← Building

Suite Books

Summary

I’ve always wanted to build or solidify friendships around the books you read, but there’s no good option for this. Goodreads is the default place to share what you read but its social features are terrible. Discussing it in person seems like another good option, but have you tried speaking to a group of friends at the pub about the latest book you’ve read?

So I was building a fun and judgement free place where you could share what you read and what you wanted to read with anyone in your life. It had to be fun because of the stigma around the ‘have you read this book’ question.

What went well

• Built the entire app myself on Bubble, a no-code tool, and grew to thousands of users.
• Improved a number of users’ reading life with comments like ‘I only read this because person x was reading it’ and ‘I’m more motivated to read a book now and leave comments.’
• Activation of users via free marketing channels was good, using micro-influencers to share their reading.

What went wrong

• Retention was poor and it was very predictable.

  • I focused on ‘books completed’ and ‘want to read’ but targeted the user who reads ~5 books a year. That means that the app really only has relevance once every couple of months.
  • In the future, design the product around the problem so that it is needed every day.

• Don’t fight market forces around pricing.

  • Goodreads was a bad solution yes, but it’s free. Building a nicer, more engaging solution to this is not going to be worth money to many people.
  • In the future, find other value that the user you’re targeting will pay money for. If you can’t find that, don’t build the product.