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Each week Adam & Ste focus on a specific feature, idea or prototype in Hardcover and iterate on it together or with guests.
Adam (00:01.507)
Hey, hey, stay. Welcome back.
Ste (00:05.703)
Yeah, it's been a while. How are you?
Adam (00:08.026)
Yeah, pretty good, pretty good. Yeah, it's been, it's been a busy December, but I, at least I was like staying in one place. I think you, you did a lot more than I did when it comes to traveling and family stuff.
Ste (00:24.527)
Oh yeah, I hopped around quite a bit, had to go visit family back home in Romania, had to eat a lot of Romanian cuisine and also caught, I think, the worst flu of my recent adult years, which I managed to survive, luckily, but it wasn't the best. So yeah, really glad to be home. Happy New Year, everybody. It's, yeah, I'm on the man. So.
That's actually really, really good. I'm feeling okay. How about you? How did you celebrate Christmas and New Year's?
Adam (01:04.066)
My wife and I just had Christmas here, you know, some calls with family. Our tradition, pretty much since my wife was a kid, is we watch the Disney celebration thing where it's just like musical artists and Christmassy stuff. I'm pretty sure they record it in Florida and other places in like November and October, but then they air it on Christmas, but it's still fun.
So we tend to do that and drink mimosas and that's our Christmas morning.
Ste (01:38.007)
sounds nice yeah I would have yeah given up the food for musas
Adam (01:40.706)
But for your, yeah, do you think it was COVID or?
Ste (01:47.559)
Well, it was weird because like four or five days in, both me and my wife lost our taste. And that's not something you usually get with the flu. We didn't do the test because it's already like over, but yeah, you know, this family gatherings, it's always, and gatherings in general, you always end up with some kind of thing like this. So.
I can say I was surprised, but I was hoping it wouldn't be that bad. But yeah, it was a hot feverish Christmas, so to say. But otherwise it was nice. I mean, I enjoyed the food, I enjoyed the company. So I can't complain.
Adam (02:29.428)
and
Adam (02:38.883)
That's especially rough when you're traveling. Like being sick when traveling is like the worst.
Ste (02:44.419)
Yeah, I know, I wouldn't do it again, but you know... Not up to me, I guess.
Adam (02:51.242)
Oh, well, yeah. Any, did you do anything fun for New Year's or were you still like coming down from feeling sick?
Ste (02:58.615)
We actually had, we got back to London and we had some friends over who stayed here to look after the cats. So, yeah, just a bunch of early champagne and some fish. We cooked some ceviche, which is that kind of like, yeah, chopped up fish. Yeah, it's the best. It's the best. And they say you're supposed to eat fish on New Year's to be, I don't know.
Adam (03:17.67)
I love ceviche.
Ste (03:28.075)
Have good luck in the new year. Is that something where in the US or where you're from or is it like totally new?
Adam (03:38.391)
I feel like I've heard that before, but I don't know where it comes from.
Ste (03:42.395)
Yeah, yeah, fish. Must have been like fish is like really hard to like get like historically, it must have been. So maybe if you had fish, you were like, okay, we're having fish, we're going to have fish for the whole of like next year. That's my theory, at least I don't know how much it like stands. But yeah, that must be it.
Adam (04:09.29)
The tradition that we always do is having 12 grapes at midnight and you have to eat them by 12.01. And if you get a sour grape, it indicates a sour month. I think it's like an old Spanish tradition or Puerto Rican. So we've gotten all of our friends to do it here, which has been fun.
Ste (04:22.9)
Oh, wow, it's okay.
Ste (04:33.836)
Nice. When you get the sour one? Did you get any sour ones?
Adam (04:37.134)
Uh, I don't think I've ever gotten a sour one. I think we've done a good job of picking out grapes ahead of time. You're allowed to pick them out.
Ste (04:40.43)
No!
Ste (04:47.11)
Okay, okay, so yeah, okay, so there is some skill involved. It's not only like luck.
Adam (04:53.825)
Yeah.
Ste (04:54.883)
Okay, that's good to know. So only sweet months for the year. That's, that's, that's reassuring.
Adam (05:01.322)
Yeah, but yeah, and yeah, since then, just trying to get into the flow of the new year and, you know, get back to, you know, uh, doing, doing stuff again, after pretty much just lazing around for the last couple of weeks, aside from the year in books.
Ste (05:02.207)
Yeah.
Ste (05:09.01)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (05:18.083)
Yeah, it does. Yeah, yeah, it does feel like your brain goes on vacation these days. I totally lost track of time. I didn't realize today was actually a Wednesday. You don't know, it's like a continuous weekend and like weekday at the same time. So yeah, I'd say the same for ghost for me. It's good to, you know, actually be back. It's like, you know.
having a warmup after you haven't done sports in a while. Some things are beginning to like pop in places.
Adam (05:56.126)
Yeah, yeah. I also went back to the gym and I was very sore after not going for a couple of weeks.
Ste (06:04.783)
Oh yeah, crap, I also have to do that. Uh, what, what were your, like some of your, let's say, what are those called? New Year's resolutions.
Adam (06:22.242)
I wrote some down, but I just have a broad one, which is to better balance creation, consumption, and movement. I feel like when those three are in balance in my life, I just feel a lot healthier. And sometimes I'll go way towards the consumption side and just watch a whole bunch of shows and social media. Sometimes I'll go way towards the creation side and just work myself to death. So it's more about just like...
trying to do the balance of all those, I feel is, and movement too in there, because I feel like at the end of the day, when I'm like sitting down after dinner or something, I'll feel so much more like relaxed and relieved if I've, you know, done stuff that day in some way.
Ste (07:10.407)
Yeah, I meant to that. That's a good resolution. Yeah. I like the whole like martial arts balance, like vibe to it. Yeah. I'd say balance would be like one of, one of mine as well. And I guess, you know, having a bit more coverage to like push projects like I have her. Um, yeah, that would be one as well.
And speaking of which, today is like a really special edition of HireCover Live, I guess, because we're actually going to talk about HireCover Live.
Adam (07:50.618)
Yeah, I had a couple things to chat about. And yeah, I guess the first one before we jump into that was just like chatting about the year in books launch since that it, uh, so we released the year in books on Christmas at around noon. We actually like published it a day or two before, but that's when we kind of started sending it out and.
Ste (08:02.591)
Oh yeah.
Adam (08:18.198)
We ended up having like the best week in terms of signups hardcovers had since we started, which has been really amazing this last week, actually, like seeing actual like a number of people joining as opposed to even a year ago, we were getting like two people a day, one person a day or some days like, you know, no one would join. So this week, it's felt more like a new bunch of new people finding hardcover, which has been really exciting.
Ste (08:47.231)
Yeah, it's been in the high double digits for some days. So I was really amazed because this is our first, let's say, organic campaign. So nothing where we launch on some site and that site brings us traffic. This was all us. We made this resource, we shared it, and people really liked it. So that was really, really fun to see. I think it was, and it will be because it's not like...
It's still like a piece of history on hardcover, and I think people are still discovering it throughout January. And yeah, it's been really interesting to see that. Was it, did you expect that? Ha ha ha.
Adam (09:29.888)
Yeah.
Adam (09:35.842)
I was kind of hoping it would be shared some. And I think as Jeff just mentioned, there have been some even threads on threads about hardcover. And we got a lot of attraction on Reddit and a couple different subreddits for different authors. Yeah, it's still, I feel like we still have more to do for marketing it. It's still a...
Adam (10:04.774)
I feel like it's like getting to the point where like some people have seen it, but it still Feels like the people who have seen it are still in some of the niche book world Like they're really into the book world connected to either one of the authors or people on the community so I'm still wondering how we can like break into that next step and get it in front of like everyone else but
Ste (10:29.363)
Yeah, I had the same feel about it. And definitely it would be really nice. It's good that it marketed itself up to this point. And it's, I think the first time I've actually seen people like share hardcover with their network enthusiastically, like, oh, look at this.
There's been a lot of good feedback for people who have just been discovering us. And that gets better and better as we make it better. I'm imagining someone finding us now versus one year ago. They have lots more reasons to be excited. And yeah, some of them come ahead and tell us that, which has been really, really nice to see.
Also a good thing that we did is reaching out to authors. Uh, Adam has been like the, uh, you have been like the, uh, the main drive of that. You know, actually like mailing we have, we actually, what we did is for the authors that had books featured on hardcover life, we actually, uh, printed out a nice note and we actually got their physical addresses to their agents or for them.
and mailed it to them. And I think what was surprising to me was the willingness of authors to share their address for us to send them something like that. And yeah, the willingness, I mean, you know.
Adam (12:10.419)
Oh yeah, have you seen the physical stickers? Let me get one of them.
Ste (12:13.351)
No, I haven't. Yeah. Good opportunity to, yeah, yeah. So actually see them live. We did some like really cool holographic stickers. I don't know if the effect will actually be visible on video, but yeah. Oh, here we go. OK, yeah, here we go. OK, oh, those came out. How? Yeah.
Adam (12:29.666)
So we have.
Adam (12:37.502)
Yeah, they're decent size. They're like full palm. Yeah.
Ste (12:42.427)
Yeah, that's not bad. Okay. Wow. Okay. And they're actually translucent. I seen like the holographic. Yeah, I've seen some of that nice glare. Okay, so job well done there. I was a bit worried that they would be like faded in but yeah, you could see the details as well.
Adam (12:48.901)
Yeah.
Adam (13:01.202)
And, and I've started getting more messages from authors and, um, like agents who were on vacation when we sent that out and now they're coming back in the new year and now they're applying to their emails. So I have a feeling it's going to have a little bit of a long tail for, uh, those contacts.
Ste (13:14.335)
Okay, ah yeah, that's good. Yeah.
Ste (13:21.727)
Yeah. Well, that's always good. Everybody loves that like, fun tale. Like good responses. Okay. Yeah. This has been like really a really good move. And I like that it's personal towards the authors as well. So now we are talking to some really.
Adam (13:26.576)
Thank you.
Ste (13:44.563)
some really good people that actually wrote the books that are featured on hardcover. So especially for when we push the author's update sometime this year, having them as potential people to ask feedback from is going to be really, really good. So yeah.
Adam (14:08.054)
One unexpectedly useful thing, I ended up doing a thread on Mastodon about all the authors that are on Mastodon that had books featured in the yearbooks and tagged those authors. One thing that was really neat about that is that a lot of those posts ended up being reposted. The way Mastodon works is that posts are shown on multiple different servers.
So all of a sudden we had links to the urine books from like hundreds of different domains because those posts were on all these different Mastodon servers and each Mastodon server has its own domain. So that actually helped some on the short term for SEO as well because it looked like all of a sudden, like all these different websites were linking to us. So it's something I hadn't even thought about for Mastodon as a marketing engine.
Ste (15:00.855)
shit
Yeah. Oh yeah, that's good. Yeah that should have given us a really nice boost, right?
Adam (15:11.922)
Yeah. I don't think any authors have, well, no, one signed up. I think Ethan Markoti, who did, like, You Deserve a Tech Union, who I follow on Mastodon, a couple of authors just, like, shared it on social, like, fondly. And then a lot of agents were, like, just really excited. And just a.
Ste (15:34.504)
Yeah.
Adam (15:40.174)
thankful for it in their emails. But I think one of the next steps for us is going to be like those authors that we're curious is talking to them about what they want from a site like Hardcover from the author standpoint. Because right now, like Hardcover is designed for readers. It's not really designed for authors. So I think that's one of our big things for later on in this year is like figuring out what designing Hardcover for authors is gonna look like.
Ste (16:08.627)
Yeah, that's gonna be really exciting. I think after discussions, that should be right up there on the lists and a couple of other updates like the list page. And well, yeah, maybe just that. So pretty soon, I guess. Well, discussions is gonna be a big one, but anyhow.
Adam (16:30.754)
Yeah.
Ste (16:32.919)
That's going to tie in with authors as well, because I think authors will be highly related to the way we do discussions and the way they could use discussions will be pretty important. Yeah. So the Irim books, I guess...
Adam (16:49.886)
Yeah, I think that'll be big.
Ste (16:56.295)
a success for us. We just have to push it like, it's still like January is a good month for making sure it gets shared out there. And yeah, getting in front of more people, it's a really good resource.
Adam (17:14.647)
Yeah.
Adam (17:18.386)
Yeah. Like Letterboxd hasn't even released their 2023 year in movies. So I feel like they do it in mid January. So we're just doing it a little early.
Ste (17:29.207)
Uh huh. Yeah, exactly. So it would just be, you know, the Christmas launch and then the, you know, next launch, the New Year's launch. Just as good. Just as good. It's still fresh. 2023 still, still with us.
Adam (17:40.814)
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.
Adam (17:49.854)
Yep. Well, wanna chat about some Hardcover Live stuff? Cool. One of the things I was gonna try doing is using these transitions that Riverside has. Here we go. Now it's, we're in the new segment for Hardcover Live.
Ste (17:55.28)
Yeah, of course. So.
Ste (18:05.015)
Oh, let's see.
Ste (18:10.551)
Okay, okay, oh I didn't even notice that. Wow, okay that was smooth.
Adam (18:15.286)
Yeah, there's a, I, I'm, I'm not like, uh, I've never done like podcasting. Like I'm always amazed about how people can do these things. Some of them do them live. Like when I'm watching, uh, one of my favorite, um, streamers is, uh, learn with Jason who does, uh, he does like live streams where him and another person build something together over like 90 minutes and so it's like a developer.
Ste (18:23.819)
Yeah.
Ste (18:31.765)
Oh yeah.
Ste (18:38.932)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (18:42.93)
And like doing these things live is always like amazing to me. But I don't watch very many live streams. Do you have any one that you have connected with or podcasts or channels?
Ste (18:46.58)
Yeah.
Ste (18:55.551)
Yeah, yeah, actually there was, there's like this guy, Farza, who does sort of like a, uh, Y Combinator, but for like amateurs.
which is a good prep for like Y Combinera. And he usually does these, I'm gonna share it because he does them yearly. And maybe this year we can even like get in hardcover. It could be like good practice. And all of the sessions are live. And I really liked it because, you know, they convey that kind of energy that you need to actually get going with a startup. So yeah.
I admit they're very hard to, you know.
do and yeah, I think this exercise is good for both of us as well as Hardcover. And I think we can get to a point where we can actually make it entertaining and informative for the people watching us and actually make it not only about what we're building. I love learning with Jason, by the way. He's like one of the people who like...
I'm watching and I love the way he's making it so easy to see how to build something. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. What's what you're thinking about? What we can do with hardcover life? In terms of the format mainly.
Adam (20:33.03)
Yeah, I like that you started this brainstorming doc I just pulled up. And I did some work on the live page on the website. Maybe we could start with like talking about those two and kind of see where we are now. And then
Ste (20:50.165)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (20:54.714)
see what's next for it.
Ste (20:57.513)
Yeah.
Adam (20:59.212)
I'll share this just to have something up here.
Adam (21:07.57)
Okay, share screen.
Adam (21:13.218)
And I think I've realized that looking at all the past lives, because I imported them all, it ends up looking better when we share like a window rather than an entire screen. Like it allows it to be just a little bit bigger. So I think I'm gonna start sharing a window rather than a screen.
Ste (21:28.503)
Oh, yeah.
Ste (21:32.431)
Oh yeah, definitely works better.
Adam (21:36.446)
So yes, this is, and I realized like this one's the one we're recording right now. And I realized like my JavaScript must have been off for it because it should still show up as like, hasn't been released yet and watch now. But I realized that like 1 p.m. today, like right as we were going live, that it didn't have that link to Riverside anymore. So.
Ste (21:52.823)
Thank you.
Ste (22:00.648)
Ah, it's happening, it's happening. That's good.
Adam (22:05.582)
So yeah, each episode has a length, link to watch on YouTube and a link to listen to the podcast with a full like transcript and all that.
Ste (22:19.995)
Oh, here we go. There's our faces. That's great.
Adam (22:22.396)
Yeah.
And then for each one of them, it's kind of just, yeah.
Ste (22:28.516)
I'm going to work on some awesome cover images for these. We had some at some point. I'm just going to have to make them even more spectacular, especially for what we have guests, which is like, yeah. We'll talk about that in a sec.
Adam (22:33.745)
Mmm.
Adam (22:46.502)
Yeah, yeah, let me make a note of that. Yeah, cover images. Yeah, that would be really cool. Especially since, yeah, for like a way to kind of market it before it actually goes live, like that could be the placeholder. Cause right now, like here, there's the no placeholder for this episode cause I just kind of grabbed screenshots from different episodes for these, but.
Ste (22:59.475)
Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah.
Ste (23:11.739)
Yeah, that's good, build mode, yeah, just like the rough cut.
Adam (23:16.151)
Yeah.
Adam (23:19.81)
Yeah, there's a, I think like functionally, this feels like it has everything we need, but any design recommendations or design tweaks to any of this, feel free to make.
Ste (23:35.143)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's actually very good. I mean, you know, I wouldn't have like major stuff to add to it. Maybe just some spacing, but you know, you know me, I'm always like, just like moving like one, one unit of padding, but yeah, even in terms of spacing, it actually, I might not do anything at all. It might just be that maybe experiment with some other layouts when we have the covers and, uh, yeah.
That's, yeah, this is, yeah, job well done. It's looking very good. Now, in terms of the single posts for content, I was thinking, should we talk about guests and cover that because, oh, here we go. We also have a section on the homepage.
Adam (24:11.79)
cool.
Adam (24:26.466)
Yeah.
I kind of just stole the past looks and just a heart. So this would show the next episode usually. Yeah.
Ste (24:42.015)
Yeah, this is perfect. I like it. Maybe I'm gonna make a small illustration for that on the homepage as well. Yeah.
Adam (24:43.723)
So, it's a.
Adam (24:49.43)
That'd be cool. And from a technical standpoint, this was really neat to make because it's using advanced custom fields in WordPress. So it's like each one is just a post of type live. And then here at the bottom, there's all like the metadata about the post. So it's like,
Here are the participants, the video length, podcast, YouTube, and then it just creates the page with all this data.
Ste (25:25.199)
Nice. Yeah, that's great. Maybe we can use that. I was thinking for the guests to also have a small bio, like bio for like what they, if they're authors, what they wrote or if they're book bloggers, what their book blog is. Yeah, just maybe a snippet of things about them and...
Adam (25:46.684)
Yeah.
Ste (25:52.435)
Maybe some other data as well. I was thinking favorite books, but that was just the first thought. But yeah, on the single post page, I think that could be a good addition. And if we use the custom fields, it should be fairly easy to add those in and link them up.
Adam (26:10.422)
Yeah. We could add like a, anything here for, you know, like about the guest and just format it like normal, normal WordPress. And then, and then we would probably like add them here as a, as a participant. And then they would show up with the link to their hardcover profile here.
Ste (26:16.867)
Okay, okay, just okay just format it. Okay, you don't need custom fields. Yeah
Ste (26:31.954)
Nice.
Yeah, that's great.
Adam (26:39.338)
Yeah, that's, that's pretty much what I've been preparing for, but it's, it's really just like, it feels like it's getting us up to like the starting point in a, in a race for like, you know, what's next for hardcover live. So I feel like you've been, you've been theorizing about like, what do we, what do we do with this format next? Because the last year has pretty much been, um, the two of us jump on a call. We catch up, um, talk about work in progress. And then we talk about.
we like do a deep dive into a single feature. And I think you've been thinking about some changes to that format and keeping some parts of it the same.
Ste (27:11.284)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (27:18.983)
Yeah, well, I can tell you what I like about this format. So it's good that we're covering aspects of building car cover and showing people stuff that we haven't released yet. And potentially, I mean, we've gathered some feedback live as we were building things in the past. So that's the good thing about it. I think.
The bad thing about it is that it can get technical, and I think there's a wider audience of people who are interested in this. So thinking about our mission to make, let's say the book industry, the broad mission of making the book industry just slightly better.
I think we could use hardcover life to do that as well. And through it, have it become a thing in itself where we reach out to authors, to book bloggers, to book influencers, to people in the book world in general and just ask them about what they think the problem is.
because I got this idea from the discovery calls we had with people. And the discovery calls are really like interesting because we get some like very, very useful bits of information every time we jump on one of those calls. And if those were live, I mean, some of the calls where you ask people.
Uh, not necessarily about, you know, a feature, but what would be useful for, for you, I think they can like yield some, uh, really interesting answers. And it can be different. It doesn't have to be that. So yeah. Uh, I think the first thing I was thinking about is if we bring someone, uh, in as a guest and, uh,
Ste (29:26.659)
sort of asks them what their take is on some matter related to what they do. Antitin with hardcover somehow, maybe we can make it so that we also get some information through that call and the people watching it also get like loads of interesting bits about what those people think about the book industry about
Uh, our app, why not? We can even like look at prototypes with them and see what's what they think. I was thinking, you know, what if we get someone from the discord community and, uh, they come on live and we talk about, let's say the discussions prototype and they tell us what they like, what they don't like. I mean, even spice it up a bit because you know, we're like mostly agreeing on all of the things. So, uh.
I love to get like an opinion where we have to convince someone or just like talk through a feature they might not understand. I think those are the moments where we can learn a lot. And it will also be interesting because how we build hardcover is the technical part, but how we build hardcover is...
More than that, like asking people what they want from hardcover. I mean, that's been our thing from the start. Asking readers, like, what do you want? And drawing the conclusions.
Adam (30:58.503)
Yeah.
Adam (31:06.866)
Yeah, I think like, yeah, it's almost like doing those discovery calls that we're doing, but doing them sometimes in public with people that are up for it. So yeah, it feels like one of the next ones that came to mind as you were saying that could just be having a Jeff, our lead librarian on and doing a talk where we're digging deep into like librarian features and what we want.
out of those, what the problems are with the current system. Um, I that's kind of been my, like planning for some changes to that has been my, um, like my focus. Um, and so next starting probably next week or the next two weeks, I'll be like really getting into the nitty gritty of those fi- fixes. So yeah, that might be a good first one for next week if Jeff's up for it.
Ste (31:59.935)
Yeah, definitely. That sounds great. That's exactly what this could be. And I'd love to ask someone. I know I tend to sometimes talk more than I should. So it will also be an opportunity for us to ask questions and let other people talk and us focus on what we're asking them.
I'd be particularly interested, let's say we invite an author and ask them about review bombing and what they think about it or another thing that's going on in the book industry and just hear what they want to say. I think that's, I don't know, some, there are definitely people who cover that, but yeah. I think...
Adam (32:46.446)
Uh, and yeah, I know some of the things that I'm most curious to ask authors is like at the really high level, like how do you connect with your audience? How do you keep them informed as you're, as you're creating, how do you connect with them after you've written a book and just like better understand where those like channels are today? Cause I feel like with kind of the
I don't know, I won't say downfall of X, but you know, as it becomes less relevant to society and people start moving away, like so many of them have been moving to Instagram, to threads, to blue sky, or a lot of them are just, you know, on Facebook or have their own email lists. So it's really like, one of the things I really want to understand is like, just what
do they feel works for them today and what isn't working?
Ste (33:47.351)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely that's gonna be like very insightful and it also overlaps with one of what we want to find out From authors. So yeah, we can do also do all sorts of things Like like I said, we could also show them like the author page and ask them, you know Do you like this? Do you not like this? or maybe even ask them, you know have a certain set of like five questions about books like
The book, like prompts, have like some prompts ready, maybe like specific to them. Some funny, some interesting, some like hard, but actually like ask those prompts live and see them develop on the subject. What book changed your life? What book made you the author that you are? And yeah, just ask them that. I think that's gonna be like.
Adam (34:34.061)
Yeah.
Ste (34:43.967)
really interesting and I'm guessing we could also use that info to Publish it to their author pages that would be like really neat. So have those prompts live Plus if they want to add like other things after the live Allow them to do that. But yeah have those live prompts On their page and the podcast episode on their page featured
Adam (35:11.862)
Yeah, it feels like this is going to be less about talking with an author and publicizing their book. I mean, that'll be a part of it, but that's not the main focus. It's not like, hey, you're releasing a book, come on Hardcover Live and we'll talk about it. It's more like, how do you, as an author, interact with the book community and how do you...
Ste (35:30.78)
Yeah.
Adam (35:38.834)
work as an author and how can hardcover help with that?
Ste (35:42.887)
Yeah, yeah, that's perfect. But that's a good idea as well. I mean, approaching authors after they launch their book. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think some of the authors would be really thrilled to be part of this, especially if we make the questions interesting. I think we have the capacity to drop some really insightful questions. And yeah.
Adam (35:45.985)
Hahaha
Adam (35:50.925)
Yeah.
Adam (36:09.842)
Yeah. It, I, uh, it makes me wonder, like, you know, we're, we're a tiny group. We still were, you know, growing as a, um, both as a podcast and as a, this is our first real live stream that we've done. Um, so it, I have a feeling we're going to have to, you know, set our sites slowly and work up to like the big name authors, but I have a feeling, uh, finding authors that
want to talk about this stuff is going to be like not terribly difficult because I mean I know as a developer like I would go on any podcast because I like talking about developer stuff so I have a feeling it's just a matter of finding those authors that are just like dying to talk about this stuff with someone.
Ste (36:59.379)
Yeah. Well, some of them gave us our, their personal addresses. So I'm guessing like appearing on the podcast. I was expecting that to be like very, very like tricky, but it wasn't. So yeah, I'm guessing some of them might be more open, especially if we make this into a format, just like work our way up and build it.
where it generally gets interesting. So kind of like one of the shows, like, I don't know, hot ones where, you know, you eat those spicy wings. Do you know that one? Well, not that. Yeah. Well, we're not gonna eat spicy wings, but yeah. Talk about books and maybe we can find the format to make that like fun and interesting. But.
Adam (37:35.13)
Oh, I love hot ones.
Adam (37:49.794)
Yeah.
Ste (37:50.567)
make it into a really good show on the internet. That would be really, really fun to, or at least insightful, yeah.
Adam (38:01.158)
Yeah. Doing, I feel like part of so much of that's doing that prep work to get good questions ahead of time. Like that's part of what makes Hot Ones so good is that they're like, they, they do their research, they get into the deep cuts about someone's past. And, uh, I feel like that's something that both of us enjoy doing is like, you know, doing that bit of a prep work and research and it could make it for a good one. And I really liked the idea of having like that same
Ste (38:09.877)
Yeah.
Ste (38:26.731)
Yeah, definitely.
Adam (38:29.73)
question that we ask people at like the end of a show. Like, there's a lot of shows that, you know, it's, you know, the show kind of, you know, goes like this, and then, you know, it kind of starts to fade off. And then they ask that question at the end, and it's like, oh, now I know where in the show we are. And it's kind of like, it's time to wrap up the show and answer this question that they ask everyone. And I really like that format.
Ste (38:51.627)
Yeah, exactly. Uh-huh, yeah, that's gonna be great. I mean, we can start thinking about those kind of things, like that question. Yeah, I'm wondering what that could be. We can figure it out as we go along. And we can also have the librarians dig into it. I think many of the people will be really, really interested into...
doing some of that research as well. It's, I mean, it can get interesting and like I get spicy, you know, those deep cuts you're talking about definitely are gonna be interesting to research. So we can count on the, what's Jeff calling it? The shush, is it the shush?
Adam (39:39.573)
The shush, the group of librarians is the collective noun for a group of librarians.
Ste (39:45.147)
Oh, really? Is that official? Okay, that's good to know. Yeah, we can definitely do that.
Adam (39:46.854)
I mean, now it is.
Ste (39:54.975)
Sounds good. Sounds great. What about the length? I think we touched upon this at some point. And what do you think about the hour mark?
Adam (40:07.934)
I like keeping it to an hour. And I know, like I was looking through some of the past episodes when I was moving them over to YouTube. And I think the longest we got was like an hour and 40 minutes where it was like, it was just the two of us working in Figma together for an hour. And that's like fun and it's its own thing, but maybe that's not hardcover live. Maybe that can just be us like, you know, occasionally if we wanna go live and do a deep dive into a feature.
Ste (40:22.583)
I'm sorry.
Ste (40:30.624)
Yeah.
Ste (40:35.323)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's like my, my feeling exactly on the, on the matter. I was even like thinking if we could do it like even, uh, shorter to, you know, keep it like stick to the, the protein, not, uh, have like extra bits and stuff. So I'm assuming, you know, as much as people like our, our intros, we can keep that to like a minimum. And I mean, if we have a.
Uh, a guest, I'm guessing we'll just like directly introduce the guest and. Yeah. It would be nice to like have those build calls, maybe have those built calls, but not on a schedule, just whenever we feel like it, when we're, we sync and build something, just have those calls free for anyone to join, but not have them. You're right. They're not like necessarily hardcover life. Those didn't feel like, yeah.
Adam (41:30.738)
I still like some episodes being like that, like building together, but not like, it would have to be confined to that hour mark. That's the hard part. It's to not have it, to have it be succinct and like we're diving into this feature and we're building it together, but we're not gonna build out every little bit of it. But.
Ste (41:52.571)
Okay. So just like cut it at one hour. Okay. Yeah. I think that works. Yeah. I think.
Adam (41:56.682)
Yeah. And that's one hour with like 15 minutes of intro and like five minutes of wrap up. So it's.
Ste (42:05.172)
Yeah. One hour definitely is like the sweet spot, I guess, for that kind of stuff. Allows us to like show people some, some things and also keep it like to the point.
Adam (42:05.506)
But.
Ste (42:18.599)
Maybe we can even differentiate between these. So whether it's a build episode or a guest episode, I mean, oh, they're going to see like the people who participated. I was thinking that, you know, we might not be able to set up a guest every week. So some weeks it can be someone from the community where we can send them like a questionnaire upfront, because we might not know things about them, but we can ask.
And we can have, by the way, open call. I mean, if anyone from the community wants to join Hardcover Live and do this with us, it's not going to only be our player. I think it's going to be like very fun and interesting to have this kind of chat. Yeah, so some days we could do that. Some days we could go for book influencers. Some days we can go for author guests. And I think that's...
we can maybe even like rinse and repeat it. So, you know, the first week of the first, the month, we built something. The second one, it's like someone from the community. The third one is a book blogger and then, or like a book influencer. And then we have an author to wrap up the week. So that would be, I think that'd be too much.
Adam (43:36.886)
Yeah.
I, yeah, maybe like, you know, that kind of matches what I was thinking. It's kind of like the default, if we don't have a guest, is building something together. And if we're able to get a guest, then we focus on like their domain expertise and how they work and understanding that their problems. Almost basically like a discovery call, but also just a learning about our, learning about the book community call as well.
Ste (44:10.719)
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are some members of the community who are very keen on talking about their libraries. We can do a deep dive into what they're reading, and we can also ask them about hardcover, so find out things that they'd want. It would be also a good idea if they want to push a feature they really want.
You know.
Ste (44:43.439)
to our attention, so yeah.
Adam (44:46.33)
Yeah, those, uh, I have a feeling with, with those calls, it's, it's definitely going to come down to us to make it like a, a welcoming, exciting experience for the call, not on the person. So they, they can basically come on and relax and kind of let us, let us take the wheel and, uh, they can just, you know, sit in the back seat and answer all the fun questions and have all the fun opinions.
Ste (45:00.597)
Oh yeah.
Ste (45:09.759)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the set of questions, I think, will apply for every time we have a guest. It will just be different questions, depending on if they're from the community. So we don't have like, we'll ask for some answers to the questions. So we have some background.
Then for book bloggers, I think we could like drop a profile and then for authors, that's when I guess we'll have the most info. So that would be when we can ask the community as well to look into things they want to ask them. It could also be an MAA. So, uh, AMA, sorry, where we could, uh, get questions from the public.
Adam (45:47.118)
Thanks for watching!
Ste (46:01.231)
So if you've got an author you really like and you've been dying to ask him a question, we could facilitate that.
Adam (46:09.502)
Yeah, yeah, I think, I think once we have like one person, these are like, we're kind of talking about personas. So once we have like a persona, um, like a discussion guide or, you know, an interview guide for how we, like questions we've asked one author, we'll probably be able to ask other authors, like most of those same questions, but then over time, you know, we'll, we'll figure out the answers that, you know,
We'll figure out some solutions and we'll come up with new questions and things like that. But, uh, I have a feeling that it's like, it sounds like our, uh, like personas are like authors, book influencers, other people in the book industry, whether that's, um, editors, press marketers, um, librarians on hardcover, um, hardcover users, readers, the hardcover team. Um, and then I was thinking also like other.
Ste (46:41.096)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (46:56.779)
Yeah.
Adam (47:07.342)
people who are designing or developing other similar products, whether it's in the book industry or other social networks, kind of like peers, peer social networks.
Ste (47:20.825)
Oh, yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I'd love talking to some of those people. Like, yeah, I think I even have some in mind, just people who are like doing things like we're doing, but on another niche, maybe, or like they can be in the book space as well. Uh, yeah.
Adam (47:37.863)
Yeah, exactly.
Ste (47:44.159)
Definitely, that would be really, really interesting. And I kind of like this format. I think it will also work because you can ask a question. I can ask a question. There will be plenty of, we could be each other's fallback for like, who?
talking to the other person. So definitely, I think it's going to have a nice flow to it. And it's not just going to be us talking, except on the build calls. Yeah, that sounds good. I think it's good diversity of formats for what we can do with hardcover.
Adam (48:19.402)
Yeah.
Adam (48:32.958)
Yeah, yeah. I'll, I'll like, I'll have to keep better notes on like all the individual book products, projects that I see online. Like, like, um, not too long ago, I saw someone who just like created something where you can like put in your like Goodreads, um, user ID and it goes out to local libraries and finds like what books are available at those local libraries using overdrive. So it's like having, you know, people doing
Ste (48:33.803)
with the live.
Adam (49:01.43)
things like that where it's, it's maybe not like a full community, but it's more like a tool or someone created something to analyze your, your stats. Um, things like that, where it's, it's like, they're just, just all these people creating cool stuff and figuring out how to showcase them, even if they're not. You know, hardcover dependent, they're cool stuff in the book space.
Ste (49:10.697)
Isn't it?
Ste (49:16.616)
Yeah.
Ste (49:23.219)
Yeah, definitely. Mitch mentioned lots of open source book products that are being worked on. Definitely those are, I mean, open sources, not only something we're planning to do, at least with the front end and maybe we'll get it wrapped. Maybe this, I mean, it should be like realistically could happen this year. If we.
Adam (49:47.267)
I don't want to commit to it, but I would be sad if hardcover isn't open source by the end of the year.
Ste (49:55.003)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, same. So definitely, there's so many people. And what's good about the open source community is that when we do this, I think lots of other people who are working on smaller projects, I mean, not to the scale of like ours, can be integrated in what we do. And so.
Yeah, for instance, the Overdrive project, I mean, that could definitely be something that helps readers find the books. And we have the book pages, so that could be something that could be integrated. But yeah, it's really fun seeing this. And the open source community is going to be very, very valuable to us, especially you know.
Adam (50:35.606)
Yeah.
Adam (50:39.327)
And yeah.
Ste (50:51.227)
Going into this new year where open source seems to be the thing. I'm keep, I keep seeing like open source alternatives that are taking off. So they're just not, not just like the smaller competitor to something. They're like the main thing. And once an open source project is the main thing, good design, good community, good like exposure to people who are.
Adam (50:59.022)
Thank you.
Ste (51:14.699)
contributing that's, I don't see like any way of someone like taking that away. I mean, an open source project is fail proof from that perspective. So.
Adam (51:28.858)
Yeah, I think, I think we're in a, I like, I'm trying to think of other projects that would be like ours in the open source world where, where it's not just the code base that's excuse me. It's not just the code base that's important, but it's also just like the database where like our, our book database itself is not something that we can open source because it has everyone's private data in it. So it's like, we have.
Ste (51:37.365)
Yeah.
Adam (51:58.902)
We have all this data about books and about additions and series and authors. And that part would be fine to figure out how to extract and open up. And so I've been thinking about like, how do we, how do we almost like, I don't, it's not, it wouldn't be splitting up the app, but how do we like do something that makes that available in a open way? And yeah, like the thing is like, if we
Ste (52:24.231)
Yeah.
Adam (52:28.074)
If we host it somewhere, like we're on the hook for hosting a, a live snapshot of all this data. So the thing that I always come back to in my head, which I don't know enough about is like creating like a, a blockchain public database for book data that any book startup would be able to use for free because it would just be. Publicly on the blockchain, but that's not something I know enough about to speak with any authority.
but I like it in theory.
Ste (52:59.291)
Yeah, yeah, that definitely sounds good in theory. And I'm also like a fan of the openness of the blockchain. I think like right now, at least an API for the book data and author data wouldn't be something that... I mean, Goodreads doesn't have a really good API. We could be like that API that Goodreads actually neglected. So I think that...
that and open sourcing the front end so people can open their own PRs, they can suggest fixes. I think that's important. One example that I'm always sharing is cal.com, which is an alternative to CalD. So their data, the meeting data, the user data, that's like proprietary to the company. But...
the front end and I think like even more than the front end, like the whole code base apart from the database, yeah, it's basically open source. So if you wanna build something like that, you can do it the next day, but you know, they're just like so big right now that it would make sense. You can just contribute if you don't like something. So I wish we get to that point where, you know, people would just say, okay, hardcover is like a good team.
a good product, so I'm better off just contributing to that project. In terms of, yeah, I guess the sensitive thing would be authors and books. So that would be, I guess, TBD, but as long as we have an API that people can access and we vow to keep it open and not shut it down, I think that could be like.
a good solution to the whole thing.
Adam (55:00.862)
Yeah, yeah, and Mitch in the chat mentioned about sending data back to OpenLibrary, which is something I've looked into, and we potentially can do it. So the way it works is OpenLibrary has tons of data on a bunch of books, and they're backed by archive.org. They have a ton of funding through their nonprofit. And so maybe instead of
Ste (55:06.871)
Hell yeah.
Adam (55:29.754)
us trying to recreate their wheel with a blockchain database. We just like figure out how to like really send data back to them. I, I think I still have some concerns about it for when we want our data to be slightly different than theirs. They have taken some other, some different approaches to the way they structure their book data than we have. Um, mostly around, well, actually I'm not even sure on this anymore. Some I originally thought it was a difference in structure, but maybe it's just.
an inaccuracy in their data. And so, for instance, books have multiple ISBNs in their system, or editions have multiple ISBNs, which in hardcover, one edition only has one ISBN, or a 13 and a 10 ISBN. While in there, you might have an edition that has 10 different ISBNs. And that caused some havoc when we've imported them to our system. And someone read 10 books, but they
They're issues one through six of a manga. And then on their side, they call that one book. So it's, there's a, there's some differences in structure that we would have to address, but I would, I would love to be able to just like better sync our data with open library. That would be, that would be amazing. Cause they have a huge team there developing, um, their book did as well. But to be determined.
Ste (56:55.043)
Yeah, nice. Well, on that note, I think we hit the hour mark, so should we wrap it up?
Adam (57:02.066)
Yeah, we can call this one and yeah, I will talk to you next week.
Ste (57:09.019)
Yeah, perfect. Well, see you everybody and yeah talk next week.
Adam (57:14.61)
And you can look for the show notes at hardcover.app slash live.
Ste (57:19.879)
Alright, bye bye.