That's the size of The StoryGraph's team: Myself, Rob, and Abbie, who works part-time.
And I'm the only developer.
So when it's a period, like now, when most of the work we're doing isn't very forward-facing and we don't have many feature announcements, it can feel, at least to me, as if we're moving too slowly and losing momentum.
But then I hear things like "Well done to your design team!" and "Can you pass this on to your developers?" and I think: hmm, perhaps we're doing just fine!
After all, people seem to think we're a lot bigger than we are, so that must be good, right? 😆
We have such a friendly and supportive user base. 🥰
Since last time...
We received a fair amount of attention on the Internet last week, from a TikTok video, to independent bookshops in the States posting about us, to being mentioned regularly in a reddit thread on Goodreads alternatives.
It meant we hit a new user number milestone:
We've gained a further 11k since then!
We finally released the next version of our recommendations and similar books models!
Part of this update means that we now recommend from a pool of 1.5 million books, as opposed to only 200k!
How we let people know that a new world of book discovery awaits them!
We also started tracking our Plus conversion over the last 30 days, alongside all-time, and found that 26% of the people whose free trial has expired in the last month became paying customers! 🙌🏾
That number is even more awesome to us because we don't take any credit card details in advance and we don't send any emails to let people know when their free trial has expired (though we will likely do the latter at some point)!
Next two weeks
Our recommendations work best when people fill out the free text box that asks them what types of books they like to read.
We plan to improve the user experience here at some point — after all, nobody likes a big, empty text box — but for now the easiest thing to do is to provide more in-app help to anyone who's stuck.
So, stay tuned for some guidelines going live soon!
On top of continuing with our user experience improvements, we have had a few reports of device compatibility issues! This is the risk when you switch in more advanced web technology! Hopefully by the next time you hear from me we've resolved all of these problems. 🤞🏾
