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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 (00:01.398)
Hey, hey, stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:04.474)
Hiya, is going well, ending a nice day of work. How about you?
Adam (00:10.958)
Pretty good. Been going to a bunch of Sundance movies this week, so not volunteering today, but still going to see a movie later tonight, or at least trying to see one.
Ste (00:23.133)
Nice, nice, how was it?
Adam (00:26.742)
It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, this year it's felt more busy than a couple other years in the past, but I'm having fun with it. Like, at least if we like get in early, then we haven't had a problem getting to movies, but some movies you need to be there like an hour beforehand.
Ste (00:51.933)
Okay, gotcha. Is it usually like a queue going on or is it, do you have tickets or is it forced come first survey? Yeah, I never looked into it.
Adam (01:03.314)
Yeah, it's ticketed, but then there's another type of pass, which is like the pass that like you can go to any movie you want and you don't need tickets. And if enough people with that pass show up for a movie, then you might not get in for a movie if you have tickets and you're late to show up. So it's best to just get there early. Yeah.
Ste (01:22.193)
Okay, so yeah, it's all dependent on the best people. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I can imagine, you know, it's in high demand. This is crowded, like, usually.
Adam (01:32.974)
Yeah, I mean, I think I've been to like four or five sold out shows so far. So those are shows that they're like turning people away at the door because there's too many people.
Ste (01:43.813)
Wow. Yeah.
Adam (01:45.89)
But yeah, so far my top movie has been, it's what's inside. It's like a first time director, kind of the director was there for the Q and A and he was saying like, try not to spoil people on the movie, but the premise that he shares is like, there's a group of friends from college and fast forward eight years later, one of them's getting married.
Ste (01:53.673)
Okay.
Adam (02:15.19)
The night before his marriage, he invites everyone back to his house to hang out for the night. And one friend they haven't seen for eight years shows up with a suitcase. And it's like, what's in the suitcase? What happens next? And it was just really good.
Ste (02:26.409)
Probably.
Ste (02:32.509)
Nice, yeah, gotta hate that, you know, when that friend shows up with the suitcase. That's a good movie premise. Yeah, nice. So you've been keeping busy? Well, not much, just walking around the neighbourhood. My kid is very active these days, so yeah, I'm doing a lot of parenting.
Adam (02:37.291)
It's like, oh.
Adam (02:42.46)
Yeah
Adam (02:47.01)
But yeah, what have you been up to?
Ste (02:58.921)
And apart from that, just walking around, it's gotten significantly hotter. So, yeah, went on long walks basically throughout the weekend. And yeah, I got some of those nice, did you ever have bows, you know, the buns, the steam buns with stuff inside them? Yeah, they're really good. And there's a really good place that's actually like.
Adam (03:19.043)
Mm. I love those.
Ste (03:29.561)
more places right now that sells like really well-made baobans. So yeah, had some of those. And yeah, waiting for spring to come. I have a bunch of daffodils. Are they daffodils? No, they're not daffodils. They're the other ones with like lots of purple flowers. Hyacinths.
Adam (03:39.502)
Very cool.
Adam (03:51.47)
Hmm.
Ste (03:52.925)
Are they hyacins? Maybe. Yeah. And they've been budding up on my terrace. So yeah, it won't be long now.
Adam (03:54.606)
You'll be high since.
Adam (04:02.367)
Wow, it's yeah, that's that seems early for flowers, but that's a that's cool to see.
Ste (04:08.841)
Yeah, I know. I think it's been like a very hot year. I've seen threads of pictures from the US, I think, with lots of flowers that were blooming in December. And some people were saying that it's because it's El Nino season or year or whatever that is. But I don't know if that was it. But yeah, many people were saying that they haven't seen this in like, quite a while.
Adam (04:39.564)
Yeah, it's felt the opposite here where it's been like on the cold side. Maybe it's just like the southern parts of the country are a little bit warmer than usual.
Ste (04:49.646)
Yeah, I bet. Is it still snowy?
Adam (04:52.67)
a little bit. A lot of it's melted, but I think it'll come back. It still has a lot of winter to go. I'm hoping because I want to go skiing at least once this year. And yeah, I didn't ski last year because I had torn my ACL and I was going through knee surgery and all that. But I think I'm back up to the point where I could go. And my wife's committed to taking a very intro lesson to skiing. So I think that'll be fun.
Ste (05:21.489)
Oh, nice. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. I can't wait. I haven't skied in like, God, 10, 15 years. Yeah. I don't know. I read that. I'm actually scared about it a bit because I read that it's not like riding a bicycle or like swimming. So you kind of lose the ability. So yeah, I'm a bit, well, I actually know how to do that stuff again with the feet.
So, yeah.
Adam (05:53.473)
Stick to the beginner slopes and I think, or stick to one level easier than you were before. At least.
Ste (06:02.137)
Yeah, I was pretty, I mean, yeah. I don't know why my parents, like, they forced me to, like, I had an uncle who was really into skiing and I went, like, to the Van Slopes when I was little, but yeah, I don't, I'd be scared to do that. How advanced would you say you are? I mean, before the whole...
Adam (06:15.814)
Wow.
Adam (06:26.027)
I can make it down blue slopes without any problem, but the jump from blue to black slopes is enough for me to be worried. And I can make it, they're too steep that I can't, I don't have good control at that kind of steepness, I guess. Unless I'm just going super slow.
Ste (06:34.584)
Okay.
Ste (06:44.233)
Yeah, what's blue? Okay, but what's blue? Is it like advanced or I mean, how what are there what are the levels under blue?
Adam (06:57.118)
um like a green for beginner, blue for intermediate, and like black diamond for advanced.
Ste (07:03.625)
Okay, gotcha, okay, okay. Nice, yeah, I think it was about the same. I wouldn't know right now.
Adam (07:06.614)
Thank you.
Adam (07:16.066)
Aside from that, what have you been up to on the hardcover front lately?
Ste (07:20.713)
Well, we've published the Apply as a Librarian page this week, which is a really good way for people to apply to become a librarian on the website now. So as you know, I've been working on that page, then I shipped it to you and you managed to put it all together. So now I think.
For everyone who's not a librarian, you can apply on the website and also tell us a bit of info about...
where you can contribute, like the areas you can contribute on, which is very helpful for us. And I think right now we're trying to figure out how this year will go and what we'll build, which takes us to one of the subjects we have for today, the State of the Fire Cover Survey, right?
Adam (08:26.146)
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this one and just like, just put kind of every like kind of throw all our ideas on the wall and kind of see what resonates with the community the most.
Ste (08:39.713)
Yeah, yeah, this is very exciting and low key this I've been thinking about, you know, what is the biggest priority, the next thing we should we should work on and I think having that level of feedback from all the readers on hardcover that's going to be very, very useful. I think we're
Are we three years in or are we still like two years, two and a half, two and a half years in. So I think right now we are with some exceptions on feature parity with most big book tracking networks, with our certain like different ways of doing things. So this brings us to like an interesting.
Adam (09:07.347)
Yeah, two and a half.
Ste (09:31.253)
stage in our development where we can think of what things to do to be even better. So we're kind of entering territory where, you know, we're not trying to catch up with other networks that, you know, have validated features that we have as well. We're trying to see what's next for the
And yeah, seeing how people, seeing how to ask people that, I think it's quite challenging in terms of how do you ask the questions.
Adam (10:16.775)
Yeah, we, when I was kind of starting the survey, I was going over our last two surveys that we conducted with readers. And I could share my screen to show some of the takeaways from those real quick.
Ste (10:29.521)
Yeah, let's go for that.
Adam (10:37.558)
Let's see, can I make this bigger? There we go. Let's say make every page bigger. So yeah, this is kind of the, this survey before we actually put it into like an actual form. So kind of the idea is that, like it's good at least once a year to do like a survey of our readers, our users, people that are currently, that have currently registered.
and are using the app or signed up at some point. So this isn't going to cover people that haven't ever heard of hardcover. It's not targeted to them. It's not targeted to people who would use hardcover if we had X. It's mostly, it's completely designed around people that are already using the app or found some interest to use it in the first place and then understanding both what they're using on hardcover, which we have a good understanding of already from just...
database usage, but also what, if we added to hardcover, would they most resonate with?
And so, uh, yeah, it's kind of taking into account, like all of this is like one more form of input because we have this feature request board that people give input on, we have this feature request channel, you have all the comments from user interviews. We have all the surveys we've done. We've had, we have like our internal roadmap to profitability, which is like, you know, these are the things that we'll need to do to, you know, be profitable as a company, uh, like, you know, um,
having more people become supporters or potentially allowing authors to pay us for additional services which is farther down the line. So this is kind of like taking all this input, putting it in front of our readers and saying like okay, what if this matters the most to you? That's kind of my take on the survey.
Ste (12:38.757)
Yeah, that's a good take. And we have some questions which I think are going in the right direction. Maybe we can chat a bit through them and see, I guess right now is what's important is seeing which ones to keep and which ones to ditch and what questions bring us.
closer to getting some insight into what people want. The tricky part with these is that it never works to ask people what they, I mean, it sometimes works actually, to ask people what do you want from hardcover? What do you want from our app?
It's tough for us to imagine what to build for someone who doesn't have like a burning desire for something to happen. It's even tougher to come up with an answer to that. So, yeah, this is the, how do you frame questions so that you get to that? And we're trying to learn, I mean,
The stage is set this way right now. We're in a point, we're at a point where we're trying to learn this so we can make Carcavure a network that competes with the big ones out there with good reads, with story graph, with, and also brings something new and yeah.
That new part is where it gets interesting. And I think we're at the point where we're slowly, yeah, going in that direction.
Adam (14:28.294)
Yeah. So from our last survey, we had one of our last questions. Well, first off, we had like a lot of free response areas. This is from October, 2022. So a year and a half ago. And kind of the most common things people asked for then was wanting to track partial progress.
The app seems a little new and unpolished and people were running into bugs most often more often and I think like this is way before our last redesign and so I think we've Successfully tackled these I think there are still bugs though. So um that one's still like on my radar, of course but a kind of the last question we asked was Four things we're thinking about working on
like give them a score from one to five on how important you think they are. And the most important thing was improved book discovery for learning about new books, and then stats and graphs about your reading history, and then a mobile app, and then book discussions. And so that's kind of been our prioritization since this survey in 2022. Like we redesigned the book page with
prompts, reviews, and lists for book discovery, added the training books page. We launched our mobile app, and we added the year in books, and as well as personal stats at the end of, for every reader. So it kind of handled the three top ones, but we haven't handled discussions, which were the least voted one on this list. So we've been kind of keeping that as an option. So that was...
October 2022. But do you think whether there's anything else we need to think about from this one?
Ste (16:29.965)
No, I think it's been offering us answers to questions we had up to this point.
Ste (16:41.581)
Right now, maybe it would be useful to think about how to follow up on those. I'm mainly interested about what people think about discussions because we do have some answers in that area and how those tie with other things. So yeah, on this, I think this did its job. It took us this far. So some good, really good insights.
Adam (17:05.719)
Yeah.
Ste (17:10.885)
that we actually delivered on.
Adam (17:14.75)
And having the scale from one to five made it very clear, like what the most important things were to people. So I, I think that was also another takeaway is that this format of just a like feature rank its importance to you on a scale of one to five provided for some useful data for prioritization.
Ste (17:30.629)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (17:36.001)
Yeah, would you think that putting these one against the other, sort of like asking people what the priority is for some set options in their opinion, would it be as useful as asking them to give an importance score from one to five or not?
Adam (18:02.182)
Yeah, I'm, I'm curious about that too, because as we'll see later down, I have, I have some of those where it's like, here are 10 features, sort them by how important they are to you. So I'm kind of on the fence on what's more useful for us. Like, I feel like having it as a ranked thing where it's like rank the importance of these 10 features, it's, it's conceptually more to ask of a person than just rank them. I feel like rankings.
Ste (18:11.837)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (18:29.907)
Mm-hmm
Adam (18:31.986)
easier because you make fewer decisions, but it depends on what the output of that is.
Ste (18:41.241)
Yeah, I was just thinking that you kind of have to adjust your skills. Like if there are 10 questions about 10 features each from one to five, you kind of have to think, okay, I put five on this one, but this one is which followed is like in my mind has bigger priority, but I put five on that one. So I have to change that to four and put five on this one. So yeah, what you're saying about like actually ranking them. Definitely. I think.
Adam (19:05.262)
Thanks for watching.
Ste (19:10.997)
Uh, for me as someone who would be presented with a survey would make more, more sense, but it's useful the other way around. I mean, we got good results in this case.
Adam (19:25.01)
Yeah. Yeah, the ranking part does. I think the one part and the nice part about ranking is that it'll make it super clear what the top thing is and the bottom thing is in a way that this is more variable.
Ste (19:41.765)
Yeah, I agree.
Adam (19:43.394)
The ones in the middle will be a little fuzzy though, but I think that the best and the worst will be more highlighted.
Ste (19:46.329)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (19:50.665)
Yeah, I think once you see the options one next to each other, you will have, especially on that middle part, have a little debate on how this compares to the one underneath it and just rank them, put a bit more energy into ranking them.
Adam (20:13.478)
Yeah. And so that was October 22. The next survey we did was in May of 2023. And we kind of formatted this survey as like, it was the while you were reading survey. So the idea was like, from the moment you start reading a book, we were trying to understand everything a reader did, like between when they started reading a book and to like shortly after they finished it.
So that includes things like tracking the dates you started reading a book, the date you finished it, asking about your goals or streaks, saving quotes or notes, scanning content in from the book or discussing the book. And kind of the things we learned from that were that the tracking of the books, like start date, finish date, and like...
progress along the way, like I'm 10% done, I'm 20% done. Those were the top things that people wanted, which was good, because that aligns with what we've been wanting to do. What was kind of confusing to me was the second thing was keep track of goals and streaks. And I feel like we didn't split that out enough, and those are two wildly different things. And that's kind of a takeaway for me for this.
Ste (21:20.422)
Yeah.
Ste (21:34.055)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (21:35.926)
this year's survey is to have better understanding of goals versus streaks.
Ste (21:40.641)
Yeah, and I think generally it has to be very specific and only ask about one thing at a time. Another thing that's kind of maybe even dangerous from this kind of survey is that my surprise was that discussions were so low and my hunch is that people generally can't imagine discussions
or have a bad idea about how discussions could go based on what their experience with discussing a book are.
I'm saying this because when we put them in front of our prototypes, where we actually showed them how we're going to build discussions, I think most people were really into it and they were really excited about that. So maybe there's like a takeaway there to see or to interpret these results in a way that, you know, something that's classed lower or higher.
I mean, higher it's easy because that's like top of mind. But for some things which are more complicated, I guess, like discussions where you have to imagine like a lot of things, you can't imagine how it's like talk about the book with strangers necessarily. It's a complex thing versus goals where you're like, I just wanna read 10 books this month. Okay, those are simple. Discussions are...
Adam (23:07.063)
Yeah.
Adam (23:13.782)
Yeah.
Ste (23:14.845)
how am I gonna post, what am I gonna post, what book am I gonna post about? And you already, nah, okay, this is not a priority. But I mean, if you look at the prototypes, it's actually like much clearer and the results we got from that survey were like, okay, wow, okay, I would definitely do this because it's kind of like a book club and you know, exactly what we wanted from it. So.
Adam (23:21.198)
Thanks for watching!
Adam (23:43.242)
Yeah, it's.
Ste (23:43.353)
Yeah, I think just watch out for the more complex things we put in there. Maybe even eliminate the complex things. Or like you said earlier, try to split them up into smaller, more palatable chunks.
Adam (24:07.238)
Yeah, because discussing books could be like our when we say discussing books, we're talking about like a Reddit style discussion board for each book. But discussing books could also mean having a discussion on Discord about the book. It could mean organizing a real time group of people to discuss a book. It could mean audio, video or text. So I feel like leaving this like this kind of categorized it as all of the above.
And so some of these people that wanted it might've wanted a Reddit style and not wanted, maybe the people that didn't wanted something else, but I don't think we'll know until we figure out a better framing of the question for this year.
Ste (24:37.606)
Yeah.
Ste (24:51.485)
Yeah.
Adam (24:54.132)
Um...
Adam (24:57.238)
So yeah, that survey kind of helped us prioritize these things and kind of for tracking and kind of push off some of the discussion stuff for later while we figured more of it out.
Adam (25:15.454)
Yeah, most of the questions start off with kind of general demographics. I don't know if any of those are worth talking about.
Ste (25:16.07)
Yeah.
Ste (25:23.333)
Yeah, now we can skip those. They're basically like stuff about your reading and yourself that we wanna know.
Adam (25:34.826)
This one is a question.
Ste (25:37.201)
Yeah, the sword thing. Yeah.
Adam (25:40.914)
Yeah, it's a question about how you use hardcover today.
Ste (25:41.305)
I think these are... Yeah, no go ahead, sorry.
Ste (25:48.078)
Mm-hmm. The sorting is going to be really nice. I think it will give us a lot of answers about, you know, what people like more than the thing underneath it.
Adam (26:05.582)
Yeah, I think maybe this one though, maybe this one. So this question is, what are your biggest unsolved book-related problems? And I don't really love the phrasing of this question, but the idea is like, what are general book-related issues that you have in the world? Not specific to hardcover, but like, yeah, so trying to face this general question, phrase this.
Ste (26:17.017)
Yeah, that's...
Ste (26:24.6)
Uh-huh.
Ste (26:32.157)
Mm-hmm. Well, it's basically what have you been bumping into when you were reading, or what kind of friction have you had while reading? But let's think of like a simpler way to ask that.
Adam (26:52.671)
Yeah.
Adam (27:01.354)
Yeah, it's kind of like if you've encountered this problem, yeah.
Ste (27:11.249)
Well, they can just put zero in it if they haven't encountered it. How important are these?
Adam (27:11.406)
Thanks for watching.
Ste (27:21.709)
issues I guess or problems or...
Adam (27:27.206)
means.
Ste (27:29.161)
conundrums. You might run into while reading. They might interpret conundrums.
Adam (27:35.881)
Yeah.
Adam (27:44.274)
Yeah, you could just keep it vague. How often have you run into these problems?
Ste (27:49.697)
Yeah, and the five is often a one is never.
Adam (27:55.998)
Yeah.
So one to five.
Ste (28:04.341)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's perfect
Adam (28:05.362)
And then those are things like deciding on new books to read, finding accurate recommendations, organizing your real world book library, remembering takeaways and highlights, probably just to say takeaways from what you've read.
Adam (28:23.33)
And yeah, keeping track of what you've read, staying up to date with your favorite authors. So these are some things that we're solving, some things we're not. It's kind of a mix of just general book problems. But I'm wondering what else we could add here. Like, should we include something for like getting advanced review copies from authors or something like that?
Ste (28:32.425)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ste (28:50.917)
Yeah, of course. Yeah. I was also thinking about like the medium. Is it, do you listen to books? Do you have like a device, like a Kindle or a Nook? Do you read physical books? But I'm not sure. So...
Adam (29:09.486)
Hmm, maybe that would be a good one. Because I'm thinking like what devices do you read books on? And maybe that could be like Kindle, Kobo. We need to get a full list of things and then probably have a other.
Ste (29:16.389)
Hmm. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's ask that. Yeah.
Ste (29:27.053)
Oh yeah, there are like about 10. Yeah. And there should be like a physical, no device. Physical books.
Adam (29:39.882)
Yeah, we'll have to add more here, but.
Ste (29:41.361)
Paper, yeah. Good old paper.
Adam (29:48.886)
be.
Ste (29:51.044)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (29:52.277)
Yeah.
Adam (30:01.63)
Cool. See how we have, yeah, which are the following to use to connect with other readers online? Kind of like Instagram, Discord, TikTok, Reddit, local book clubs, Goodreads. It's kind of just like, how do you connect with people?
Ste (30:16.056)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (30:19.909)
Yeah, those are kind of like the main options.
Adam (30:22.382)
Yeah. And who do you talk with about books you've read? So I feel like these are different things because one of these is kind of like consumption, but one of them's more like you creating with like having, yeah.
Ste (30:26.757)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (30:32.973)
Yeah. Participation, yeah.
Ste (30:40.305)
Yeah, definitely. That's going to be useful to know if they actually like talk about books in like any place. That's digital.
Adam (30:50.818)
Yeah.
Adam (30:56.362)
And then this is the one that we were talking about for the sorting versus ranking, or sorting versus setting a one to five. So here are some things we're thinking about working on. Put these in the order that would be most important to you. And some of the options are discuss books you're reading. And this is probably like in a Reddit.
Ste (31:05.135)
Mm-hmm
Ste (31:12.946)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (31:21.626)
st- style forum on hardcover.
Ste (31:25.59)
I wouldn't put, I mean maybe some people don't know about it, that's like a real possibility or they might like, it might strike some bad associations in their heads so...
Adam (31:29.399)
Yeah.
Adam (31:41.258)
Maybe like text discussion forum on.
Ste (31:45.145)
Yeah, it could just be not chat about because you're not chatting, talking. I know library thing has them labeled as talk, which is good, but you know, I was actually thinking about how to label it and yeah, discussions. Yeah, you are, you are discussing. So I guess just the action.
I think it could have been like best at first because else, you know, it's, I think it's pretty clear.
that you will be able to, yeah, maybe live it like that.
Adam (32:35.122)
Yeah. So I ended up with, as you were talking and giving that feedback, a text-based discussion slash forum for every book, parentheses, similar to Reddit.
Ste (32:46.349)
Yeah, maybe just like, I wouldn't text-based, maybe just discussion because they could post, or yeah, just leave it, they could post photos, but I think, yeah, it's better to leave it as a text-based so they know it's not face-to-face or audio or...
Adam (33:08.062)
Yeah. That's what I was thinking.
Ste (33:08.345)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (33:12.645)
Yeah, that's good. For this one, I'm thinking should we group these features depending on something related to your profile, related to like the activity on hardcover, like the social part, the tracking part, the, your profile part, like the export or your library part, or do we not have enough?
features for all of those categories. Yeah, I think we might not so maybe just, yeah, leave it like mixed.
Adam (33:49.182)
Yeah. You also don't have a team where we could like split them up. I feel like if we had like one person working on one thing and we're in person working on the other, then we could split them up for that reason.
Ste (34:01.794)
Yeah.
Adam (34:03.07)
It, but that also made me think like, what if we have these as both a ranking and then the last thing is a sorting one. So we have like a question where you rank each of these one to five. And then the last question is sort them. So it's basically doing both.
Ste (34:04.637)
Let's just.
Ste (34:24.899)
Mm-hmm
Yeah, yeah, I mean, let's do that. They're like simple and you can just like go through them.
Adam (34:37.071)
Yeah.
Ste (34:38.617)
Jeff is signaling us about his VersaL XS in the chat. All right. Yeah, I think let's have them as ranking and then as sorting, let's see. And I'd put some more in there and maybe some, I'd...
Adam (34:43.732)
I'll talk with him about that.
Ste (35:05.609)
I mean, looking at these, I think some are less big in scope. So I'm looking at more metadata about books and...
Ste (35:22.629)
Let's say for instance, badges on the...
the words for reading an activity. Um, yeah, not, not sure. I think metadata seems like a smaller updates badges seems like a bigger update, so I wouldn't, uh,
Well, I wouldn't know how to rank them because of that. But yeah, maybe just like, we can see the importance that people put on like bigger feature versus smaller features. I was thinking about like equalizing their scope in a way so more metadata about books make it sound a bit more like bigger than it is like.
Adam (36:01.091)
Yeah.
Ste (36:13.369)
much more data about books.
Adam (36:18.282)
Is, is, is your concern that they'll be like taking into account how hard it is to do it? Or because.
Ste (36:23.669)
or how big of a feature it is. So more metadata might, even if it's like a big thing, might be classed lower than badges and awards or find real world book friends in your local area. But not sure if that will influence it. Maybe not, maybe I'm overthinking it.
Adam (36:45.162)
Yeah, to me the difficulty of it makes no difference. Like, I just wanna know what people want. So if they want something, even if it's really, really hard and we're gonna have to do it manually for every single book, I wanna know if that's the top thing people want. And then.
Ste (36:51.132)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ste (37:01.861)
Oh yeah, no, it's not about difficulty on our side. It's about how they perceive like the pushing, if we frame the options in a way that some options seem bigger than others, if we're not like artificially getting people to rank those higher, that's my concern, but maybe that's like...
just wording, we can, I can have a pass over the wording and see, you know, specifically if my, yeah.
Adam (37:40.702)
Yeah. Even, even changing it from more metadata about each book to just like more information about each book. I mean, that's things like that.
Ste (37:41.273)
Yeah. See you now.
Ste (37:49.125)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, or like fully comprehensive information. I mean, I think like having like full information about the book, all of those things would rank it as high as badges, which is like a big thing. We're like finding real book friends.
Adam (38:08.486)
Yeah. Yeah, this, uh, find real world book friends one is a, is a neat one. Like, like I, I know we're not there yet because we need a lot more users to make that work, but I think that could be big down the line.
Ste (38:28.245)
Yeah, it might even be one of those things. I mean, with social apps, the thing is you got to code the growth engine in the app, if that makes sense. So the reason why it could be an engine for growth is what I'm saying, that we don't necessarily need to.
have a lot of users to start with, with that kind of feature, but it could be like an engine for growth if we implement it. So yeah, I'm curious to see how that's going to be ranked. If it's ranked like way high, that's an indication for us that people really do want this, and it might be a good thing for us to work on.
Adam (39:22.062)
Yeah, it also brings in the whole idea of like, you know, there's a lot of things you can do with the real world side, but kind of like Jeff mentioned, this gets us into the personally identifiable information part, which is a...
Ste (39:36.914)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (39:41.289)
Oh yeah, we should, yeah. I just want to mention that library thing does this where you have like a public facing information that is like we have the location on our profile. I mean, nobody can identify I'm from London, me and another 9 million people.
but they also have a special private address that I think is used so people can send books to you, which is, I mean, we should look into that because they're doing it. It's either that or for book clubs, I'm not sure.
Maybe I imagine it's for people sending books to you, but they're definitely using that private address for something. So it's not something that's available publicly, but yeah, I think it's actually for seeing people in your area. So it might be like the very same thing. And I'm sure there's like a legal way to avoid.
trouble. We can just look in. They have 2 million users, so I'm guessing, you know, they got that part sorted out.
Adam (40:52.713)
Yeah.
Adam (41:01.31)
Let's see, are there any other things on here that you think should be added to this list?
Adam (41:15.594)
I know like the dashboard, you were showing some screens from.
Ste (41:21.269)
Yeah, the dashboard is something that came up requested by some people, but the question you had about its use case is really relevant, because the use case would be to have an overview on your reading. So we could put a dashboard that shows an overview of your hardcover activity, I guess.
I remember us talking about it before people started mentioning it in the feature requests on discord. So that's why I designed it, but might not be a thing. It might actually like harm us because I guess we want people to see the feed mainly. So this would be an alternative to seeing the feed as your homepage. We could just put some of those widgets.
Adam (42:17.46)
Yeah.
Ste (42:20.729)
in the sidebar so you can access them on desktop.
Adam (42:26.31)
Yeah, it, it's very like customizable and it's, it's a hard one. Cause I feel like some widgets would be like really useful and other ones I would never use. So it's, it's how we can get something that has enough things on it that would be really useful.
Ste (42:37.95)
Hahaha
Ste (42:43.865)
Yeah. Yeah, well, I made it like purely from community suggestions, including your suggestions. So those in there are stuff that people have asked for. I have, we have a bunch of really active users who want this feature. So I even have a screenshot that one of our readers made that I put in there. So.
Not a priority, but none of the other networks have it, so...
It could look nice. It could be like an extra thing to add if it's easy. I'm guessing like some of that data would be easier to get. Some of it might be like tougher to.
Adam (43:37.806)
The hard part is making it dynamic, I think, and like choosing, rebuilding it based on dragging around and all that part. Like making it one static page isn't too bad, but making it one static page that resonates with everyone is tough, because kind of like I said, all these widgets I wouldn't use and this one I would. So it's like, do we build that if people are only gonna focus on some of them?
Ste (43:48.449)
Oh this... Yeah.
Ste (43:55.021)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (43:59.432)
Yeah.
Ste (44:04.473)
Yeah, I think it's pretty easy to make it customizable from a interface perspective. We can just use frame or motion. I was actually, I actually wanted to code the whole like bento board thing. And we can just like use CSS classes to hide the ones that you don't use. I think someone mentioned it in the Discord at some point. So.
Adam (44:32.462)
The, I think the hard part's like saving that setting. Like you build your dashboard, you want to save it to the database and you want it to show up on your phone when you switch from device to device. And that's, that's where it gets a little tricky. Like if it was just like on one device and without a refresh, it would be really easy, but persisting it and getting it to show the way you want with it in the style you want is going to be, that's going to be the work.
Ste (44:43.565)
Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
Ste (45:02.805)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, not a priority. We have like a lot of stuff before that to take care of, my guess is, but yeah, we could put it there to just see how like height it ranks.
Adam (45:04.083)
So, yeah.
Adam (45:10.434)
Yeah.
Adam (45:18.186)
Um, yeah, if we were to describe it, a dashboard that shows an overview of your, um,
Ste (45:27.873)
reading, quick stats and friend activity.
Adam (45:37.941)
Yeah.
Ste (45:38.201)
Yeah, again, might be a thing that people have to see instead of imagine, but let's see.
Adam (45:48.202)
Yeah, I'm really excited to send this out. I mean, we're planning on sending it out on the first of the month with the hardcover report. And the idea is that the dashboard would be, mind if I pull up the dashboard that you shared? Okay, let me.
Ste (46:11.153)
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, we've got the question in the chat. Where would this dashboard be? Basically, ideally, you'd be able to choose if you want to see this dashboard or the feed when you tap on the homepage. So we wouldn't want to cannibalize our feed. So we just make it an option to set it as your homepage from like your profile settings for people who really don't want a feed.
So this would be it. You'd have what you're reading right now, your reading goal, similar readers you could follow, your average page read if you're updating your progress, some trending.
parts of it and activities in your feed, discussions you might like for when we're building discussions and if you're a librarian, the librarian stats else is going to prompt you to become a librarian if you want or just not show it if you're not a librarian.
Adam (47:16.662)
It sounds like the goal of this page to me is that it would be a jumping off point to other parts on hardcover that you would want to go to multiple times, or maybe parts that you, that we're suggesting you go to that you might not have discovered otherwise.
Ste (47:34.001)
That's also true, yeah. That might actually be a better description because yeah, an overview of your reading is just the top part. The other parts are exactly like points you can jump off to other sections.
Yeah, exactly. You would be able to go to the feeds. I actually wanted to include the button, but I don't know why I didn't. So from here, if you would tap on activities in your feeds in the bottom left corner, you'd go to your feeds. Or if you set this as your home page, you'd only be seeing this instead of the feed. That's what people actually asked from us.
I'm not sure it's a thing that's good for UX right now. I'm still like, yeah. But.
Adam (48:32.919)
Yeah.
Ste (48:37.137)
This could be, yeah.
Adam (48:39.195)
Yeah, I think I'm curious to see what people think of it, because I feel like it's not something I would personally use, but it was something that came up some in our feed interviews. But I also wonder like.
Like, yeah, how those people could use it because yeah, they've talked about like showing some of these things that you can get to you by just going to your current profile page and seeing like your reading goal, reading right now. So I have a feeling we'll be, we'll be talking more about this after the survey to see like, should we, and if it, if it comes up from the survey, then that's when we could start like, you know, showing this to some people and seeing what they think.
Ste (49:04.282)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (49:14.246)
Yeah, definitely.
Ste (49:25.197)
Yeah, that sounds like a plan.
Adam (49:25.462)
But if you're reading and if you're looking at this screenshot on YouTube or anything, feel free to comment on it.
Ste (49:35.829)
Oh yeah, definitely. It could be like a useful step for when we update the profile page as well, because some of those sections might be useful in there. And of course, they could go next to the feed, the new one we're working on that includes discussions. So we'll see.
Adam (49:52.875)
Yeah.
Adam (50:00.386)
One thing that I kind of worry about from the feedback that we get from people wanting something like this, it's less that they want something like this, and it's more that they want like one of these things, one of the solutions on this page to be its own complete feature. Like they want to see their most similar readers, or they want to see, like based on your reading books, we'd like.
Ste (50:22.563)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (50:26.626)
But seeing them all at once is less important than just like having a clear way to get there. And some people might not want to click around or might not know how to get there on their own.
Ste (50:38.277)
Yeah, exactly. And that's a good point because we can, I mean, some of this stuff has been requested and we could look into building these micro features first in other parts. So for instance, I would wanna see the most similar readers and I wanna see like just like a list of suggestions based on my reading.
Adam (51:09.374)
Yeah.
Ste (51:12.365)
Now we have the trending, but we don't have the trending that you might like, for instance. So it's not personalized necessarily to, that's why I was thinking, you know, it could impact, like when you visit your profile, you could get these, many of these data points to be integrated in there. So you can like quickly, yeah, see them. But yeah.
Adam (51:12.462)
time.
Adam (51:40.427)
I think of all of these things on our potential feature list. Is there one that stands out to you? And this will probably be the last thing before we head out. But what is the one thing to you that's most exciting here on our want to do potential list?
Ste (52:06.193)
Well, I think we don't have one about discussion. Yeah, I think the discussions one is the most, yeah, the first one.
Adam (52:12.15)
Yeah, this one.
Ste (52:18.161)
The next one will be find real world book friends in your area. I think that's going to be.
Yeah, and badges, I mean, if badges would be easier to...
Ste (52:40.297)
to code, that would be, I mean, we have it all figured out, I think, or like 80% of it, I think, the way the badge system would work, we even have like how the badges would look like. So that's the most exciting visually but the most exciting in terms of us as a network I think would be discussions. Right now, the only way we can...
have people express their feelings about the book is through reviews, but I'd want them to interact. So, you know, debate and ask and dig deep into everything that a book is and basically do the stuff that happens in book clubs, but do it async on the book page. So I think that still checks out even after all this time. If we implement that, yeah.
But I'm curious to see because that's the risk in this.
Adam (53:48.819)
Yeah.
Ste (53:50.073)
making sure you're building something people want. So.
Adam (53:52.718)
Yeah. And also that we have the audience to support it, at least like with discussions. It's one of those things where the larger we get, the more impactful it's going to be. So it's
Ste (54:06.149)
Yeah. How about you? What's your like from this list? What's your like top, top choice?
Adam (54:13.39)
I think my top one is safe quotes and notes to a reading log.
And one thing that I kind of like about that is like this would like I'm envisioning this as like, you know, there's an entry that says like started reading and it's like because you or marked as want to read and it's like the date you first marked it as want to read. And then you could have additional notes on like why you added it to your want to read list in there. So like oh someone so and so recommended this.
which is something that's come up multiple times. It's like, why did someone recommend this? And then it could say, the next entry could be like, started reading on this date and like the exact format you started reading. And then it could have your progress updates. And then it could have your notes that go along with your progress updates. And so it's like 10%, 20%. And I'm even thinking like, you could add an entry that's a quote and that quote could potentially be
could show up in our quotes in discussions later on. So it could be like priming the data for discussions. And we could also use the editor that we create for this reading log within discussions later. So it could be a chance for us to create our editor, but we don't have to worry about moderation in the same way because people will be creating this just for themselves. So there's less moderation overhead.
So I almost feel like this could be a good feature on the path to discussions that helps us get some of the tech requirements in place for discussions. But.
Ste (55:55.621)
Yeah, that sounds great actually. That sound, I mean, it checks out and, uh, yeah, definitely we could integrate it. That was about to say, as you were saying that, you know, it could be like a stepping stone towards discussions, but you've actually like thought about it the same way, so that's, that's perfect. We could start mocking this up even. I mean, we've mocked up a whole lot of things. We could do this because.
Adam (56:20.814)
See.
Ste (56:24.985)
Yeah, it's, I think I've.
Adam (56:28.454)
And that's why I'm so excited to put out the survey. Where does quotes in a reading log compare with streaks? If people really want streaks or really want streaks and badges in goal setting, that's one group of features that we could work on together versus a reading log. So I feel like this will help us kind of determine the group of features that we focus on.
Ste (56:41.65)
Yeah.
Ste (56:53.729)
Yeah, it's going to be really helpful for us because see, I mean, you described it and I was focusing on a whole bunch of other things, which in my mind seemed more important, but just by hearing that thought, I mean, it's just a name in a survey right now and it's going to be interesting to see how people perceive it. But then getting that data and actually starting to process it ourselves, I think that's going to be the fun part.
because we already have some plans for all of these. Eventually, I think Hardcover is going to have all of the things in there. But yeah, with the real challenges for a team that is as small as ours, what's going to be next on our list?
Adam (57:47.65)
Yeah.
Cool.
Ste (57:51.117)
Yeah, that sounds good. I can't wait to like mock what's exactly what you described. So we'll be, I guess, chatting about this after Sundance is over. And let's see, maybe we can do a real speedy shipping of.
Adam (57:57.125)
Yeah.
Adam (58:14.702)
Thanks for watching!
Ste (58:15.193)
If we can mock it up and it looks good and we got, we got a validation and maybe the data from the survey checks out. Yeah.
Adam (58:24.138)
What I think what I'm excited about, like from this list, like discussions is probably like the hardest thing on here. And that's one we've already put some work into. So in comparison, anything else is gonna be easier.
Ste (58:38.289)
Yeah, well that's good. On that optimistic note, I think we can wrap it up.
Adam (58:43.075)
Hehehe
Yep. Cool. Yeah, thanks, Stee, and thanks everyone for joining. Yeah.
Ste (58:54.745)
Yeah, it's been High Cover number 34, right?
Adam (58:59.614)
Yep. And we will talk to you next week.
Ste (59:04.273)
Yeah, perfect. Have a good rest of the week everybody and see you later.
Adam (59:08.034)
Yeah, bye.