Taking on Goliath (Changelog Interviews #577)
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.
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Chapters
- 0:00 This week on The Changelog
- 1:33 Sponsor: Vercel
- 4:18 Start the show!
- 5:14 Goodbooks killer (alternative?)
- 10:08 The importance of customer research
- 15:53 Effective customer interviews
- 17:32 Open ended questions
- 23:41 You're doing this solo?
- 24:15 Close to everything
- 25:31 The growth story and challenges
- 35:24 Feeling stuck
- 38:10 Sponsor: CIQ / Rocky Linux
- 42:00 The business plan
- 47:13 Who's on "Plus"
- 47:44 Exploring the potential of book clubs
- 56:45 Active userbase and revenue streams
- 57:31 Finding the common problem
- 1:00:51 What's the best use of your time?
- 1:01:47 How to choose what to work on
- 1:07:34 Are you talking to your "Plus" users?
- 1:08:42 What does success look like?
- 1:10:55 Adam has an idea!!
- 1:16:34 Sponsor: Read Write Own
- 1:17:56 Do you want to be acquired?
- 1:28:18 What's the infra of StoryGraph?
- 1:38:26 Are you having fun?
- 1:43:22 Disrupting Oprah...
- 1:47:10 I would be SO motivated
- 1:50:12 Up next!
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