Customer Research and Building a Goodreads Alternative

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In this chapter, the speaker shares their experience with the Goodreads app and the development of their own book-related app. They discuss the importance of customer research, the challenges of positioning their app as a Goodreads alternative, and the iterative process of gathering and analyzing feedback. The chapter also explores the benefits of asking open-ended questions, synthesizing responses, and handling biases in customer research.

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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