goodreads imports.

So when we have 10,000 users on the app, there are about 8,000 people that want to import their Goodreads. And we need to do that relatively quickly while they're excited, while they're interested. How long does a standard Goodreads import take? Are we talking seconds, minutes? Minutes. But we had people waiting for weeks this January. Sure. Well, because you had a backup. Yeah. Yeah, we had people waiting for weeks this january sure well because you had a backup yeah

yeah we had another 20 000 i said to rob wow haven't seen this these q numbers since june of 2020 and are there api limits slowing you down there as well like can you hit goodreads just as fast as you can or do they they limit you we don't we don't touch goodreads at all we don't touch goodreads at all it's all in-housereads at all. It's all in-house stuff. How do you do your imports then? Now we're going to see the source. Oh, gosh. But we don't. We don't at all.

She put her mask on. You can't see me. Are you scraping? Do you know that? Not touching Goodreads at all. No scraping at all. Okay. I want to know how you're doing it.

Would you reveal it for our Changelog++ listeners ears only? No. No, we don't. We're not telling anyone. You're not telling anybody. We've got a lot of secret sauce stuff. Okay. All right. It's Mechanical Turk behind the scenes making a phone call to Goodreads support, acting as the user. Surprise, it's Adam! I've been making the phone calls.

Hey, I need my import list. Can you help me with that, please? And they get emailed and I upload it. My name is Sally. Yeah. And I would like to export. I can talk about a decision I made early on, actually, which was that I remember when I started,

I never used Goodreads API because I always said to myself, if this thing gets big, they could just take away API access and then no one could import. So from day one, I said, export your data from Goodreads. Here's the steps. Give me the CSV. We'll sort it out. And I remember at the beginning, people would complain, like say, this is very clunky.

Other apps do it this way. And what happened two years ago you go good we said we're shutting down our api now well smart so that is how you do it to this day is csv import oh yeah we do it is a csv that we're given yeah yeah okay that makes sense and then you hold on to it for a few weeks and then eventually you do something with it i just love being at you that was a burn turd it was just funny i'm just messing with you i would love to have your problems i mean you got serious problems like technical problems let's not discount them those are the fun ones like you are it's baptism by fire because you're having success and you're having to learn and adjust and like scramble and a lot of us you know we just put our stuff out in the

world and nobody ever uses it and so we're just like we would love we're just h-topping looking at our cpu doing nothing we're like come on now that's why i said an enviable scenario you know even though at first you didn't really necessarily want it because you were not aligned you thought with your original goals. But I mean, you're having fun, right? It seems like you're having fun. Oh, overall, I'm having the best time. Like, I love my life.

How amazing is this that I had this idea, I had this little dream. Do you remember when I said it would be quite a stretch to say that I never thought about a good reason alternative in those early like months i remember thinking okay i'm not building good results but imagine if you did but we're not we're not building or not we're not right i have a little bit so the fact that we are now like the main alternative to Goodreads, the team is so small, especially me being like a bootcamp grad, right? That's something else that I always like to stress, actually, because I'm a bootcamp grad. I started coding when I was what, just graduated of uni. So I would work 21, 22.

Actually, that's wild because I'm 32 now. So that's like a decade. Yeah, you're a senior dev. Yeah, that's wild. So, oh my gosh, yeah, 2013. I've passed my 10 years of actually learning to code. That's wild. Completely escaped me.

You've been too busy. I've been too busy. I didn't even realize I passed my 10 years of being a dev. Anyway. You're a senior dev for sure. Wow. So, but I always like to stress that i'm a boot camp grad my degree was in philosophy politics and economics i was going into banking like i'm not i haven't

been coding since i was young so my point is like anybody can do it like you know what i mean like you can if you want to do it you can do it yeah it might take you a long time but you can do it it is possible and you don't have to you could be listening to this and not even know how to code yet and still end up building something in some years that i think you represent more than just you can do it as a boot camp graduate i think you represent that you can accomplish an idea and speak to real people and solve real problems and scale and be profitable, not just bootcamp graduate. I think you represent way more than that. Yeah, I think so, too. But I think I don't want that piece to be missed.

Like, it's not like I did computer science. It's not like I I always like I hear that, too. There is a lot more that I represent. I wanted to add some major credits there that you did not, even though. Thank you. I think you're amazing. I think what you've done is awesome. I think you're solving cool, like Jared said, you're solving cool problems.

I said it while we were all talking, but I said some of us just H-top looking at our CPU doing nothing and we're just like inventing problems so that we can make it spike temporarily. Please let me break it so I can fix it kind of thing. And you actually have, you know, code in the wild. You're solving problems and you're happy doing it. And you're learning along the way. Like that's, you're in the journey. That's the fun part.

Don't forget. Yes. Thank you. One day you'll look back and be like, those were the days. What does your wife say, Jared? These are the days. These are the days. That's right. These are the days. I'm a big fan of that. These are the days. What does your wife say, Jared? These are the days? These are the days. That's right. These are the days.

I'm a big fan of that. These are the days. And this is why I always make sure I'm enjoying myself, both within work and outside of work at the same time. So lots of people say to me, oh, you must be doing all that all the time. You must be this. And I'm always like, actually, no, I'm pretty strict with my sleep.

And my main hobby, apart from reading, is dance. this and and I'm always like actually no I'm pretty strict with my sleep and I I do one of my my main hobby apart from reading is dance I'm in dance class a few times a week having lunch with friends and I'm out sometimes I think am I working enough because I'm enjoying myself you know um one thing I do want to say is in those earliest days when I was doing that customer research, I told myself to be prepared to walk away. So I told myself, if these interviews don't reveal that there is something here, Goodreads exists, other apps exist, don't waste your time. Be prepared to walk away. And I think that's very important. I just thought of it now when you were talking about inventing problems.

I said to myself, I don't want to invent a problem where one doesn't exist because then I end up eating up years of my runway and having nothing to show for it at the end beyond an app that nobody uses. Yeah. Well, if you're the most notable Goodreads alternative, I think that you are definitely not inventing the problem. Well, actually going back to the beginning of the conversation, I think that that, that pattern that I put out at the beginning, I think is actually a very good way of not inventing problems is like seeing something that was wildly successful slash loved reached a point where it did sell. Now it's languished in the hands of a giant and people don't like it anymore. I mean, there's more things than just Goodreads that are like that. It's a pretty rife place for innovation, I think. It's like, I think that's a way of not doing something. You know that people love that thing one time.

And so something like that that fills similar needs in a unique way that's not languishing, that's a good way of not just inventing problems. 100%. Yeah. Cool. Nadia, this has been awesome. I would be there for your book club, even though I don't read very much, but I think

you should definitely, yeah, I think Oprah needs to be disrupted at this point, right? She's. Should I run it as Storygraph or should I run it as Nadia? On Storygraph. Which one should I do? Since you're giving me all the advice. Do you want to be successful and famous or just successful? Because if you're just successful, do it as StoryGraph.

Well, some people don't want the fame. I like the idea of being known of like, oh, that's the founder of StoryGraph, but not in a way. I need to be able to like go on the tube and go on the bus and nobody talk to me. All right. Do it as StoryGraph then. Do it as StoryGraph. Because they'll be coming up to you. Hey, what books are you reading?

And you're like, oh, no, I've created a monster. I'll be like this with my book wearing a wearing a beard you know yeah yeah yeah just in disguise all the time like right so if you don't want that then maybe just do it a story graph because i have i i have actually thought about running my own book club because running the read-along was fun but i might just do that like keep running the read-alongs on StoryGraph and everyone just looks forward to like wow every other month StoryGraph does a read-along it's run by the founder but you know I mean but I might just do that instead and then I don't have if I miss a month or even though like I never I'm always like once I start something

I'm like it has to be every every week every other month but you could also eventually replace yourself with somebody who's good at it and it could could still be the story graph read along, you know. Are you saying I'm not good at it? No, somebody else who is good at it. Oh, okay. I thought you were saying someone who is actually good at it. Not just de facto running it. No, you're.

No, no, no. I'm saying by then you've built it into something. Yeah, somebody else. Well, I added that because, of course course as the person who created it you might think you know i have a problem like this like nobody else can do it like i do it but then there's other people like they can read and talk about a book too but not like you can i mean it won't be the same yeah i love it you're like let me make it better not like you can there's no one like you i'm digging out i'm digging out you haven't seen run one, so you don't know whether I'm good or not.

It's true. One day. Time will tell. When you join the read-along. I'll have to be there for the first one. Yeah. For sure. That's like the conference, too.

I mean, there's an opportunity there, too, where you can collect people with not just a book club, but then now you go on the road and meet people that read the same book. And gatherings. Storygraph gatherings. You know what I mean? Like there's so much because I mean, if you're optimizing for deep enjoyment and community, you kind of will get famous along the way naturally just because as your friend group grows, so does your fame grow. Right. But if that's something I mean, that's an angle that Goodreads is definitely not doing.

Right. They're not meeting people. Right. They're just providing software. Honestly, that's something, I mean, that's an angle that Goodreads is definitely not doing, right? They're not meeting people, right? They're just providing software. Honestly, that's what they are doing. Since we started it, we've only seen them announce that they're taking away features. And there are some things that I do wonder why they haven't added them because people want them. And I guess the only thing I can think is that the tech debt is that bad that it's really hard to add new features at this point? Possibly.

It's, I mean, it could be just a symptom too that somebody really is in charge. There's like, no one's really in charge of the product. And so it's just like, just keep it alive and maybe kill some things along the way and cut some costs. Yeah, the original founder of Goodreads finally stepped down. I say finally in that most founders don't last that long i think after an acquisition so he stepped down in 20 it was like 2020 or 2021

and he was replaced as because they have a ceo of goodreads and this woman replaced him and i thought oh maybe that like there's someone freshen maybe now they get there's someone fresh in. Maybe now we're going to start seeing some changes, but literally nothing yet. I would be so motivated if I were you, based on this information. I've not dug into Goodreads and their pulse, so to speak. I would be so motivated. Because you've got a Goliath asleep at the wheel,

and you're on fire, right? Great place to be in. You've got some smooth stones. You can just knock that Goliath out asleep at the wheel, and you're on fire, right? Great place to be in. You got some smooth stones. You can just knock that Goliath out. That's right. Honestly, I don't reshare anything where people are, you know, very anti-Goodreads or Amazon or Jeff. That's not the strategy I have.

It's always very positive. So I also don't like when I know people mean well, but I don't like it where supporters of us will comment on other people's posts and they'll say things like, ew, Goodreads, you should be using Storygraph. And I hate it because I'm like, no, you're introducing our product to this person

in a very negative fashion. And this person was just celebrating that they reached their Goodreads goal. Like it's meant to be celebratory do you know do you know what I mean like so I stuff like that so I never expect anyone any of my friends anyone in my life to use story graph I never ask them to I never tell them to it will just be if anything like a like a joke like we just had now but um yeah it's funny because I do have like you know if I've been on on dates with someone or whatever and they'll say, oh, I use Goodreads.

Does that mean we can? And I'm like, no, I don't care. You use what you like. No, not at all. Well, it was also just a joke for real because I was going to pull up my the next best thing to Goodreads. I suppose if I'm pulling out a list is my Audible list because I'm more of an Audible listener than a book reader. And my list scrolls for a very long time. And I also have literally every one of their

badges wow except for two i'm only missing the bottom two what are those two uh mount everest well that means that this epic award is given away when you listen to something as long as a day so i have to listen to a book that's 24 hours. I just finished one that's 24 hours. Listen. You've got Everest if you were on Audible. No, I'm not. I actually never was because I only started listening to audiobooks 2021

and a big driver was, oh, I need to connect with all the audio listeners because I don't really understand their pain points. And now I do. The Watchtower one says, it says, look at your stats. Attention must be paid. Do it a lot and you're well on your way. says it says looks at your stats attention must be paid do it a lot and you're well on your way so if I look at my stats often which it does tell me like listening

time daily monthly total I guess I've listened to three months 28 days and 46 minutes worth of books I don't know I'm a master listener level. Like I got, I got them all. Like I'm all, I'm all the way up there. Like I'm a master according to audible and I have all the badges. That's kind of fun.

But you haven't told me, see what he did there. He was like, look at all my amazing audible stats. He's still not told us the type of books he listens to. Well, I was saving it for plus plus. Okay.

Show's over. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Oh, my gosh. What a cliffhanger to leave you on. I'm sorry about that. If you're not a plus plus subscriber, you can change that right now.

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The end of the show is here, but what's coming up is a lot of great content. This Friday on ChangeLogin, friends, we have a epic lengthy show from our trip to that conference. Yes, that conference. You can learn more at thatconference.com. It was such a blast going to that conference. Seriously, the red carpet was everywhere. They did such a great job. And next week, Jared and I are talking to OSI Executive Director Stefano Maffoli about the definition for open source AI. It's going to be awesome. And a reminder, Ship It is back. Well, it's officially recording again. We haven't shipped a Ship It episode, but that's coming soon.

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