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#100 | 16 August 2021

A trip down memory lane...

 
This is the 100th instalment of this newsletter! 🎉

To celebrate, how about we relive some of your StoryGraph journey highlights via past issues?

Thank you to everyone who wrote in to contribute — you really helped me pull this together!

#1 - Building a Beta (10th June 2019)

The very beginning (of the newsletter)!

I'd been working on the idea of the product since the beginning of the year, and had built small related apps to test certain concepts and features. 

It was now time for me to build a more substantial product, and I decided to start a weekly newsletter in order to hold myself accountable, especially as I was working alone!


#13 - A Revelation and A Surprise (1st July 2019)

The beta was complete, but it was private, and I'd been manually onboarding people for 5 weeks.

From my interviews with my earliest users, I realised that anybody could get value from the site's main filter menu, so I surprised everybody by announcing that the beta product was now open to the public.

Yes, I was very nervous! 😬
 
Screenshot of The StoryGraph from July 2019. The title reads "All books". There are two links underneath. One is "Request to add a book" and the other is "Request more options". Underneath that is a filter menu, encased in a square. There is a label reading "I'm in the mood for something..." followed by a list of 14 moods. Then there are checkboxes for Pace and Book Type (fiction/nonfiction). There's a select box to select a Genre and checkboxes to select different page-length categories. There's a light blue Filter button and a link at the bottom reading "Clear all filters". Underneath, there are two book panes, on white rectangular cards. The books' covers are on the left. On the right are the title of the book, the genres on teal labels, the moods on bright orange/red labels, and three sky blue buttons with white text reading: Mark as read, Mark as currently reading, and Add to TBR.
How the product looked on the day that the beta went public! 😱

#46 - Goodbye, Personal Recommendations! (20th April 2020)

Who remembers our original personal recommendation service? Where you'd fill out a short form explaining exactly what you were looking for and we'd send you a book that matched your request perfectly?

It was super popular amongst those who paid to give the service a go, but we ultimately had to shut it down because it wasn't compelling enough to a wider audience and didn't scale well at all.

It was the first, really tough product decision we had to make!
 
A screenshot from The StoryGraph from early 2020. The title of the page reads "Your personal recommendations". Then there's a white card with text on it. The text reads: "Credits available: 1; Request a personal recommendation (a link in blue); 0 recommendations pending". Underneath is a book pane for Trevor Noah's Born A Crime. The cover is on the left and all of the book information is on the right, including a link titled: "Go to recommendation page".
The old personal recommendations dashboard! 🤯

#55 - The StoryGraph Explodes! (22nd June 2020)

Our first major spike after a couple of very popular tweets about us. In a few days we grew from 1k to 20k users. 

At the time it was all incredibly stressful, because we just weren't set up to deal with that volume — Goodreads imports and recommendations essentially came to a standstill for two weeks — but Rob and I managed to get through it all. 💪🏾

#83 - Launched! 🎉 (4th January 2021)

We officially launched, complete with a (no-longer-present) redesign!
A screenshot of The StoryGraph's homepage from January 2021. The site is on a light blue background, with content in white panes. There's a menu bar across the top. There are two long columns, taking up most of the screen. The top one has a title of "Your Recommendations" and the second has a title of "Your To-Read Pile". Both feature 5 3D book covers. To the right are two panes, one reading "Currently reading", with a list of three books, one with a progress bar filled up with green by about 15%. The bottom pane reads "On The StoryGraph" and lists three books.
I remember being so proud and happy with this design. Then I started to go off all of the blue. 😅

#96 - Slow-Paced, Please! (21 June 2021)

Something that comes up a lot when I ask for feedback on this newsletter is the fact that I frequently share the tough sides of running a business. So one of the newsletter highlights has to be the biggest piece of controversy we've had yet — the Twitter storm when a series of well-known authors discovered incorrect content warnings on their books. 😩


#99 - Going Viral on TikTok (2 August 2021)

It was only the last issue, but still worth a mention in this highlight reel given it marked our biggest spike ever and us topping the App Store Books charts in a range of countries! 🙌🏾
 
Screenshot of the Apple App Store Books Top Charts from July 28th. At number 1 is "StoryGraph: Reading Tracker". Audible is at number 3, Amazon Kindle is at number 4, Goodreads is at number 7.
It was fun while it lasted. 😆

There were soo many more highlights that I could have shared, but I didn't want the length of this to get too out of hand. Perhaps I should make a Memory Lane segment or something. 🤔

A big thank you to all of my readers, especially those of you who have been here since the very beginning. Without you this journey wouldn't be as fun!

I have to give a special shoutout to my wonderful, supportive, inspiring, beautiful mother, who has read and replied to every single issue. I didn't know it was possible to say: "You're doing great. I love you. Keep going." in so many different ways! Thank you, mumma. I wouldn't be where I was without you. ❤️
 

Since last time...
 

On top of releasing our eagerly-awaited Up Next feature, we also released something that I'm personally so incredibly proud and excited by, because it speaks to the dream vision I had for The StoryGraph before the product existed: being the place to help you choose your next book.

It's a Plus feature, called Up Next Suggestions. We look at all of the books on your To-Read Pile and give you smart recommendations about what you should read next and why.
I wasn't getting a "similar to your last read" pick before today. However, I finished A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman last night and now one has popped up. 😍

 

Next two weeks


Apart from catching up on some bugs and maintenance work, the main focus will be V3 of the Stats dashboard, alongside starting to think about what V1 of our Groups feature is going to look like! 👀
 

What I'm reading right now


I hope to read through Adjoa Wiredu's  poetry collection, On Reflection, today as part of my Jacaranda reading challenge!
Screenshot of the book pane for On Reflection on The StoryGraph. The cover mainly teal cover is to the left, with a dark, blurry image of a woman. The pane on the right shows the book has been tagged with 'poetry', 'reflective' and 'slow-paced'. It has 77 pages, and was published in 2020. I've marked it as 'to-read'.

Have a great week and here's to another 100 issues! 🙏🏾🤞🏾

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)
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