13 ms·

Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

734 points by vinnyglennon 2y ago

quesera 2y ago
> Nadia Odunayo is the founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, the app that helps you to track your reading and choose which book to read next based on your mood and favorite topics and themes. https://thestorygraph.com/ https://thestorygraph.com/
- deleted 2y ago
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jumperabg 2y ago
Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?
- skizm 2y ago
  Instagram and WhatsApp (pre-acquisition) were both pretty legendary for how small their teams were vs how many users their apps had. Instagram had 13 employees, and WhatsApp had 55 employees at the times of their sales.
  - julianeon 2y ago
    In Instagram's case I think it was very clear they were "borrowing from the future": they were accumulating a lot of technical debt and continuing to pile it on. It was not sustainable. The goal was to either hire more or get acquired. When the latter happened, the codebase quickly benefitted from the work of many more Facebook engineers.
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do. If you aren't borrowing from the future, you're probably wasting your initial VC investment.
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        > Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do That's too broad, the hope is you're borrowing from a point in the future when you're able to pay the debt. If you borrow too much, or from a point too close to the present - though it's hard detangle those 2, then you may fail to scale at a critical time such as positive press attention or going viral, because you're paying down tech debt. From the article: if it had taken 6 months to fix their importer instead of the 2 weeks it did, the product may have died.
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  Basecamp has always been a good example of that.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Basecamp has a full-sized team and has for many, many years.
    - cactusplant7374 2y ago
      It's about the ratio. Employees to users. And the profit per employee is quite high.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        That's great and all, I like them fine, but they're not a one-person-band.
        cactusplant7374 2y ago
        Neither is StoryGraph. Original comment said: > Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? So probably pretty close when they originally started their venture.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Pinboard probably
  - burkaman 2y ago
    Pinboard peaked at about 30,000 users: https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1 https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1
    - dowager_dan99 2y ago
      ha! kind of funny to read the comments in this thread and see this at the top of the Pinboard website: Notice (Dec 13): code cleanup continues; please keep reporting bugs to support@pinboard.in
      - tptacek 2y ago
        Why?
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Fair point. But they were 30K _paying_ users, which is a huge difference. What's the free-to-paying users in a service like the OP's?
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  While not as tiny, Craigslist has a huge user base all over the world and still has less than 50 employees total (not just devs). IMO it's the poster child of being able to scale worldwide while keeping the product highly focused, highly operational, and avoiding feature and technical fluff.
  - vanviegen 2y ago
    From what I can tell, craigslist is not really a player outside of the US. Just about every country seems you have its own 'craigslist'.
    - dowager_dan99 2y ago
      really even regionally. In Canada i've seen geo popularity across Kijiji, Craigs List, FB Marketplace, domain-specific communities with markets
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      While it's true that most countries have their homegrown version by now, I've used Craigslist myself in other countries, and it does have enough of a presence that it's actually maintained in over 50 countries which is no small feat.
      - input_sh 2y ago
        I just checked the Croatian version and it has a total of 5 things listed for sale and 3 jobs. Needless to say, there's a far more popular local alternative that basically every person in Croatia knows about (njuskalo.hr).
      - nolito 2y ago
        Well, they are present in Denmark. I only managed to find a single item - an expensive apartment. In Denmark the place to go is dba.dk or facebook marketplace. Checking the portugese version - its 3 items in Lisbon.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
- grog454 2y ago
  > Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well. > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never done. Whether that's because of ego or chasing local optima I'm not sure - probably a mix of both.
  - cbm-vic-20 2y ago
    It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      And for all of the benefits of process, I have never met a level of documentation, verification, or testing that matches the advantages of having the entire code base originating from one mind. Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale. But there are certain applications where it scales fine.
      - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
        I don't think we need nearly as many devs as we think. We do need someone who is taking a hardline approach on limiting the amount of scope tackled at once, and then fewer devs that are downstream of that. It is hubris to think that every problem admits the same solution, namely, throw as many devs as we can at it and hope for the best. But business isn't really known for being reflective.
      - swiftcoder 2y ago
        > Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale The real question here is scale in terms of what? Because a lot of folks are out here trying to scale people/careers, not software. It's extremely noticeable at BigCorps. Why do we need to scale this project from 3 -> 30 -> 300 developers? Because that's the number of reports to promo from Manager I -> Manager II -> Director
- dheera 2y ago
  I don't know StoryGraph's story, but it's a lot easier if: - You don't take VC money - You are okay with it not becoming a billion dollar unicorn - You are okay with occasional downtime (this isn't being deployed in a hospital emergency room after all) - You don't plan to feature bloat it - You are okay with it living its life and eventually being out-competed I had a webapp once with 250K monthly active users for several years (Fooplot). I was the sole developer. It eventually got increasingly out-competed by VC-funded Desmos and eventually got involuntarily shutdown when AWS decided to stop supporting EC2 classic instances. But I just let it be. Its ad revenue made me a good amount of side income when I was a PhD student. It had frequent downtime when people would try to export an overly complicated graph, which would crash the server. I just restarted it when I noticed. Sometimes it would be a few days later. It died eventually when AWS terminated it. I moved onto other things. Yeah, I wasn't the best maintainer, but the ~$30K I made from its ad revenue over the years was a pretty good payout for about 10 hours of work.
- schneems 2y ago
  IIRC urbandictionary is/was a one man show, Aaron Peckham. Deployed on Heroku https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl (post from 2014, not sure if he is still a customer).
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  It's not a small team, but Valve seems to have a very similar proportion of employees to users. I think they have about 400 employees, and a user base of 140 million. That's roughly 3 employees per million users.
  - mikepurvis 2y ago
    They’re running a marketplace though, and that’s a bit of a special case — obviously why VCs are always very excited for anything that is or looks like it might able to become marketplace-shaped. Certainly there aren’t 140M MAU fore the steam deck or any of the games they’ve built themselves, that’s for sure.
  - piva00 2y ago
    WhatsApp pre-acquisition by Meta was also very lean, some 40-50 people total serving 200 MAU.
    - deleted 2y ago
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- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I got a voice chat service for Brazil to nearly 500,000 users as a single dev. Of course we co-branded somebody else's application but I made the user database, sign up systems, contests and other web-based parts.
- open592 2y ago
  From a long time ago (~2009) but this comment instantly reminded me of the gem which was Plenty Of Fish https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/ https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/ "POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day"
  - TheJoeMan 2y ago
    Thank you for sharing! Only issue with the article I see is that "CPM" is already "cost per mille (thousand)". So any lines such as "$15 per CPM" make me hesitate.
- imachine1980_ 2y ago
  Lichess is one guy for the web and server and one guy for the mobile app Cool video about the topic https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h
- gwd 2y ago
  I mean, SQLite is what, 4 developers? And it's by some estimations is one of the top five deployed software modules of any description: [1] https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
- rwmj 2y ago
  Support would be the biggest thing, especially if the website needed any kind of login, payment, or user contributions. Back when we ran a website for UK schools (so, probably 50K-100K users maximum), we only answered support calls or emails during UK working hours, and still needed a 2-3 member team doing that. That was a shoestring even at the time. Nowadays just the safety aspect of running a service for children would demand something larger.
- zerkten 2y ago
  Stack Overflow was an example of this. They had a relatively small dev team and they also maintained a very small hardware footprint for delivering their product. Over time they expanded their scope into products beyond the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites which seems to have increased their team size. At least a big part of their success was containing technical by avoiding product debt. They had a clear vision and very tight control of their product which is different from 99% of startups. They were experimenting but not throwing any crap at the wall which was never cleaned up or iterated on. There was a very strong product-engineering connection and alignment which is unusual. Misalignment there is the genesis of much tech debt. Many product features are thrown out with little iteration to get them right but use "shipping so we can iterate" as an excuse to throw them out to users.
- deleted 2y ago
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- ffsm8 2y ago
  Whatsapp pre Facebook. It has reportedly around 50 employees at acquisition, and 450 million users at the time.
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes Tech debt doesn't come because the business requires more coding. It comes from poor planning and rushed implementation, often spurred by overzealous and naive management. This is a small team with one dev, so they likely do things correctly from the start and don't acquire much if any technical debt. Nothing has to be done yesterday, ever.
  - hoppp 2y ago
    Exactly. Technical debt often comes when a lot of developers work on the same codebase. Everyone contributed and nobody refactors. If the project is well thought out in advance a single developer is enough and will do perfect code
  - vergessenmir 2y ago
    Tech debt is a function of your code base, it's age, team turnover and number of pivots. Many factors to consider but I'll focus on pivots. You can't plan for a pivot because it's a known unknown. The same way you can't plan for a specific financial event in the market but you can brace yourself for a category of scenarios. Even with that, you can't predict the impact or the appropriate response your business needs to take. In the same way so is the pivot. The nature of the pivot is the market revealing the debt you didn't know you had. The magnitude of that readjustment to the market, in the time it has to happen and the time to the next pivot is unknowable because it's information not present at design time.
- laborcontract 2y ago
  Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing, distribution, that makes the business so hard. Marketing and sales, in isolation, I've had success with in prior jobs. I'm a fairly productive solo developer. However, being able to context switch and do both dev and marketing? Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it.
  - RenThraysk 2y ago
    Flappy Bird had 50m+ installs.
  - jezzamon 2y ago
    For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
    - deleted 2y ago
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    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      Which was all just to sit at the table for a chance at massive success. Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.
      - diggan 2y ago
        > Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on. But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?
- steventruong 2y ago
  Eric Barone as a one man team built, designed, animated, wrote, and composed the entire game of Stardew Valley by himself. The game sold over 30 million copies and had an all time high of over 230K concurrent players at one point earlier this year.
- eek2121 2y ago
  I owned a website with over a million users. Used cloudflare and a $20 cloud instance to run it. Also relied on certain other CDNs. Don’t own it anymore, but considering starting a new project.
  - huma 2y ago
    What was the app about?
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  Write good enough code that can be easily replaced. It really is no different than what you'd write on the job.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  Dwarf Fortress is another obvious one - basically small successful indie games are all gonna be this. But that's not a VC product market.
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    If we're counting all successful indie games, we could extend that to successful modern artists? I'm not familiar but I'm sure there are some that sell a painting or sculpture for millions, though that's just one buyer. Is there an equivalent in indie Movies? Successful musicians?
- noprocrasted 2y ago
  It turns out you can go quite far when your objective is to solve a business problem rather than building an overcomplicated mess to solicit VC money.
- eucki 2y ago
  Pieter Levels is creating the kind of software I’ve always dreamed of building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg
  - 0______0 2y ago
    Thanks for mentioning him. I gained some new perspective and felt inspired by looking around at his work and Twitter.
- edm0nd 2y ago
  >Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Tons of FOSS projects. See the entire JiaTan fiasco.
- bcrosby95 2y ago
  Back in the Facebook app days we had some apps with 2-8mil daily unique users on anywhere from 1-3 devs and team sizes anywhere from 2-5.
- kbutler 2y ago
  Minecraft? Not sure how big it was before Notch hired anyone else, but this reddit post encouraging him to hire somebody says he'd "brought in $67,903,100.72" https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youve_brought_in_6790310072_hire_developers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youv...
- OJFord 2y ago
  WhatsApp & Instagram were I think both very small teams with very many users when Facebook bought them (I think was FB not Meta at the time) for very much money. Which maybe goes some way to your second question, as they were slightly and slowly scaled up versions of solo serving 1M. (And obviously have continued that under FB/Meta with probably now a much less impressive/unusual staff:user ratio.)
- mdswanson 2y ago
  My one-person indie company released many apps, and one of them (Halftone) had over 6 million users by the time I shut it down. It's definitely possible.
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    Interested to hear why you shut it down when you had over 6 million users?
- jedberg 2y ago
  We had ~10M users on reddit with three engineers and one non-engineer. Got up to about ~20M with five eng and two non-eng.
- kumarm 2y ago
  Started on Android Market in 2010. First hire (designer) after 12 Million downloads and started hiring other Dev's after crossing 50 Million downloads. Still run decently popular apps on App Store and Play Store.
- npinsker 2y ago
  Mobile games can often scale to eye-popping numbers. Among Us has over 1 billion downloads and was made by a single programmer. Plenty of other examples -- e.g. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.OfflineGames https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.O..., a solo dev who has multiple 100MM+ download small games.
- akreal 2y ago
  Telegram?
- CM30 2y ago
  Uh, do online content creators count for this? Because an awful lot of popular YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/whatever accounts would probably fit a similar profile. Small team, perhaps even just one person, but million of viewers tuning in every week or so. The very biggest have decent sized teams (like Mr Beast), but there are plenty in the 100s of thousands/low millions of subscribers/followers range that are operated by between 1-4 people. And yeah, games too. Quite a few big indie games have that sort of team size/setup.
bilbo0s 2y ago
Only tangentially relevant to the story I guess, but StoryGraph is kind of a brilliant idea.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I should really migrate from GoodReads; since Amazon bought them, development has effectively stopped, and there's a lot of QoL issues.
  - wiether 2y ago
    It took me a while to migrate (you upload a CSV and it can take a few days to process it) but now I'm happy with it and a paid subscriber. I won't say that it's great, there's a few things that annoys me, but it sure is better than GoodReads already and improvements are regularly added.
  - acdha 2y ago
    The export/import process was painless and after switching the main thing I noticed is how obvious it is that StoryGraph is under active development and Goodreads is effectively orphaned.
  - gregors 2y ago
    A story as old as acquisition itself
myth_drannon 2y ago
The app is hugged to death by HN...
- aniforprez 2y ago
  I don't think that's the case. I've found it to be fairly janky and it has frequent down times every so often. I'm much more inspired to give a small one-person team some leeway about it though for a free app vs. Amazon and all its resources not even bothering to properly maintain Goodreads.
  - jahnu 2y ago
    Amazon don’t even properly maintain their Prime Video app for TVs. It’s so bad on my good LG TV that I gave up waiting three seconds for button presses to register while trying to start watching their billion dollar show they kept urging me to watch.
    - alternatex 2y ago
      Wait till you try HBO's Max app. I used to plan my watches half an hour ahead. LG TVs do have quite the shoddy hardware though. Every penny goes to the panel.
      - jahnu 2y ago
        Netflix and Apple seem to have no problem making a good client. We won’t have HBO here until 2026. The Austrian national broadcaster have a decent if not brilliant player. Even the built in dnla player works great. Amazon are ridiculous and should be ashamed of such crappy software.
skrebbel 2y ago
Looks like a pretty cool app! "Amazon-free Goodreads" is a pretty good pitch. I'm curious how freemium model works out for them though, I could imagine a lot of people thinking the free version is good enough for them.
- soneca 2y ago
  I am curious of more about the business as well, but I imagine even a very small proportion of paying users could be sufficient to maintain a 3-people team with that scale
  - deleted 2y ago
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- bwb 2y ago
  I think they do around $500k+ a year based on the numbers they have shared in a few spots. The new giveaway platform for authors should help jump that revenue up too.
  - swyx 2y ago
    what? how?? how do so many people in the world read books that they have needs for a SECOND book review platform? i just feel really behind on my book reading :/ havent read a good book in like a year.
    - bwb 2y ago
      The paid feature is book tracking and stats. Reviews are a by product IMO. I mean Goodreads reviews setup is horrible, no screening, nothing helpful in the implementation, etc
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  My wife loves Storygraph, and has said that she thinks they give away too much for free and need to put more value behind premium.
schneems 2y ago
Nadia is an amazing speaker. Look up her other talks. You won’t regret it. She blends technical info with an interesting story/mystery in a very thoughtful and well delivered package. Here’s a recent one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pOW4vepSX8g&pp=ygUOTmFkaWEgT2R1bmF5byA%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pOW4vepSX8g&pp=ygUOTmFkaWEgT2R...
- graypegg 2y ago
  Her skills with story telling really show there, that was really engaging but stayed technical and information dense! Thanks so much for the link!
- brunooliv 2y ago
  Wow, this was so amazing! And in a way, so... refreshing! Makes me want to learn Ruby :D
  - npteljes 2y ago
    In case you ever seriously consider it, I suggest doing it with RubyMine. It rekindled my passion for programming with its thoughtful suggestions and magic-like refactoring options. Helped a lot to learn the language, and to convert the code, and so my thought process, to be more like how Ruby does things.
skizm 2y ago
I always wonder, how do sites like this get their list of books and book metadata? Do publishers have an API? What about Amazon?
- atrus 2y ago
  https://openlibrary.org/ https://openlibrary.org/ has a pretty good set of data and a decent API. You can mix and match too, since openlibraries covers kinda suck half the time.
  - rafram 2y ago
    It's alright. I would use it for a tool where the most important part is having a more-or-less accurate author <-> title <-> ISBN mapping, but not for anything where I need precise bibliographic metadata.
- bwb 2y ago
  It is so bad!!! I use Nielsen's API, but the data is pretty rough, and you have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. Plus, the archaic industry standards around genre are hard to translate to what readers use - https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list. Ingrams and Bowker are the other big metadata providers. Ingram's is good but expensive, but the data faces the same issues.
  - matwood 2y ago
    If you have an ISBN you can also check Worldcat, but at scale it's also probably not free. And if you're working with anything that might have an academic slant, Crossref can be useful. Book metadata is very challenging. Even the publishers of said books are pretty bad at delivering good metadata.
    - rafram 2y ago
      WorldCat doesn't have an official API for anyone but member libraries, scraping the site is not fun, and the quality of the data isn't great (it's essentially bulk-imported from member libraries' catalogs). National databases like the Library of Congress are significantly better - WorldCat is best used as a fallback for books that aren't included in the high-quality databases.
bwb 2y ago
Nadia does a great weekly dev log email that I enjoy as well. I highly recommend it -> https://buttondown.com/nodunayo https://buttondown.com/nodunayo
- skrebbel 2y ago
  I simply don't understand how she codes the app and writes the newsletter and does social media marketing for StoryGraph and flies all over the world to do keynotes at ruby conferences. I'm very impressed.
- popcorncowboy 2y ago
  @jmduke might wanna look at that
scotty79 2y ago
> the app that helps you to track your reading and choose which book to read next based on your mood and favorite topics and themes. I'd like to have that for games and music. Stores are mostly terrible at recomending anything. Steam does better than most but still far from good. And syncing recommendations with my mood is pretty much non-existent.
zeroonetwothree 2y ago
I tried using this but it was too onerous to import my existing list of books I’ve read (1000+). So I gave up after a bit. I usually don’t really have trouble finding books to read anyway. BTW my library (and probably yours too) has a free service where librarians will actually recommend books for you based on other books you liked or other criteria. I found those recommendations to be very good.
- jack_riminton 2y ago
  [flagged]
nonconstant 2y ago
Ruby on Rails community is so lucky to have Nadia
phildenhoff 2y ago
StoryGraph is an excellent tool and I continue to use it daily. I’ve also found Hardcover.app, which I quite like. It has an API and a slightly more refined UI, but it’s clearly more than one person working on it. Of course, if your focus is book clubs, Fable is likely the app for you
- magnio 2y ago
  I also use Hardcover.app, but the community there is tiny compared to Goodreads, with the only possible exception being fantasy readers.
  - bwb 2y ago
    It will get there, its growing :)
  - HardcoverJeff 2y ago
    GR claims 125 million+ users. StoryGraph now claims over 3 million. Hardcover currently has 20K - and yes, a lot of those are fantasy based readers. That just means it is easier for other readers to come in and potentially become the new largest user group. :)
- ryangs 2y ago
  Excited to hear about Hardcover! I like StoryGraph but the lack of API frustrates me - I want to be able to sync back to my general notes store (Obsidian). Hopefully Hardcover works better with that.
  - northrup 2y ago
    Which is funny, StoryGraph is a Ruby on Rails app, exposing an API is a doable thing, which leads me to believe it is not a priority or a purposeful design decision.
    - phildenhoff 2y ago
      Yeah Hardcover seems to have a GraphQL API they use for their UI, which they expose. There’s not a lot of extra polish for third party devs — it feels like “this is the API we use, use it or not, things may break”. On the other hand, StoryGraph does server-side rendering and so it doesn’t have an API already. So adding one would be a decent amount of work
kwakubiney 2y ago
She talks about the story on this podcast episode[1] [1]https://open.spotify.com/episode/5AGrLoFgkYZ0KxLXBOjbwB https://open.spotify.com/episode/5AGrLoFgkYZ0KxLXBOjbwB
- max_ 2y ago
  Please don't use Spotify links as they are heavily geolocked
  - swyx 2y ago
    agreed. also they rehost the mp3 so the creator doesnt get downloads. fuck spotify with a sharp stick.
- adamgordonbell 2y ago
  Alternate link to episode: https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/ https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/
- deleted 2y ago
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adamgordonbell 2y ago
Couple years ago I talked to Nadia. Crazy story. End of year is a big time for her as people setup reading goals for the year I think. My wife is now using it. I wouldn't have guessed a book site would be so seasonal. https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/ https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/
- swyx 2y ago
  love your authentic coverage adam. never change.
  - adamgordonbell 2y ago
    Thanks Shawn!!
shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
> the app that helps you to track your reading and choose which book to read next based on your mood and favorite topics and themes. If these requirements are constant then one woman dev team is sufficient until the requirements become thick enough to handle with 2 hands. And Pinterest reached 11 million users with 6 engineers, if interested https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-pinterest-scaled-to-11-million https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-pinterest-scaled-to-11...
dang 2y ago
[stub for offtopicness] [good grief]
- Developerx 2y ago
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- knighthack 2y ago
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- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
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  - deleted 2y ago
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  - carlgreene 2y ago
    Well, your username certainly checks out. I am not sure how many solo projects you have embarked on, but providing a product to 2 million people is no small feat even for a team. Iterating to product market fit takes a lot and not many people are ever able to do it. Whether it is simple or not it's obviously providing value for the users that are using it, and is reliable enough because it keeps growing.
  - bovermyer 2y ago
    I doubt "support" is all that necessary for an app of this type, as you yourself mentioned. Making something that millions of people use and appreciate? That's worthy of praise.
    - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
      I actually emailed the story graph with a support question and got a prompt response. I imagine you do have to provide it since you have paying customers.
pathless 2y ago
This is a crazy question, but what song is used in the intro of that video?
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Try using the Google Chrome extension Shazaam to find the answer. It is pretty good.
vwkd 2y ago
Ah, that's one of those websites that accept a password of any length without error, truncate it, and show you a "wrong password" the next time you try to log in. Then you go through password reset roulette until you find a short enough password that works. Don't do this.
- davedx 2y ago
  Wait wait. Why would you truncate it after input unless... you're storing it in plaintext?
  - zja 2y ago
    You truncate passwords to prevent DOS
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      Why not either show an error or do a client-side hash so there's a fixed length?
      - orblivion 2y ago
        Showing an error is probably the right thing. Client-side mitigations wouldn't prevent a DOS.
  - orblivion 2y ago
    Maybe the KDF gets really slow with a super long input.
p3rls 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
habosa 2y ago
I just want to +1 the recommendation for StoryGraph. I used Goodreads for a decade but got frustrated at how little Amazon invested in it. Plus the review culture was getting toxic. Took me an hour or two to migrate all of my books over. StoryGraph isn’t necessarily better than Goodreads but it’s definitely just as good and it’s great to support software not owned by Amazon. They may own e-books but they don’t have to own reading.
- phildenhoff 2y ago
  I’m not sure what world other people live in but Amazon has absolutely nothing to do with my reading ebooks. Not how I buy them, not how I read them. I’ve been building an app specifically to help me manage the ebooks that I own
  - habosa 2y ago
    > I’m not sure what world other people live in > I’ve been building an app Most people live in a world where they don’t build their own ebook software. I think you actually do know this.
    - phildenhoff 2y ago
      Yes, and I think you can imagine that the software I’m building is neither an e-reader nor is it a platform to purchase ebooks
jerodsanto 2y ago
Nadia is amazing! We had her on The Changelog last Feb and learned SO much by picking her brain. Here's the link, in case you finish watching her talk and want an even deeper-dive: https://changelog.com/podcast/577 https://changelog.com/podcast/577

734 points by vinnyglennon 2y ago

> Nadia Odunayo is the founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, the app that helps you to track your reading and choose which book to read next based on your mood and favorite topics and themes. https://thestorygraph.com/ https://thestorygraph.com/

deleted 2y ago
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jumperabg 2y ago

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

skizm 2y ago
Instagram and WhatsApp (pre-acquisition) were both pretty legendary for how small their teams were vs how many users their apps had. Instagram had 13 employees, and WhatsApp had 55 employees at the times of their sales.
- julianeon 2y ago
  In Instagram's case I think it was very clear they were "borrowing from the future": they were accumulating a lot of technical debt and continuing to pile it on. It was not sustainable. The goal was to either hire more or get acquired. When the latter happened, the codebase quickly benefitted from the work of many more Facebook engineers.
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do. If you aren't borrowing from the future, you're probably wasting your initial VC investment.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do That's too broad, the hope is you're borrowing from a point in the future when you're able to pay the debt. If you borrow too much, or from a point too close to the present - though it's hard detangle those 2, then you may fail to scale at a critical time such as positive press attention or going viral, because you're paying down tech debt. From the article: if it had taken 6 months to fix their importer instead of the 2 weeks it did, the product may have died.
cactusplant7374 2y ago
Basecamp has always been a good example of that.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Basecamp has a full-sized team and has for many, many years.
  - cactusplant7374 2y ago
    It's about the ratio. Employees to users. And the profit per employee is quite high.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      That's great and all, I like them fine, but they're not a one-person-band.
      - cactusplant7374 2y ago
        Neither is StoryGraph. Original comment said: > Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? So probably pretty close when they originally started their venture.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Pinboard probably
- burkaman 2y ago
  Pinboard peaked at about 30,000 users: https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1 https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    ha! kind of funny to read the comments in this thread and see this at the top of the Pinboard website: Notice (Dec 13): code cleanup continues; please keep reporting bugs to support@pinboard.in
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Why?
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Fair point. But they were 30K _paying_ users, which is a huge difference. What's the free-to-paying users in a service like the OP's?
insane_dreamer 2y ago
While not as tiny, Craigslist has a huge user base all over the world and still has less than 50 employees total (not just devs). IMO it's the poster child of being able to scale worldwide while keeping the product highly focused, highly operational, and avoiding feature and technical fluff.
- vanviegen 2y ago
  From what I can tell, craigslist is not really a player outside of the US. Just about every country seems you have its own 'craigslist'.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    really even regionally. In Canada i've seen geo popularity across Kijiji, Craigs List, FB Marketplace, domain-specific communities with markets
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    While it's true that most countries have their homegrown version by now, I've used Craigslist myself in other countries, and it does have enough of a presence that it's actually maintained in over 50 countries which is no small feat.
    - input_sh 2y ago
      I just checked the Croatian version and it has a total of 5 things listed for sale and 3 jobs. Needless to say, there's a far more popular local alternative that basically every person in Croatia knows about (njuskalo.hr).
    - nolito 2y ago
      Well, they are present in Denmark. I only managed to find a single item - an expensive apartment. In Denmark the place to go is dba.dk or facebook marketplace. Checking the portugese version - its 3 items in Lisbon.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
grog454 2y ago
> Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well. > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never done. Whether that's because of ego or chasing local optima I'm not sure - probably a mix of both.
- cbm-vic-20 2y ago
  It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    And for all of the benefits of process, I have never met a level of documentation, verification, or testing that matches the advantages of having the entire code base originating from one mind. Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale. But there are certain applications where it scales fine.
    - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
      I don't think we need nearly as many devs as we think. We do need someone who is taking a hardline approach on limiting the amount of scope tackled at once, and then fewer devs that are downstream of that. It is hubris to think that every problem admits the same solution, namely, throw as many devs as we can at it and hope for the best. But business isn't really known for being reflective.
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      > Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale The real question here is scale in terms of what? Because a lot of folks are out here trying to scale people/careers, not software. It's extremely noticeable at BigCorps. Why do we need to scale this project from 3 -> 30 -> 300 developers? Because that's the number of reports to promo from Manager I -> Manager II -> Director
dheera 2y ago
I don't know StoryGraph's story, but it's a lot easier if: - You don't take VC money - You are okay with it not becoming a billion dollar unicorn - You are okay with occasional downtime (this isn't being deployed in a hospital emergency room after all) - You don't plan to feature bloat it - You are okay with it living its life and eventually being out-competed I had a webapp once with 250K monthly active users for several years (Fooplot). I was the sole developer. It eventually got increasingly out-competed by VC-funded Desmos and eventually got involuntarily shutdown when AWS decided to stop supporting EC2 classic instances. But I just let it be. Its ad revenue made me a good amount of side income when I was a PhD student. It had frequent downtime when people would try to export an overly complicated graph, which would crash the server. I just restarted it when I noticed. Sometimes it would be a few days later. It died eventually when AWS terminated it. I moved onto other things. Yeah, I wasn't the best maintainer, but the ~$30K I made from its ad revenue over the years was a pretty good payout for about 10 hours of work.
schneems 2y ago
IIRC urbandictionary is/was a one man show, Aaron Peckham. Deployed on Heroku https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl (post from 2014, not sure if he is still a customer).
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
It's not a small team, but Valve seems to have a very similar proportion of employees to users. I think they have about 400 employees, and a user base of 140 million. That's roughly 3 employees per million users.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  They’re running a marketplace though, and that’s a bit of a special case — obviously why VCs are always very excited for anything that is or looks like it might able to become marketplace-shaped. Certainly there aren’t 140M MAU fore the steam deck or any of the games they’ve built themselves, that’s for sure.
- piva00 2y ago
  WhatsApp pre-acquisition by Meta was also very lean, some 40-50 people total serving 200 MAU.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
PaulHoule 2y ago
I got a voice chat service for Brazil to nearly 500,000 users as a single dev. Of course we co-branded somebody else's application but I made the user database, sign up systems, contests and other web-based parts.
open592 2y ago
From a long time ago (~2009) but this comment instantly reminded me of the gem which was Plenty Of Fish https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/ https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/ "POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day"
- TheJoeMan 2y ago
  Thank you for sharing! Only issue with the article I see is that "CPM" is already "cost per mille (thousand)". So any lines such as "$15 per CPM" make me hesitate.
imachine1980_ 2y ago
Lichess is one guy for the web and server and one guy for the mobile app Cool video about the topic https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h
gwd 2y ago
I mean, SQLite is what, 4 developers? And it's by some estimations is one of the top five deployed software modules of any description: [1] https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
rwmj 2y ago
Support would be the biggest thing, especially if the website needed any kind of login, payment, or user contributions. Back when we ran a website for UK schools (so, probably 50K-100K users maximum), we only answered support calls or emails during UK working hours, and still needed a 2-3 member team doing that. That was a shoestring even at the time. Nowadays just the safety aspect of running a service for children would demand something larger.
zerkten 2y ago
Stack Overflow was an example of this. They had a relatively small dev team and they also maintained a very small hardware footprint for delivering their product. Over time they expanded their scope into products beyond the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites which seems to have increased their team size. At least a big part of their success was containing technical by avoiding product debt. They had a clear vision and very tight control of their product which is different from 99% of startups. They were experimenting but not throwing any crap at the wall which was never cleaned up or iterated on. There was a very strong product-engineering connection and alignment which is unusual. Misalignment there is the genesis of much tech debt. Many product features are thrown out with little iteration to get them right but use "shipping so we can iterate" as an excuse to throw them out to users.
deleted 2y ago
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ffsm8 2y ago
Whatsapp pre Facebook. It has reportedly around 50 employees at acquisition, and 450 million users at the time.
stronglikedan 2y ago
> when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes Tech debt doesn't come because the business requires more coding. It comes from poor planning and rushed implementation, often spurred by overzealous and naive management. This is a small team with one dev, so they likely do things correctly from the start and don't acquire much if any technical debt. Nothing has to be done yesterday, ever.
- hoppp 2y ago
  Exactly. Technical debt often comes when a lot of developers work on the same codebase. Everyone contributed and nobody refactors. If the project is well thought out in advance a single developer is enough and will do perfect code
- vergessenmir 2y ago
  Tech debt is a function of your code base, it's age, team turnover and number of pivots. Many factors to consider but I'll focus on pivots. You can't plan for a pivot because it's a known unknown. The same way you can't plan for a specific financial event in the market but you can brace yourself for a category of scenarios. Even with that, you can't predict the impact or the appropriate response your business needs to take. In the same way so is the pivot. The nature of the pivot is the market revealing the debt you didn't know you had. The magnitude of that readjustment to the market, in the time it has to happen and the time to the next pivot is unknowable because it's information not present at design time.
laborcontract 2y ago
Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing, distribution, that makes the business so hard. Marketing and sales, in isolation, I've had success with in prior jobs. I'm a fairly productive solo developer. However, being able to context switch and do both dev and marketing? Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it.
- RenThraysk 2y ago
  Flappy Bird had 50m+ installs.
- jezzamon 2y ago
  For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Which was all just to sit at the table for a chance at massive success. Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on. But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?
steventruong 2y ago
Eric Barone as a one man team built, designed, animated, wrote, and composed the entire game of Stardew Valley by himself. The game sold over 30 million copies and had an all time high of over 230K concurrent players at one point earlier this year.
eek2121 2y ago
I owned a website with over a million users. Used cloudflare and a $20 cloud instance to run it. Also relied on certain other CDNs. Don’t own it anymore, but considering starting a new project.
- huma 2y ago
  What was the app about?
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
Write good enough code that can be easily replaced. It really is no different than what you'd write on the job.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
Dwarf Fortress is another obvious one - basically small successful indie games are all gonna be this. But that's not a VC product market.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  If we're counting all successful indie games, we could extend that to successful modern artists? I'm not familiar but I'm sure there are some that sell a painting or sculpture for millions, though that's just one buyer. Is there an equivalent in indie Movies? Successful musicians?
noprocrasted 2y ago
It turns out you can go quite far when your objective is to solve a business problem rather than building an overcomplicated mess to solicit VC money.
eucki 2y ago
Pieter Levels is creating the kind of software I’ve always dreamed of building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg
- 0______0 2y ago
  Thanks for mentioning him. I gained some new perspective and felt inspired by looking around at his work and Twitter.
edm0nd 2y ago
>Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Tons of FOSS projects. See the entire JiaTan fiasco.
bcrosby95 2y ago
Back in the Facebook app days we had some apps with 2-8mil daily unique users on anywhere from 1-3 devs and team sizes anywhere from 2-5.
kbutler 2y ago
Minecraft? Not sure how big it was before Notch hired anyone else, but this reddit post encouraging him to hire somebody says he'd "brought in $67,903,100.72" https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youve_brought_in_6790310072_hire_developers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youv...
OJFord 2y ago
WhatsApp & Instagram were I think both very small teams with very many users when Facebook bought them (I think was FB not Meta at the time) for very much money. Which maybe goes some way to your second question, as they were slightly and slowly scaled up versions of solo serving 1M. (And obviously have continued that under FB/Meta with probably now a much less impressive/unusual staff:user ratio.)
mdswanson 2y ago
My one-person indie company released many apps, and one of them (Halftone) had over 6 million users by the time I shut it down. It's definitely possible.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  Interested to hear why you shut it down when you had over 6 million users?
jedberg 2y ago
We had ~10M users on reddit with three engineers and one non-engineer. Got up to about ~20M with five eng and two non-eng.
kumarm 2y ago
Started on Android Market in 2010. First hire (designer) after 12 Million downloads and started hiring other Dev's after crossing 50 Million downloads. Still run decently popular apps on App Store and Play Store.
npinsker 2y ago
Mobile games can often scale to eye-popping numbers. Among Us has over 1 billion downloads and was made by a single programmer. Plenty of other examples -- e.g. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.OfflineGames https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.O..., a solo dev who has multiple 100MM+ download small games.
akreal 2y ago
Telegram?
CM30 2y ago
Uh, do online content creators count for this? Because an awful lot of popular YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/whatever accounts would probably fit a similar profile. Small team, perhaps even just one person, but million of viewers tuning in every week or so. The very biggest have decent sized teams (like Mr Beast), but there are plenty in the 100s of thousands/low millions of subscribers/followers range that are operated by between 1-4 people. And yeah, games too. Quite a few big indie games have that sort of team size/setup.

bilbo0s 2y ago

Only tangentially relevant to the story I guess, but StoryGraph is kind of a brilliant idea.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I should really migrate from GoodReads; since Amazon bought them, development has effectively stopped, and there's a lot of QoL issues.
- wiether 2y ago
  It took me a while to migrate (you upload a CSV and it can take a few days to process it) but now I'm happy with it and a paid subscriber. I won't say that it's great, there's a few things that annoys me, but it sure is better than GoodReads already and improvements are regularly added.
- acdha 2y ago
  The export/import process was painless and after switching the main thing I noticed is how obvious it is that StoryGraph is under active development and Goodreads is effectively orphaned.
- gregors 2y ago
  A story as old as acquisition itself

myth_drannon 2y ago

The app is hugged to death by HN...

aniforprez 2y ago
I don't think that's the case. I've found it to be fairly janky and it has frequent down times every so often. I'm much more inspired to give a small one-person team some leeway about it though for a free app vs. Amazon and all its resources not even bothering to properly maintain Goodreads.
- jahnu 2y ago
  Amazon don’t even properly maintain their Prime Video app for TVs. It’s so bad on my good LG TV that I gave up waiting three seconds for button presses to register while trying to start watching their billion dollar show they kept urging me to watch.
  - alternatex 2y ago
    Wait till you try HBO's Max app. I used to plan my watches half an hour ahead. LG TVs do have quite the shoddy hardware though. Every penny goes to the panel.
    - jahnu 2y ago
      Netflix and Apple seem to have no problem making a good client. We won’t have HBO here until 2026. The Austrian national broadcaster have a decent if not brilliant player. Even the built in dnla player works great. Amazon are ridiculous and should be ashamed of such crappy software.

skrebbel 2y ago

Looks like a pretty cool app! "Amazon-free Goodreads" is a pretty good pitch. I'm curious how freemium model works out for them though, I could imagine a lot of people thinking the free version is good enough for them.

soneca 2y ago
I am curious of more about the business as well, but I imagine even a very small proportion of paying users could be sufficient to maintain a 3-people team with that scale
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bwb 2y ago
I think they do around $500k+ a year based on the numbers they have shared in a few spots. The new giveaway platform for authors should help jump that revenue up too.
- swyx 2y ago
  what? how?? how do so many people in the world read books that they have needs for a SECOND book review platform? i just feel really behind on my book reading :/ havent read a good book in like a year.
  - bwb 2y ago
    The paid feature is book tracking and stats. Reviews are a by product IMO. I mean Goodreads reviews setup is horrible, no screening, nothing helpful in the implementation, etc
Vegenoid 2y ago
My wife loves Storygraph, and has said that she thinks they give away too much for free and need to put more value behind premium.

schneems 2y ago

Nadia is an amazing speaker. Look up her other talks. You won’t regret it. She blends technical info with an interesting story/mystery in a very thoughtful and well delivered package. Here’s a recent one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pOW4vepSX8g&pp=ygUOTmFkaWEgT2R1bmF5byA%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pOW4vepSX8g&pp=ygUOTmFkaWEgT2R...

graypegg 2y ago
Her skills with story telling really show there, that was really engaging but stayed technical and information dense! Thanks so much for the link!
brunooliv 2y ago
Wow, this was so amazing! And in a way, so... refreshing! Makes me want to learn Ruby :D
- npteljes 2y ago
  In case you ever seriously consider it, I suggest doing it with RubyMine. It rekindled my passion for programming with its thoughtful suggestions and magic-like refactoring options. Helped a lot to learn the language, and to convert the code, and so my thought process, to be more like how Ruby does things.

skizm 2y ago

I always wonder, how do sites like this get their list of books and book metadata? Do publishers have an API? What about Amazon?

atrus 2y ago
https://openlibrary.org/ https://openlibrary.org/ has a pretty good set of data and a decent API. You can mix and match too, since openlibraries covers kinda suck half the time.
- rafram 2y ago
  It's alright. I would use it for a tool where the most important part is having a more-or-less accurate author <-> title <-> ISBN mapping, but not for anything where I need precise bibliographic metadata.
bwb 2y ago
It is so bad!!! I use Nielsen's API, but the data is pretty rough, and you have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. Plus, the archaic industry standards around genre are hard to translate to what readers use - https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list. Ingrams and Bowker are the other big metadata providers. Ingram's is good but expensive, but the data faces the same issues.
- matwood 2y ago
  If you have an ISBN you can also check Worldcat, but at scale it's also probably not free. And if you're working with anything that might have an academic slant, Crossref can be useful. Book metadata is very challenging. Even the publishers of said books are pretty bad at delivering good metadata.
  - rafram 2y ago
    WorldCat doesn't have an official API for anyone but member libraries, scraping the site is not fun, and the quality of the data isn't great (it's essentially bulk-imported from member libraries' catalogs). National databases like the Library of Congress are significantly better - WorldCat is best used as a fallback for books that aren't included in the high-quality databases.

bwb 2y ago

Nadia does a great weekly dev log email that I enjoy as well. I highly recommend it -> https://buttondown.com/nodunayo https://buttondown.com/nodunayo

skrebbel 2y ago
I simply don't understand how she codes the app and writes the newsletter and does social media marketing for StoryGraph and flies all over the world to do keynotes at ruby conferences. I'm very impressed.
popcorncowboy 2y ago
@jmduke might wanna look at that

scotty79 2y ago

> the app that helps you to track your reading and choose which book to read next based on your mood and favorite topics and themes. I'd like to have that for games and music. Stores are mostly terrible at recomending anything. Steam does better than most but still far from good. And syncing recommendations with my mood is pretty much non-existent.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago

I tried using this but it was too onerous to import my existing list of books I’ve read (1000+). So I gave up after a bit. I usually don’t really have trouble finding books to read anyway. BTW my library (and probably yours too) has a free service where librarians will actually recommend books for you based on other books you liked or other criteria. I found those recommendations to be very good.

jack_riminton 2y ago
[flagged]

nonconstant 2y ago

Ruby on Rails community is so lucky to have Nadia

phildenhoff 2y ago

StoryGraph is an excellent tool and I continue to use it daily. I’ve also found Hardcover.app, which I quite like. It has an API and a slightly more refined UI, but it’s clearly more than one person working on it. Of course, if your focus is book clubs, Fable is likely the app for you

magnio 2y ago
I also use Hardcover.app, but the community there is tiny compared to Goodreads, with the only possible exception being fantasy readers.
- bwb 2y ago
  It will get there, its growing :)
- HardcoverJeff 2y ago
  GR claims 125 million+ users. StoryGraph now claims over 3 million. Hardcover currently has 20K - and yes, a lot of those are fantasy based readers. That just means it is easier for other readers to come in and potentially become the new largest user group. :)
ryangs 2y ago
Excited to hear about Hardcover! I like StoryGraph but the lack of API frustrates me - I want to be able to sync back to my general notes store (Obsidian). Hopefully Hardcover works better with that.
- northrup 2y ago
  Which is funny, StoryGraph is a Ruby on Rails app, exposing an API is a doable thing, which leads me to believe it is not a priority or a purposeful design decision.
  - phildenhoff 2y ago
    Yeah Hardcover seems to have a GraphQL API they use for their UI, which they expose. There’s not a lot of extra polish for third party devs — it feels like “this is the API we use, use it or not, things may break”. On the other hand, StoryGraph does server-side rendering and so it doesn’t have an API already. So adding one would be a decent amount of work

kwakubiney 2y ago

She talks about the story on this podcast episode[1] [1]https://open.spotify.com/episode/5AGrLoFgkYZ0KxLXBOjbwB https://open.spotify.com/episode/5AGrLoFgkYZ0KxLXBOjbwB

max_ 2y ago
Please don't use Spotify links as they are heavily geolocked
- swyx 2y ago
  agreed. also they rehost the mp3 so the creator doesnt get downloads. fuck spotify with a sharp stick.
adamgordonbell 2y ago
Alternate link to episode: https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/ https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

adamgordonbell 2y ago

Couple years ago I talked to Nadia. Crazy story. End of year is a big time for her as people setup reading goals for the year I think. My wife is now using it. I wouldn't have guessed a book site would be so seasonal. https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/ https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/

swyx 2y ago
love your authentic coverage adam. never change.
- adamgordonbell 2y ago
  Thanks Shawn!!

shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago

> the app that helps you to track your reading and choose which book to read next based on your mood and favorite topics and themes. If these requirements are constant then one woman dev team is sufficient until the requirements become thick enough to handle with 2 hands. And Pinterest reached 11 million users with 6 engineers, if interested https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-pinterest-scaled-to-11-million https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-pinterest-scaled-to-11...

dang 2y ago

[stub for offtopicness] [good grief]

Developerx 2y ago
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knighthack 2y ago
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cynicalsecurity 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- carlgreene 2y ago
  Well, your username certainly checks out. I am not sure how many solo projects you have embarked on, but providing a product to 2 million people is no small feat even for a team. Iterating to product market fit takes a lot and not many people are ever able to do it. Whether it is simple or not it's obviously providing value for the users that are using it, and is reliable enough because it keeps growing.
- bovermyer 2y ago
  I doubt "support" is all that necessary for an app of this type, as you yourself mentioned. Making something that millions of people use and appreciate? That's worthy of praise.
  - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
    I actually emailed the story graph with a support question and got a prompt response. I imagine you do have to provide it since you have paying customers.

pathless 2y ago

This is a crazy question, but what song is used in the intro of that video?

throwaway2037 2y ago
Try using the Google Chrome extension Shazaam to find the answer. It is pretty good.

vwkd 2y ago

Ah, that's one of those websites that accept a password of any length without error, truncate it, and show you a "wrong password" the next time you try to log in. Then you go through password reset roulette until you find a short enough password that works. Don't do this.

davedx 2y ago
Wait wait. Why would you truncate it after input unless... you're storing it in plaintext?
- zja 2y ago
  You truncate passwords to prevent DOS
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    Why not either show an error or do a client-side hash so there's a fixed length?
    - orblivion 2y ago
      Showing an error is probably the right thing. Client-side mitigations wouldn't prevent a DOS.
- orblivion 2y ago
  Maybe the KDF gets really slow with a super long input.

p3rls 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago
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habosa 2y ago

I just want to +1 the recommendation for StoryGraph. I used Goodreads for a decade but got frustrated at how little Amazon invested in it. Plus the review culture was getting toxic. Took me an hour or two to migrate all of my books over. StoryGraph isn’t necessarily better than Goodreads but it’s definitely just as good and it’s great to support software not owned by Amazon. They may own e-books but they don’t have to own reading.

phildenhoff 2y ago
I’m not sure what world other people live in but Amazon has absolutely nothing to do with my reading ebooks. Not how I buy them, not how I read them. I’ve been building an app specifically to help me manage the ebooks that I own
- habosa 2y ago
  > I’m not sure what world other people live in > I’ve been building an app Most people live in a world where they don’t build their own ebook software. I think you actually do know this.
  - phildenhoff 2y ago
    Yes, and I think you can imagine that the software I’m building is neither an e-reader nor is it a platform to purchase ebooks

jerodsanto 2y ago

Nadia is amazing! We had her on The Changelog last Feb and learned SO much by picking her brain. Here's the link, in case you finish watching her talk and want an even deeper-dive: https://changelog.com/podcast/577 https://changelog.com/podcast/577