Taking on Goliath (Changelog Interviews #577)

Feb 8, 2024

Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph, talks about customer research, building StoryGraph, revenue generation through subscriptions and partnerships, technical challenges faced, finding the ideal investor, and the future of the internet. They also discuss migrating to Rocky Linux, the discontinuation of CentOS, and the decision to revamp the plus plan. The speaker reflects on the importance of maintaining privacy, tackling technical challenges, and their own experiences as an avid listener of audiobooks.

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Exploring the Additional Aspects of Running an Application in Production

01:54 • 2min

Introducing Nadia Otto and the Storygraph Platform

03:45 • 2min

Building an Alternative to Goodreads

06:03 • 32min

Migrating to Rocky Linux and the Support Offered by CIQ

38:18 • 3min

Choosing an Alternative to CentOS and Building a Paid Plan

41:11 • 6min

The Future of the Plus Plan

47:11 • 15min

Generating Revenue and Maintaining Privacy

01:01:56 • 15min

The Evolution of the Internet, Reclaiming Control, and the Possibility of an Acquisition

01:16:37 • 2min

Finding the Ideal Investor

01:19:06 • 9min

Technical Challenges and Database Upgrades

01:28:18 • 20min

Avid listener's achievements and motivations

01:48:30 • 2min

Announcements, future content, and sponsors

01:50:04 • 3min

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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Sponsors:

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CIQ / Rocky Linux – CIQ is Rocky Linux’s founding support partner. They support the free, stable, and secure Linux distro called Rocky Linux.
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Featuring:

Nadia Odunayo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!