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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 (00:01.203)
Hey hey stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:03.499)
Hi, Adam, pretty good. Sorry we're late, everybody. We thought we had a little, like, syncing problem, but we're thinking of, actually planning these a few weeks ahead, so we give people even more of a heads -up for what we've got in store. This is going to be another episode of stats, and...
Adam (00:05.46)
and
Ste (00:27.327)
Yeah, we can begin by maybe like going over our past week in both our personal and hardcover lives.
Adam (00:35.211)
Yeah, I feel like the last couple months we've kind of been like, we've been doing things kind of right as we need to like just in time kind of preparation for most things. So yeah, I think it's like moving to also something we can like mark it out so we can like send emails about upcoming Hardcover Lives. We can post it on socials ahead of time. Basically have a full like
cadence of like when we're doing things and letting people know about things.
Ste (01:07.329)
Yeah, now that you say it, actually sounds like a great idea and I'm wondering why we didn't do that before this because yeah, it's episode 56 everyone, so it's like the 56th week we've been live over here, so yeah, maybe we should make it into a more...
I guess, predictable thing and posts about it and what we're going to talk about and maybe give some hints and get people excited. So yeah, that all sounds good. We're doing the custom graphics for each one, and we're prepping, and we've had lots of stuff to talk about for the past 55 lives.
Adam (01:44.578)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ste (01:55.742)
So.
Adam (01:57.07)
You know, I bet there's a way on Loops to add like a different segment, which is like want to be notified about Hardcover Live. And then they can like opt in or opt out of that specific like channel of newsletters. And then for people that are signed up for that one, they could get notified like maybe on Monday about an episode on Wednesday or something.
Ste (02:20.373)
Yeah, that seems like a good thing to add to our, that would go under notification settings, right? So people can get notified. We do have them pretty granular right now. if we add that, I'm guessing, you know, it would be like an extra separate email that people can either like opt in or out of.
Adam (02:40.638)
I was even thinking about it, yeah, because right now we have that one checkbox at the end, which is marketing emails. See, it would be one next to that, which is hardcover. Yeah, what would it be? It wouldn't be marketing emails. It would be live events and things like that.
Ste (03:00.091)
Yeah, like announcements, like team announcements. could be announcements because announcements could be like change logs. We could include some marketing stuff we're going to do as well. So there's the report, which is the marketing email. But announcements would be more like not like marketing, marketing, but more like what we're doing backstage.
Stuff like the change log. Would that make sense?
Adam (03:31.606)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure. Cause yeah, cause marketing, I don't want people to opt out just cause it's like, they don't want to feel like they're being marketed to, but even though even our main channel isn't really a marketing channel, like we very rarely use it for like, I remember a couple of years ago when I was launching a course on my financial blog and I was learning about like, how do people launch courses? And I was trying to understand the full process of like,
these are the emails you sent out a month before, then three weeks before, two weeks before, and then the week of, you're sending emails twice a day or things like that. And I'm like, wow, I would unsubscribe to this three weeks before launch.
Ste (04:15.741)
Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, me too, me too. We might be outliers though. I I'm seeing like a lot of people do this and I think our thresholds to like what we mark as spam is like way higher. But I think that's like valid for a lot of readers on higher cover. I mean, from what I've been getting talking to people, they are very, very wary of marketing.
Adam (04:27.55)
you
Ste (04:45.377)
And we live in a time when books, especially like are marketed in like 10 ,000 ways. If you're on social, know, you're getting bombarded with all sorts of stuff. Some people like didn't even want social features on hardcover because of this. They're like tired of ads, marketing of people like doing all that stuff. So yeah, I guess that's understandable. Maybe we should like be clear.
you know, in telling people what we're actually marketing to them. I hate, like, I even, you know, because we're in this, on this niche, we're subscribed to all of the emails that are coming from all the book platforms, and I'm getting lots of emails, some of which I have a high tolerance of emails, but I'm getting lots and lots and lots of emails. So.
Adam (05:19.254)
Yeah.
Adam (05:39.126)
I've unsubscribed to a couple of them, even the ones I signed up for research purposes. I'm like, maybe I should have just created a rule to like mark these as red and just hide them in case I need to look at them later. There's only a couple of sites that I actually like read the emails from. And those are usually either really long or more personal. like give a good amount of news, like they combine news with entertainment in interesting ways, which I think is kind of what we're trying to do with the hardcover report too.
Ste (05:47.351)
Yeah. Yeah, same.
Ste (05:54.088)
Yeah.
Ste (05:59.593)
Yeah.
Ste (06:08.607)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And with the emails in general, we still haven't gotten to that point where we're revising emails. But when we do, we'll probably revise all notification emails so we make them better and activity emails as well about what's happening on your feed, maybe tie them to your dashboard. it's similar in experience to what you'd be getting on your dashboard.
Yeah, I guess when we do that, we could also see how better to announce Hardcover Life, because, we're probably going to do it a whole lot longer. I mean, definitely, I guess.
Adam (06:54.9)
Yeah, I mean, this has been working out. It's been fun to also just like have this FaceTime together to like chat and figure things out. Because, you know, we work so asynchronously, like in Discord. So like, this is really the only time we're really talking to each other in person, aside from like a bi -weekly team meeting. So yeah.
Ste (07:13.726)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I'm still like in awe of how this worked and, you know, we're very, I guess, interesting kind of startup from this point of view. But yeah, definitely that's like doing more with Hierarchical for Life. Definitely a good idea. So speaking about that, today we're going to talk about stats again.
Adam (07:31.351)
Yeah.
Adam (07:45.718)
Yeah. And before jumping into that, any, what have you been up to in the last week, hardcover or personalized?
Ste (07:55.777)
Well, hardcover -wise, I wish I could have been doing more, but basically I've been preparing the feedback step for stats, so we're aiming to get feedback on what people want from stats. We really like putting a lot of effort into the research. That's what I've been doing on the hardcover side, and on the personal side, discovering lots of places with baguettes.
I've been eating a lot of baguettes. I don't know if there's any French people in the chat or on Discord. Definitely tell me, yeah, we just grab them from the Boulangeres, and I'm just munching on them on the street. I don't know if that's a faux pas or if that's allowed, but I haven't been getting any looks, so I guess that's okay. Yeah, and running after my kid.
Adam (08:34.559)
You
Ste (08:54.357)
He's walking really good. I found out why my mouse wasn't working, so this is a working mouse. the other one, I think the battery was draining because it's one of his favorite toys. And I think he's just like my cat in that regard, making household items, his favorite toys. So he's just been throwing it around. And I think the battery...
is dead because of that. yeah, it's been through a lot. But yeah, the better still sits at 3%. So that's why I've been learning the best, I think, free hardcover lives without any mouse.
Adam (09:24.807)
I'm amazed it still works at all.
Ste (09:40.661)
But yeah, it's fun otherwise. Yeah.
Adam (09:44.438)
Nice. We had some baguettes last night, although they weren't, I guess they, I'm curious, I don't know if these are different types of baguettes. Like we had a Banh Mi, which are Vietnamese sandwiches, and they use French baguettes generally for their bread for it. I think they might have like a little bit of different flour in them or something, I'm not sure on the differences. But we have like a,
a tradition where there's a big concert series that comes to town here in Salt Lake called the Red Butte Concert Series, which is all outdoor concerts in this oberitum, like overlooking the mountain, like backed by the mountains. And it's a BYOB and bring your own food event. So like we bring in our blankets, our chairs, and we just went and watched a band called Pink Martini just play like different world music. They
They're kind of like a big bossa nova band with like 10 members and they play songs in different languages. So I think they said they have songs in 30 different languages. So they played some songs in French, some songs in Turkish and Farsi and Japanese and Korean. So it's a fun time.
Ste (11:03.635)
Nice. And the banh mi is like, how is the baguette? I'm curious. Isn't banh mi like the softer bread?
Adam (11:14.026)
It's pretty soft, yeah, but I wonder how much of that's from it being, like it still has like a crunch to it, so I wonder how much of it's soft because it's cut in half and they like load it, they scoop out some of the middle to put in the ingredients. So maybe it's a little softer than a regular baguette.
Ste (11:15.796)
Okay.
Ste (11:31.456)
Yeah.
Yeah, it might be. I mean, I don't think I've had an original banh mi ever. I might have had fusion banh mi's or whatever, restaurants that aren't specialized in... Yeah, but I think the French ones might have a thicker crust. There's two, if you ask for regular baguettes...
Here you get a regular baguette, but you can ask for a tradition baguette, which is actually like with a baguette done in certain parameters. So it's a certain type of flour, certain types of like timing on how the bread, the dough rises and that kind of stuff. So that's a separate one. And that has, I think the only thing I noticed it's like a bit sourish and it has a thicker crust.
So yeah, that's why I was asking if the bread for Bon Misi is a little bit softer. But yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, I think I listened to Pink Martini like, sometime ago. I know they were like a jazzy kind of thing, but I didn't know they sang in so many languages. And I thought it was like a Waze Molley band, like a regular jazz band, like what, five, six people, but.
Adam (12:35.306)
Interesting.
Adam (12:52.858)
Yeah, even bigger.
Ste (12:54.751)
Wow, OK. That sounds very, very good. It sounds like you're having a lot of fun this time of year. Does the Soul Lake get really lively, more lively in autumn than in summer? Or is it like,
Adam (12:58.114)
Yeah.
Adam (13:13.826)
I think so, because yeah, during the summer it gets into like 100 plus degree weather for a lot of the days. So it's normally right around now when it starts to get a little bit nicer, like you go outside and it doesn't feel like you're being like fried to death. So yeah. But a lot of the time during the summer, people go out to the mountains where it's a little bit cooler. And then by fall, it's, it's nice and cool down in the valley too.
Ste (13:29.971)
Yeah.
Ste (13:42.953)
No, that sounds good. Yeah, I was about to ask if you've been like on any other hikes or if you're planning to like go again now that it's like a little bit chiller because yeah, I know that kind of temperature and it's not like survivable outside maybe like in the evenings, but yeah.
Adam (13:47.318)
Thank
Adam (13:51.169)
you
Adam (14:02.388)
Yeah, like I, I went for a run like last month or so, and I came back home after like, I made it through the full like whatever I was running. And I realized that I had like heat stroke for the first time. Like I couldn't, I couldn't formulate sentences in a coherent way. My wife was very worried about me. And so I just needed to like cool down and get back to normal, but that made me realize how fast that can happen. So whenever I see like.
Ste (14:17.269)
for
Ste (14:23.873)
Jesus, yeah.
Ste (14:30.785)
Jesus.
Adam (14:31.926)
you know, tourists that are doing trails without water and realizing how dangerous that is because in one hour you can go from feeling fine, good enough to go for a run to not even being coherent enough to talk.
Ste (14:40.523)
Yeah.
Ste (14:44.587)
Jesus, yeah, that sounds very harsh Yeah, I think I had heat strokes when I was more but not not at that level. Yeah, it's dangerous stuff. I mean It can get like really really dangerous if you know But It's good that you know autumn finally Halloween approaching. Yeah, I'm wondering when when we can actually like do the Halloween stuff when it's not like not too early Maybe beginning of October
Adam (14:46.882)
You
Adam (14:51.444)
yeah.
Ste (15:14.419)
But yeah, great.
Adam (15:18.832)
Well, let's see. So last week we talked about, we did the mind map of the different stats. What do you think would be the best thing for this week?
Ste (15:25.814)
Yeah.
Ste (15:30.805)
Well, I think we could show people the survey, the three -question survey we've been preparing, and basically, we could talk about what we hope to get from it, and maybe then we can jump in our stats and, based on the mind map, maybe see what we've been doing right and what we've been doing wrong.
or not like what we've been doing wrong, but maybe like with that knowledge, see how else we should structure it because we're at the structuring part. I guess that's what we why we're like still like doing this research. We could be shipping like what we know are good stats, but I think the idea is for us to take like a little bit of extra time and really, really think like deeply what.
about what stats are and in what form would be best to ship them to readers so they can make the most out of them.
Adam (16:39.04)
Yeah, sounds good.
Ste (16:41.121)
Cool. So maybe I updated it really recently. I'm curious. Maybe you could go on the link and maybe share your screen and tell me what you think about the, or walk people through the questions. yeah. Let me check if I actually update it. So to give people a bit of background, this is just three questions. I initially made it like,
Adam (16:54.132)
Yeah, let me pull that up.
Adam (17:01.078)
you
Ste (17:09.929)
way longer and it involved ranking stats and asking people, from this list, what are your favorite stats? But Adam was very on point pointing out that I think right now we're mostly looking for more open -ended answers. So not like this is what we want to deliver you, pick from this list, but more like blue sky, thinking about
it's in a blue sky kind of way, like any solution possible, what would you think would help you the most?
Adam (17:47.366)
Yeah, I think my biggest hope with the survey is that at the end of it, after evaluating responses from readers, we know what problems they want solved by stats. So we want to know, not like they want stats about how many books they've read, but I want to be able to know how many books I'm going to read this year based on my past years and to know whether or not that's likely or not.
more insights like that, that are like what questions people have about their stats. yeah, these are the questions right now. What stats are you most interested in when it comes to your reading? So yeah, so let's see. With that context that I just provided, I'm wondering even about like this one, because it.
Ste (18:23.178)
Yeah.
Adam (18:44.948)
It is open -ended. I do like that, where it's kind of like curiosity. guess this is starting broad. Most people don't think about things in problems and solutions. They think about things in what's flashy and going to be exciting for them to see. So I think this is still a good start. And then we get deeper as the questions go.
Ste (19:01.725)
Yeah, even if they, I mean, they might not have like any idea at this point, but this is like kickstarting. Okay, these people want something from me. Let me get my brain into like that mode where I'm thinking about what do I actually want? I've actually started to answer this and it's very interesting that we're working on statics and it was hard for me to answer anything like...
other than how is my reading going? Like pages read per day per week. And how am I faring compared to others on the network? I think those would be like top, top, top, top two. And stuff about notes. I'd want to, yeah, have some idea into...
what books sparked the most, you know, note taking, what books sparked the most activity on that side. So I guess like it's like just these three for me. Of course, I'd love to like see all others, but here we go. Yeah.
Adam (20:19.175)
So yeah, I wrote for what stats are you most interested in when it comes to your reading? I wrote books per month, pages per month, top genres, people I've referred, top books I've referred, and kind of a more general level, like how did my last month go? Am I on track with my goals?
Ste (20:33.237)
to you.
Ste (20:38.291)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, that's good.
Adam (20:40.425)
Yeah.
Adam (20:44.162)
Cool, so yeah, the second question. What stats would you be most excited to share with your friends and or followers? And this is kind of one of our goals with stats is to make them more shareable, to get them to the point where you're so excited to look at your stats that it provides enough value for you that you're curious to even like share them and get responses from people about them. Which I think is like, it's taking it to another level where it's not just useful to you.
but it's useful in showing off your personality and your interests in a way that maybe you wouldn't be able to do if you were just writing a note on Facebook or a note on Twitter.
Ste (21:25.899)
Yeah, this one's very on point. This is like, if the first one was what this is like.
Adam (21:32.332)
it
Ste (21:37.491)
If you would share something, what level would have to be above so you could share it? And I guess this is not only about social sharing, which some people might be very wary of. I I'm not posting my month in review on Instagram, although there are lots of people doing that. But maybe it's something you'd want to share with your friends or something to boast.
Maybe, I mean, that's fair game. mean, I wouldn't like, yeah, this is one of the questions we're probably gonna talk about today. You know, that GitHub contributions chart that everyone keeps sharing on Twitter, we'd have that for reading and it could be nice to, you know, give yourself a confidence boost by sharing like what your chart is throughout the, you know, a month or.
a year that would be really neat to encourage you to, I guess, read more or compare with others. I guess it could be like if I have someone tracking their reading on hardcover, I'd be curious to know what their stats are. And I'd probably share mine just to get an answer. Like, yeah, look at this. This is my snapshot.
What's your snapshot?
Adam (23:06.787)
It makes me think like, like for the tally form that you've created, right now it's like three questions each with its own page, right? What if on this page, for page two, we had another question which was like, how often would you want to share? And the options are like, never, you know, weekly, monthly, yearly.
Ste (23:10.752)
Hmm.
Ste (23:14.614)
Yeah.
Ste (23:18.155)
Yeah.
Ste (23:27.509)
Mmm.
Adam (23:34.838)
And then we can really understand how often people are even thinking about the idea of sharing. Because that might inform what kind of things we create shareable things for. Like if everyone's saying, I want to share something monthly, that skews us to really focusing on the monthly wrapped. If it's yearly, then that makes that an even bigger focus.
Ste (23:56.179)
Yeah, that's a very good question. Let's add this in. And maybe another good one, because they don't... I many people would be assuming they would share this on social, and for many people it might be like, would never share this on socials, but maybe we make it clear that it's also like sharing with friends, or if you share your book club progress on a group that's also sharing a stat. So if you're like...
58 % done with a book that's in a book club and you share it with your book club. That should also be included here, right? Because it's a stat.
Adam (24:35.744)
Yeah, so yeah, are you thinking like, what if there's a question like, who would you be excited to share this with? And the question, the answers might be like, no one, it's just for me, friends and family, people on, people I talk books about in book clubs and things like that. And then maybe like some other social media ones like Twitter, TikTok.
Ste (24:46.742)
Yeah.
Ste (24:50.836)
Yeah.
Ste (24:58.943)
Yeah. Mm -hmm. yeah.
Adam (25:04.949)
Instagram.
Ste (25:06.111)
Yeah, let's make a chat box with all of those. So it's like easy to fill in. So...
Adam (25:10.678)
Yeah, you just check a couple of things that you might want to share.
Ste (25:14.451)
Yeah, yeah, I'm curious like what and where people would share because that also like informs how we design them and structure them.
Adam (25:23.458)
it's true. Yeah, if everyone's sharing it in Instagram format, for instance, that would make us really prioritize the square shape as opposed to if it's on TikTok, we might prioritize like a different format. I mean, ideally, we would support both but I mean, there's always going to be something that is going to be a little better.
Ste (25:32.011)
Yeah.
Ste (25:36.253)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there it is. okay. So here add to those quick questions. Who would you share it with and where and how often?
Okay, perfect.
Adam (25:59.158)
think this will still be a very quick survey even with those two because those are just check boxes.
Ste (26:02.417)
yeah. We've had like, yeah, we were pretty surprised how much feedback some people gave us in the past surveys. So I'm guessing like some people will write a lot about stats. yeah, those two extra questions, I don't think they'll intimidate anyone. So yeah, that's cool.
Adam (26:05.952)
Yeah, for it for.
Adam (26:26.911)
For this question, what stats would you be most interested or excited to share with your friends or followers? I wrote something like Spotify wrapped at the end of the year showcasing my top reads, most popular books, underrated books, top genres, pages read, books listened to, and making it fun somehow by comparing it to other metrics like eight days of audio books or, you know, like a
Ste (26:41.601)
Hmm.
Ste (26:47.803)
Yeah.
Adam (26:53.878)
five story building high of books, pages, things like that.
Ste (26:56.897)
yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know someone mentioned in Discord that they'd love like a really like visual representation of their... It was like their want to read to read ratio in a certain time period. So I added 60 books to my want to read and I read 30 books. So you'd see like, you know, that one where you suggested, you know, we'd have like a mountain next to jewels.
Adam (27:11.447)
Hmm
Ste (27:25.022)
with that ratio being pretty visual. think, yeah, something could, like that could definitely work, like making it fun.
Adam (27:29.206)
Thank
Adam (27:35.714)
The question is, what aspect of your reading habits do you wish to understand better? Which, yeah, I think that's a good one. It's so broad, because it's like, so many, like in our last survey, like one of the questions was about like personas, and like which of these personas do you fit into? And ours were like Explorer, which is like people that wanna understand and like just.
Ste (27:42.719)
Yeah.
Adam (28:03.038)
It's kind of like they want to browse a library. They want to see what's out there and find, wade through the weeds and find the book that's for them. And then there was another group which was more like social readers who want to feel that community as they're reading. It's like treating hardcover like a big book club. And then the other one was more like analytic readers who are tracking what they read in order to better understand.
what they like to understand the world and they tend to hope that hardcover will help them solve that problem. So I think this question for that group is going to be very useful and I'm really curious to see what the answers are going to be for people in the other groups.
Ste (28:51.293)
Yeah, definitely. as a social reader versus as an explorer type of reader or more analytical type of reader, that's going to be very interesting to see that variation. And it also brings it a bit back to the first question, but I think by this point, because we've asked them to think about this,
maybe they have a better idea of what they actually want from their reading habits. It might be, I'm curious if this is gonna be very specific to people. I don't know, I just wish to understand in what days of the weekday I read more than others. Or I just wish to see if I'm reading enough diverse authors or if I'm like...
Adam (29:39.969)
Hmm
Ste (29:48.469)
challenging myself with ideas, which could be like a very, you know.
Ste (29:55.667)
not number oriented thing, but yeah. But yeah, I'm curious mostly, I think, about this one and the sharing. Yeah, they're good questions. They're all good questions.
Adam (30:00.641)
it.
Adam (30:12.736)
Yeah. For me, was like the thing that came to mind is like how topics, genres, and themes correlate to books I enjoy and total books read. it's kind of like understanding. I think this is what that that matrix chart tries to get at where it's like genre and mood and you're able to see your ranking. But that's not exactly a solution for this. It's more of like an attempt at a solution for this.
Ste (30:16.244)
Mmm.
Ste (30:23.915)
yeah.
Adam (30:42.006)
But it's, yeah, it's like understanding like, hey, when you read these books, you tend to read more or you tend to enjoy them more as opposed to when you read these genres or books with these themes, you maybe don't read them as fast because you're not enjoying it and then you rate them lower.
Ste (31:00.029)
Yeah, this is a very good one. it's nice. And in the chat is saying that usually for this type of survey, it takes more time than you usually budget because it is a survey made up of three questions, but because they're open -ended, there's a lot of thought that goes into them. And yeah, I agree.
Definitely, let's not mark it as a quick survey. We'll announce it as a open -ended question survey, or we'll find the wording. That's very true. Thanks for pointing it out. Yeah.
Adam (31:43.734)
Maybe like.
Yeah, it's like a more, should we say like a five minute survey? Because it feels like that's kind of the time limit we're going for. Like, I don't expect these questions to take longer than five minutes for three of them. But it gives more, yeah, it gives more indication because a three question survey could be yes, yes, yes.
Ste (31:51.988)
Yeah.
Ste (31:58.943)
Yeah, yeah, I guess.
Ste (32:05.833)
Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not like that kind of three question survey. So some people might spend way more time on it because, yeah, result of us thinking about what we want with this question might be like people really digging into what their, yeah, this is just my calendar in case you want to schedule one on one time. And this is going to be basically me and...
possibly Adam, doing the long version of the survey and showing you some prototypes of the stats, but mostly like you telling us what you want to get from them. And yeah, this would be like the survey we're gonna send out, probably with the hark of report, right?
Adam (33:01.151)
Right, so I'll plan on sending it out. That's, I think Sunday? Yeah, Sunday is when the hardcover report will go out.
Ste (33:09.653)
Nice. Yeah, it's...
Adam (33:13.072)
I need to write, so I'll be doing that probably tomorrow.
Ste (33:16.885)
Yeah, sounds great. Yeah, I'm hoping this will bring us another level of insights into stats. I was telling people in the announcement that one of the questions we're also trying to answer is, reading about the numbers? And maybe this is a good angle to...
think about it as well because sometimes it is about the numbers. I I don't mind like seeing my progress like and seeing data on genres, seeing data on like social data. I'm a sucker for that. I have to admit. I I like seeing if I'm a top reviewer, some author I really like. I like to see that my posts are getting interests. I mean, that's like a good...
And it's not TikTok. It's not like, people have whatever you do on TikTok. Like, saw this post of me talking about books. So I think there are some readers who have some very valid criticism into what platforms are doing with stats. It shouldn't be like you shouldn't read for the sake of numbers. You should read for the sake of like,
ideas, I guess, and themes and enjoyment. But numbers do come in. mean, numbers are important if you want to see how you're doing, as long as they're insightful and they offer helpful things that you really find useful to your...
Adam (34:46.732)
Yeah.
Ste (35:12.339)
either the way you read or how much you read or the things you discover. I guess that's valid. What do you think about that?
Adam (35:23.166)
Yeah, think some people will probably like, there's a one thing that I've seen come up time and time again on the like Goodreads subreddit is someone will make a tool that you can like download your Goodreads library and then upload it to and they just generate some stats for it. And those feel normally like they're not there are less insights into your reading to help you.
Ste (35:42.368)
Yeah.
Adam (35:51.904)
like solve a question that you have and more just like, this is an interesting way of showcasing all of my data. So I feel like we're going to be doing a little bit of both of those. Some of it's just like vanity metrics that maybe gets you a little more excited to read more. While some of them are more like, these are vanity metrics that showcase like areas that you may identify as an area that you want to improve on.
Yeah, I'll drop the mind map in here so we have it as well.
Ste (36:32.841)
Yeah, that's great. And I definitely agree. was looking for Ed mentioned Kahn's law, and I was actually looking. I didn't know about Kahn's law. So Kahn's law is the more time you spend reporting on what you're doing, the less time you have to do anything. Yes, definitely. I mean, I guess we'd want to basically take, I know people are like,
doing stats in notion tables, they're doing stats in CSVs, in Excels, in Sheets. I guess offering that level of stats, but also something on top of them, like you were saying, Adam, that's of vanity or very information heavy kind of metrics, but also the story of what you're reading, more insightful.
Ste (37:32.083)
and analysis into your reading. guess those are, that's the middle ground we're trying to have with these new stats. yeah, most platforms don't only care about the numbers or they don't care about the stats at all. I think they're important. think, like, know, they reflect
some things and it's also gonna be important to us to basically get all this info so we know what to...
Ste (38:18.315)
So for instance, if you add more tags, we'll know later on when to show you an author in the feed that you might not have discovered anywhere else. So that's like a good bit of information. And that's like information. That's raw info. It doesn't have to be numbers. It can be like as sensitive as, you know.
Adam (38:42.156)
had a idea for this. right now we have this big list of stats. I think I added all the ones that people were mentioning in the chat. A lot of the ones that people were mentioning in the chat were on there somewhere, but they weren't refined enough. But there were a couple of new ones. So I was thinking, essentially, we want to turn this into a page.
Ste (38:45.023)
Now here we go.
Ste (39:00.351)
Yeah.
Adam (39:11.754)
And so what I was thinking as kind of like an in -between step is what if we use something like either Notion or Trello, something with like a card associated with each of these. And then for each of these, we can like kind of describe out what we want for each of them. Like this is a line chart with x -axis this, y -axis this.
It has this title, has this description. These are the metrics it shows. Basically like, spec out all of this, because I have a feeling like trying to get from this to this, like you would be doing that all in your head if you were trying to translate it straight into a design.
Ste (39:51.042)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (39:58.259)
Yeah, and sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't.
Adam (40:03.122)
Yeah, and we could iterate on the cards until we're both like, yeah, that sounds good. And even those cards, we maybe like, we could identify like maybe between now and the first user interview we do, we can like, you know, script out those and then maybe like, we could select the top five or so and then those could be turned into actual designs and that's what we show people for user interviews.
as well as some of the cards itself.
Ste (40:31.391)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah, that sounds great. And I'm very interested in this step because it shows us what kind of information we want from that stat. I was thinking that if the stats also work as widgets on the dashboard, and we're thinking to basically maybe have certain levels at...
which we showed the stats. So it can be like a small widgets that just says like pages per week and there's just a chart or it can be like a big chart and it also shows the page numbers and you can also select like the time period. So those are like two ends of the spectrum. This is like something really simple, something that we can like integrate.
mostly anywhere, this is something really complicated that has lots of data, and you can dig deeper into it, maybe even change the way it's shown. Maybe it's not the line chart, maybe it's something else.
Adam (41:37.294)
Or maybe those are just two different charts rather than settings on one chart. yeah.
Ste (41:41.525)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So I'm interested in the type of information we show. And maybe we can focus for these cards on having that basic level of info and then seeing if we need to add more levels of complexity. Because yeah, for instance, this is a good example. If you want to zoom in on that, pages, yeah.
Pages, this is basically like pages we just, and it would show you like you have a time period. Maybe it's a month. Maybe it's like this August that's just like ending. And you have like the pages you've read. But it also can be like minutes if you like are listening to books. It's not going to be pages. Or maybe you'd want, yeah.
Adam (42:37.098)
Or, yeah, I think one thing that, like, if I had a couple of, like, recommendations for this chart, I'm curious to see what you think, because I think, like, as you're describing it, there are, so many interactions that you can do, so it feels like it could be trying to be, like, multiple charts that we might end up breaking out into multiple.
Ste (42:46.569)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ste (42:51.797)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Adam (43:00.128)
So here's what I was thinking. Like what if, like for one, every chart had some kind of title that way like, you know, it makes it clear like, and this would be like pages, read per, and then maybe if this is on the, if you're looking at a year stats, it's per month. And if you're looking at it like over all time, it might be.
Ste (43:10.987)
Mmm.
Adam (43:29.644)
pages read per year.
Ste (43:33.045)
Yeah.
Adam (43:34.318)
and then we could potentially get rid of this format pages. And then we could have one thing I was thinking is like, what if we had two different, lines where one of them is like, you know, slightly like, like, less like emphasized. And this is like your.
This one's like your pages read as in like you read books that totaled that many pages. This is like your equivalent in audio books and all non book things. So it's like, this is pages. This is like pages equivalent.
Ste (44:08.072)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (44:21.383)
Okay, so it would be like minutes for audiobooks, right?
Adam (44:24.77)
It wouldn't exactly be minutes. would be like, I think we'd have a different chart that shows minutes. But this would be like, you you've read, like you read a hundred books and let's say 50 of them are audio, 50 of them are words, like pages. Like if you use those as two different charts, they're gonna be two charts that are lower. While this one would take how many pages were in those audio books and add them to create this line.
Ste (44:30.885)
Okay.
Ste (44:42.165)
Yeah.
Ste (44:54.305)
Okay, perfect. So this would be like the total. Yeah. So maybe like you've read like pages, but you've also read over here, which might be like a week or a time period. You've read, you've listened to a lot of audio books. So you're going to get this chart, total chart like this. Okay.
Adam (45:05.825)
Yeah.
Adam (45:10.126)
Right. Yeah, if like if one month you didn't read any any books, but you had a lot of audio books, then the this big line would be flat while the audio book line would be higher. But it would always be higher because it's the two of them together. Or it would always be at least equal, I guess. Yeah, you're right.
Ste (45:16.5)
Yeah.
Yeah, it could be like, yeah, wait. Yeah. So maybe, yeah, basically you didn't. Yeah. Maybe like here you didn't read. So this would be like total reading, total pages equivalent or total as put total reading, I guess.
Adam (45:45.366)
Yeah, total reading, I think.
Ste (45:47.433)
Yeah, so if you hover it, you're gonna get this tool tip, maybe.
Adam (45:53.13)
Yeah, and we could have like, you know, as you hover over one of these dots, it would probably like showcase the equivalent dots you could. But that would be. Yeah.
Ste (46:01.138)
yeah, exactly. So you'd get like, yeah. And you'd get...
Ste (46:10.945)
89 pages and
Ste (46:19.495)
red. So you you read this and you listened to
Ste (46:28.469)
like a different amount of pages, like the equivalent. Yeah, definitely. mean, yeah, this is like a very good example of what we should be doing. It's going to be very interesting to have all this in a graph. And yeah, there's no other way of doing it.
Adam (46:35.361)
Yeah.
Ste (46:55.603)
other than starting from that info because yeah, you're right. I mean, most people listen and read, but yeah.
Adam (47:11.178)
Yeah, I think I like the idea that, you we could probably make out a card that describes this entire thing. And then I guess one of the things we'll have to make sure we mention when we're detailing each of these is like, I guess at that phase, we can determine which ones are like supporter things and which ones are for everyone.
And because yeah, it's like for this, I'm not sure like what the supporter feature here would be. I think you said like average, like pages per would be like the, the potential like supporter one.
Ste (47:51.444)
Yeah.
Ste (47:56.393)
Yeah, I just put that there. Average probably going to have four for everyone. I just wanted to put some how we do support or features in the design. We got to incentivize people to subscribe to the supporter plan through stats because there are some stats that are going to be very aimed at people who
Adam (47:58.753)
Hmm.
Adam (48:09.014)
Hmm.
Ste (48:23.517)
read a lot and get a lot of hardcover. So those are generally going to be supported features. So yeah, I guess after we analyze the mind map and figure out what widgets we do for everyone, think that's going to be a good step to do that at.
Adam (48:46.284)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ste (48:48.001)
And I'm also wondering because this is very info heavy. You're probably not going to share this on Instagram. This is more what you'd want as your information. You'd look at this chart and see, OK, so between 7 and 14 of June, I really slumped on my audiobooks. I wonder why that is. I was visiting some relatives, and I forgot my headphones at home. So that's going to be like a...
Adam (49:15.585)
Hmm.
Ste (49:17.461)
That's going to be interesting, I guess, because this is the point of this to basically see what your progress is. You'd be looking at this. Yeah.
Adam (49:18.688)
you
Adam (49:27.4)
And that makes me think, if someone's scrolling and they get to one of these and they select an area and taking a screenshot, it's not going to have anything about hardcover or their username on it. So right now, we're kind of assuming that they're going to use the Share button to generate that image. But it feels like
Ste (49:46.74)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (49:51.186)
overwhelming if we were to include like their avatar and username on every single one of these. It's going to get very repetitive.
Ste (49:58.105)
Yeah, we could do a header for the stats, sorry, and we could have that. But what I've seen, I've seen actually people sharing their lists on Instagram this way, and they mostly mention HardCropper without having the logo. So I'm definitely okay with not having the logo on everything unless they want to share it through the generated image that we're going to have. I think...
Adam (50:15.692)
Hmm.
Ste (50:28.51)
Yeah, maybe some people are going to want to generate it with the header. maybe we could make, like, we do have the profile header. And if we make it sticky, know, it could be on top for, like, every stat. Or we could make, like, some kind of way that, you know, you'd have your username on it.
The logo, mean, people are gonna mention hardcover. I'm not worried about that, but yeah, their username is basically, you know, this is, yeah.
Adam (50:54.828)
Yeah.
Adam (51:02.646)
Or I have another option that's kind of, it changes how we're thinking about sharing, but it would be so much easier to do. So the idea is like when you're using the share thing to create like a shareable version of any of these, like when you click, like, you know, share on this, instead of having us generate an image with some separate area, all it does is like,
Ste (51:12.777)
Yeah, let's see.
Adam (51:31.678)
It adds a header and a footer to this section with your username. And then you take a screenshot of that and you share it. Cause that would, and then that would be so much easier to build. Cause we wouldn't have to build each of these twice once on stats and once as a static image. Cause that's probably the area that I'm most concerned with from a time perspective.
Ste (51:40.233)
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's like, yeah.
Ste (51:49.728)
Yeah.
Ste (51:54.057)
Okay, yeah, actually that's how I was thinking it could work. was wondering if, I mean, these are gonna be responsive anyway, so basically we could set the width and if you're on mobile, you're probably gonna need smaller width. But if you're screenshotting them on mobile, yeah, we could just make the header appear.
Adam (52:15.148)
Hmm.
Ste (52:23.681)
So you're saying basically like add some extra info if you click the share button so you can screenshot it.
Adam (52:28.682)
Yeah. Yeah. So it might like add your like header with your username and your avatar. And maybe at the bottom, like some small thing that says like stats from hardcover .app slash username.
Ste (52:40.531)
Yeah, mean, I, yeah, let's do that. Yeah. Yeah. I love that because then I was thinking, you know, what, if you want to share a different format, but you can like, if you're on mobile, you just share that. And if you're on desktop, you can just resize the browser. And if you want the square image hack, you're going to get the square image.
Adam (52:57.792)
Yeah, and we can, like when you say square here, or when you share a widget on desktop, we can change the format to be a square. And then when you screenshot it, it's already a square.
Ste (53:12.659)
If we could do that, definitely. mean, yeah, we could animate it like we animate the list when you go from table view to, yeah, that sounds good. Okay, yeah, okay. At least we got that solved. That's, yeah.
Adam (53:20.214)
Yeah.
Adam (53:23.906)
I think it'll still make sense for us to generate some images that are shareable, like maybe like one overall for your stats or something like that. Like, yeah.
Ste (53:33.341)
Yeah, I'm thinking the monthly review, that's an image that we're definitely going to... I was thinking you could have a fixed format and maybe because next time we're going to talk about stats again, maybe we could have a deep dive into your monthly wrap up because the monthly wrap up would be like...
what we're building now, but basically prioritizing some of the most important stats. And I guess what we have to decide for your monthly wrap up is first, what stats are the most important so we can feature there. It's probably gonna be like a square fixed image with like widgets, like representing the most important stats. And I guess another question would be like, are we gonna let people like choose?
and personalize these widgets. That, yeah.
Adam (54:29.492)
Yeah, maybe for that one we, and for V1 maybe we don't allow that. Maybe we just like, we create one standard format that has a square version and like a high, like yeah, tall version. And we just have like specific stats that show. And then whatever your time period is you're looking at, we can generate stats for that period with that image.
Ste (54:34.56)
Yeah.
Ste (54:44.812)
yeah.
Adam (54:58.442)
So if you're looking at for a month, you get monthly stats. If you're looking at for a year, get yearly stats. If you're looking at for January to March, you get January to March stats.
Ste (55:09.853)
Yeah, that sounds great. Okay, that sounds good. And I think we're almost at time here, like another hour spent talking about stats. It's a big project, but it's definitely gonna...
Adam (55:25.534)
Bye.