Introducing Storygraph: Building an Alternative to Goodreads

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This chapter introduces Nadia Otto, the founder and CEO of Storygraph, and discusses the trend of popular web products being purchased by big tech and losing favor over time. It also explores how entrepreneurs can create alternatives to these products, with a brief mention of disrupting meetup.com.

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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