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Pete, thank you so much for your feedback! Love everything that you've said, it nailed everything I was confused about. I appreciate your advice a lot. And its
by hazzajay 11y ago
Pete, thank you so much for your feedback! Love everything that you've said, it nailed everything I was confused about. I appreciate your advice a lot. And its cool to hear that you were thinking about doing the same idea earlier. I'm happy to provide you with a forever free account. So whatever happens with the website, you'll always get free access :)
And you're spot on, with regards to pricing, quiz availability and crowd-sourcing. Those are definitely the hurdles at the moment. I'll explain a little about them and would love to hear your thoughts on them.
On pricing: I took advice from Dan Martell, Noah Kagan, and Derek Sivers whom all said to first set a price and let the users provide feedback. I'll probably remove the subscription in the coming days. I really don't want to make a book recommendations product, because there are a lot of them out there. I'll have to think about the pricing/business model more. Do you have any other thoughts?
Can you delve a bit deeper into why you wouldn't pay a one-off $5 or a $10/per year price? My reasoning behind it was (1) it's a similar price to one ebook, (2) $5 or $10/year is a small expense for someone that is actively interested in self-development (best-selling non-fiction book reader) and (3) Blinkist creates book summaries and sell their service for $10/per month. If you've taken the sample quiz, you'll see that BookGym is a combination of quiz & book summary (detailed feedback).
On quiz availability: it's a project at the moment and I'm validating the idea. I didn't see any point creating many quizzes if the market isn't interested in it. However, if there is enough interest, I'll set an official launch date. It's true that there won't be a lot of quizzes available on launch, but I don't plan on creating a "startup" or taking outside capital. I think I'd like to keep this a small project and grow it slowly over time. I'm happy to help a very small amount of people. Eg. if you're a paying customer, I'd be creating quizzes based on your requests.
On crowd-sourcing: an end-goal would be to make BookGym a place where people can contribute their own notes, learnings and questions about a book. We can use this crowd-sourced information (as well as our own research) to create summaries, courses & quizzes based on best-selling non-fiction books. I don't have the resources (money & time) to do this straight away, but if I did, I probably would! Nevertheless, I can always start small and grow into that. But this is just hypothetical right now.
Thanks again, Pete. Hope you're having a great day. If you're on twitter, I'd love to follow you. I'm @hazzajay.
- pedalpete 11y agoHey, sorry for the late reply. Just to clarify, I didn't have the same idea, I had the idea that I wanted to make sure I was learning the material, I'm not sure/convinced a quiz is the way to do it, but at least you are doing something. I just had a thought and too many other projects :) There may be a lot of book recommendation products out there, but name one. I'm not suggesting you build a book recommendation product but as a side-effect of your product, you could help people to buy more books. The difference between blinklist and bookgym is that they are selling access to the content. Sure, it isn't the real thing, it's like they are selling a knock-off. Not as good as the real thing, but you're getting it cheaper. For one, I wouldn't spend $10/year for what is currently there. And I don't see how you can scale without crowd-sourcing, so you've got a bit of a chicken/egg problem where people won't want to pay until you have content, but you won't have content until you have people supplying it, whom you're expecting to pay. I completely agree with you not creating a ton of quizzes at the moment, until you see the market is interested. That's the right thing to do. But you also have to be able to measure market interest, which is a bit difficult to do without content. I don't have a clear answer for you there.