March 4, 2025 • 46 mins
In this episode, Nadia Odunayo, CEO and founder of The StoryGraph, discusses her journey from investment banking to founding a disruptive book tracking technology company through bootstrapping instead of venture capital.
Nadia shares insights into her bootstrapping philosophy, avoiding venture capital, validating product ideas, and building a dedicated user community and building incredibly lean -- with over 4 million users, StoryGraph is only a team of 3!
Nadia provides valuable lessons on maintaining founder-product fit, the importance of customer feedback, and sustaining growth without external investments. Learn how her reflective practices and clear vision led to the successful scaling of The StoryGraph.
In this episode, we dive into:
00:00 The Journey to Bootstrapping
00:30 The StoryGraph Origin Story
01:22 Building the Reading App
05:39 Validating the Idea
10:46 Early Entrepreneurial Ventures
16:00 Forming the Right Partnerships
23:27 Weekly Reflections and Personal Checkpoints
24:24 Balancing Speed and Responsibilities
26:59 Navigating Fundraising Decisions
31:33 Defining and Measuring Success
36:37 Managing Viral Growth and Community Engagement
42:05 Reflecting on the Journey and Key Resources
🎧 Don’t miss this insightful conversation on building a bootstrapped technology company on your own terms.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I started moving more towards strapping.
(00:02):
I just wanted to build something, my own thing,
make it profitable, be my own boss,
not have to be accountable to anybody.
We have millions of books viewed every day.
Did you know that you wanted to build
a technology company in the future?
We're very staunchly now, like,
no, we're just bootstrapping, we don't need investment.
It's funny now, all the VCs that reach out.
Every week, yeah, now they're like,
(00:24):
oh, no, this is great, we wanna invest in this.
And I'm like, sorry.
Not now.
I remember saying to myself,
if this product doesn't work out,
I think I'm gonna continue this account
as like my personal books.
I felt a connection to the people
I was talking books with.
I wanted to talk about team.
You run a very tight ship, just three people.
And you were a sole founder in the very sense.
It was just you.
(00:45):
What made you feel like,
okay, I won't stop this side hustle?
We're super excited to have Nadia Odiayo join us.
Now, Nadia is a CEO and founder of The Storygraph,
which has disrupted the traditional book
tracking landscape by creating alternative means
by mainstream platforms such as Your Good Reads,
with a real focus on community.
We have over millions of books viewed every day.
(01:07):
I'm super excited to have this conversation today.
Thank you.
Welcome.
It's good to be here.
You started Storygraph as a side project.
How did you get there?
Did you know it would become this?
Tell us the backstory.
Wow, okay.
Where do I start?
So yes, I had a side project
that was a companion app to Goodreads.
(01:27):
So I used Goodreads from 2012.
And there was one thing that I wanted to do
in Goodreads that I couldn't do.
And that was being able to have
that I could either personally
or share with a select group of friends
and basically track my progress through those lists
on a pretty dashboard.
(01:48):
And with Goodreads,
you could either make your own private shelf,
or you would have these large collaborative lists.
And there wasn't that thing in between
that I was looking for.
So I started this side project
that was just a companion app to Goodreads.
So you would sign in using Goodreads.
It would pull up your shelves
and then you could add new lists and see your progress.
(02:08):
And essentially because of other work and things like that,
this project kind of never moved anywhere.
Until the beginning of 2019,
when I'd had a couple of founding partnerships
that didn't work out.
I had four years of runway
because from one of those partnerships,
we'd been building up a lot of money
(02:28):
in order to invest in our own products.
But I left that partnership.
And when I did,
I took 50% of the money we had in the bank
because I owned 50% of the company.
So that gave me five years of runway.
And then I spent a year working with another friend
that didn't work out.
So now I've got four years of runway.
So I'm thinking,
oh, the last founding partnerships that I've been in
haven't worked out.
I've got four years of money based on my current spending
(02:52):
before I would need to get a job.
So I don't need to get a job.
I don't really have any burning startup ideas right now,
but I know I've always been entrepreneurial.
I've always wanted to found something.
That's partly how I ended up learning to code as well.
So I said to myself,
well, you've got these side projects
that you've wanted to work on for years,
(03:13):
but you've never, you pick them up, you drop them.
And there were two main ones.
One was the reading one that I just told you about.
And the other one was a running one
where it auto-generated running routes
for you starting and ending where you were standing.
And the point of that, the idea for that came from,
I'd been running, one, I got bored of the route
(03:36):
around my house, the 5K route around my house.
But two, when I went traveling
and I was unfamiliar with the location,
I was like, oh, I wish I could have an app
that I said I want to run 5K or 10K.
And I would put it in
and it would generate like a safe route for me.
And you could even say like avoid traffic lights
(03:56):
or not too hilly, more flats, whatever it would be.
So I had these two ideas
that I'd been sitting on for a long time.
And I just said to myself,
just spend January of 2019, just working on both of them.
Just don't put any pressure on it, see where they go.
I was telling myself,
oh, I know I'd love to have like a startup
and build something, but don't worry about that for now.
(04:19):
Just work on your side projects and see what happens.
So on the first Monday of January, 2019,
which was the 3rd of January,
I sat down at my desk and I said,
okay, which one should I start with?
Because I can't work on both simultaneously.
And I said, I'm gonna start with the reading one
because I'm a lot more excited about that idea.
(04:40):
And I decided to go for the reading
because I was much more excited about it.
I was much more excited about books than running.
The running one was more like,
oh, I know if this existed already, great.
Whereas the reading one, I felt like,
oh, I've got to do this.
And so I just started working on that.
And just to fast forward to today,
I essentially have not stopped working on that idea
(05:03):
since that day.
But to go back to that first week in January,
I just had so much fun building this prototype
of this idea I had.
And from that week, I said to myself,
okay, it might not be this specific idea,
but I have to work in books.
It was the first time I felt really fulfilled while coding.
(05:23):
And so I showed some friends,
like I did custom interviews with that prototype I hooked up.
And I realized from those interviews that people were just like,
oh, it's cool, but there wasn't a real excitement
or a real need.
And so I said, okay, if you're going to try and see
if you can build, found a company within books,
(05:44):
then you have to put this idea that you've really got away
and just start talking to people,
do custom interviews without a product
and just find out, are there pain points?
Are there any issues?
So I started doing that and I did that for three months.
And essentially, after those three months,
I ended up building, as part of that time,
I ended up building a personal recommendation service
(06:08):
because the main pain point I ended up with
was people struggled to find
consistent high quality recommendations.
And then when I, the next phase of that was,
okay, now I actually need to build
a fully fledged reading tracker
that helps people choose their next book
because a lot of readers,
it's not that they don't know any books to read,
(06:29):
it's that they just don't know which one to go for next.
I would check in with people a week later and say,
have you read the book yet?
And they'd say, no.
I mean, it looked amazing,
but I'm gonna first read this book that's on my shelf,
then I got this, and so that's when I was like,
okay, I need to build something
that helps people make their decision
of what to choose next.
And just, we can maybe dig into this a bit more later,
(06:51):
but I never, for the longest time,
I never said I was building a Goodreads alternative
for two main reasons.
One was that it could become quite an intimidating thing,
right, like I'm just me alone at home.
For most of the first year, I was completely solo.
And to just say, yeah,
I'm gonna build a Goodreads alternative,
knowing several people tried before,
it was kind of like, why do you think that you can do that?
(07:13):
It sounds like you were anchored on the problem,
the excitement that you felt, the energy,
whilst you were building, it was some sort of signal to you.
But then you also went and validated the problem.
I'd love to talk about the transitions from,
I want to build this because it excites me,
but I need to validate that there's something here.
What were the insights you started seeing
(07:34):
that made you feel like, okay, I won't stop this side hustle.
Okay, so there are a few factors at play
in terms of me continuing to keep going in that first year.
And actually one of them was the founder product fit.
So it was the fact that I just felt this calling
to work in books in a way I had it,
because there were customer interview rounds
where it felt like there was nothing.
(07:54):
And the only two things that kept me going
were I have runway,
and so there's no rush for me to go get a job right now.
And I'm so excited about working in books.
So I will say that not all the research rounds
in that first year were, yes, I have something.
So that's what I want to start with.
So I feel like I was very lucky
with that founder product fit part.
(08:15):
And then in terms of the, like in the interviews,
why I felt, for first of all,
how did I identify that I didn't have something
with the first one?
I had read the Mum Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
And in that book-
That's a book that has come out of our podcast.
Has it?
Yeah.
And in it, he talks about how to spot
when people are just lying to you,
(08:36):
or the types of questions.
And I realized I'd fallen into that trap,
because I'd essentially been going like,
would you use this?
Does this look good?
And it's hard for someone to go, no,
because they kind of go like, yeah, sure.
But that's not a real test.
That's not real validation.
And so my number one fit,
to more directly answer your question, Maria,
in terms of balancing that passion and excitement
(08:59):
with actually properly validating is,
I had this runway, and the freedom that this runway gave me,
I was like, I can't imagine going back to a full-time job.
So that was my fear.
And I also had founded products before,
read a lot of startup books,
read and listened to a lot of founder stories.
All of that meant that I was very paperly aware
of the danger of building the wrong thing.
(09:21):
And also how you could end up building the wrong thing,
but not realizing it until later, like trying to force it.
So all of these things meant that as much as I was excited
about building something in books,
I knew the risk was high of me just building
my own passion project,
building something that wasn't quite right
and trying to force it.
And then in three years, four years,
needing to go back to a job
and having a product that coasted.
(09:42):
So that is what made me be like, no,
you have to validate this properly.
And I was prepared to walk away
if I didn't build something.
I said to myself, Nadia,
if you do these customer interviews
and nothing comes up in the book space that's worth building,
you have to be prepared to let this go.
And so I went into it being prepared to let it go.
So I would say less so than the actual
(10:02):
customer interview learnings,
which some bits of validation came later,
like when I got my first pain beta testers,
there were signs that, okay, I'm onto something here.
Or when people would tell me,
oh, I've deleted Goodreads or blah, blah, blah.
I did have signs in my interviews,
but in terms of high level,
I think it was more that I was prepared to walk away.
And so I was just really analyzing it
(10:24):
without like removing my personal emotions from it
and setting up. Got it.
So it sounds like the runway really helped
and you having time and also just enjoying it
to kind of sustain you enough
to get those initial points.
Cause trying to build a book, analytics or referral to,
at the time people were like,
but Goodreads exists, but there were gaps within Goodreads.
(10:46):
I wanted to ask a little bit about how you got,
did you have any entrepreneurial ventures before Storygraph?
I understand that you had a publication before Storygraph,
but I want to answer like,
were there any early signs that you would,
cause you're a coder, you're a builder naturally,
but were there any signs that you would
kind of lean towards the entrepreneurial path
(11:07):
as opposed to the traditional finance?
I'm laughing because you'll hear why I'm laughing
like very shortly.
Cause there's a bunch of stuff you said that is,
so for one, I was not a coder technically.
I was doing the investment banking track.
I had a job at Deutsche Bank.
I was going to be an investment banker.
So I was your typical finance consulting.
(11:29):
My degree was philosophy, politics and economics.
I was going into banking.
I only became,
and I didn't see myself as a coder and a builder
because I won a competition.
I won a couple of free places at coding boot camps and things.
It wasn't by choice that I invested to learn how to code.
It was more like, oh, when I won the competition
to go to boot camp, Makers Academy in London,
(11:51):
this will probably be smart for me
because when I am an entrepreneur,
like just using it as a kind of empty high level term,
when I'm an entrepreneur,
I'll be able to communicate with my developers.
They won't be able to pull the wool over my eyes
and trick me because I'm going to be,
I'm going to know how to code.
That's how I went into it.
So I didn't see myself as-
But at that point in time,
did you know that you wanted to build a technology company
(12:12):
at some point in the future?
So to go back, I always knew I wanted to start a company.
My mom had been very entrepreneurial.
She's the one that got me onto economics.
I didn't know about that subject
when I went into sixth form, I changed schools.
I did the international baccalaureate
so I could take six subjects
as opposed to your normal like four for A levels.
(12:33):
And so I, one of the subjects I chose was economics.
And the summer before I started studying it,
my mom got me this economics textbook.
And I always remember the first thing,
the first concept I learned from it
was the sunk cross fallacy.
And it used this idea of going to a buffet,
a buffet where you can eat.
And it was this idea of people feeling like,
(12:54):
oh, I need to keep eating to make the most of my money,
but the marginal returns are decreasing.
In fact, it becomes negative
and now you're uncomfortable and full.
And this just suck with me.
And I was like, this subject seems so cool.
So in sixth form, I also did Young Enterprise.
Oh yeah, I did that too.
Yeah, and I was the finance director of my company.
So I was always entrepreneurial,
(13:14):
but I had no technical skills.
And I remember when I, in my final year of university,
I met Alice Bentink of Entrepreneur First.
And we had coffee and she said,
yes, we run this thing called Entrepreneur First.
And she said, having an issue
with the women founders right now
and that a lot of them are coming
and they wanna start stores or things
(13:34):
that don't scale as quick as tech company scale.
And I would love for more women
to be wanting to start tech companies
because those are the ones that scale.
And I think I'd always been more interested
in tech companies anyway, even though I wasn't technical.
And Maria, you mentioned that I had this publication.
So I had a publication, a creative writing e-publication
called The Story Graph that I ran while I was at university.
(13:56):
And me and my friend who were running it,
we had to rely on a technical friend
who we originally paid for the first website,
but it was a very, very discounted rate.
And then he continued to help us.
But I felt the pain of relying on someone else
to make what were seemingly to me simple changes,
and they were simple changes to a website.
And so I just felt that pain, met Alice,
(14:18):
who was also like, you know, women, we want more women,
but women who want to start tech companies
always been entrepreneurial.
And that's kind of how I ended up.
I applied for entrepreneur first,
and when I got to the final round,
but I didn't make it, but I had checked the checkbox
that said we are going to be piloting
(14:38):
this coding course for women, do you wanna be considered?
And they gave me a place on that course.
And that was me starting to do tech,
like twice a week I would go to London
because I stayed working at my college in Oxford.
So twice a week I would go to London to learn how to code.
And it was when I started that,
that I realized the power of knowing how to code.
And then I applied for the competition,
the scholarship to Makers Academy,
(14:59):
and that's how I ended up transitioning into tech.
I love it.
And day after, or not long after I got the place
at the coding course, but also my college at Oxford
had emailed me to say, do you wanna stay behind in summer
and work on this website for 12 to 16 year olds
(15:21):
to get them starting to think early
about applying to the best universities in the country?
And they almost didn't email me because they said,
oh, Nady would be the ideal candidate,
but she's already got a job, hasn't she?
She's already covered.
And they almost didn't email me.
But I got place at that course, Code for the First Girls.
And then the next day I got the email and I just said,
I'm gonna spend, this is kind of scary for me
who's so like planned and whatever,
(15:43):
but I'm gonna turn down the Deutsche Bank job
and we're gonna spend three months doing this internship
and going twice a week to London
and we'll see what happens.
And it worked out.
It worked out.
And see what happened.
Yeah, it's so funny how that is such a nexus moment
in your life, but you probably couldn't have predicted it.
I wanna talk about team and co-founder partnerships.
(16:03):
You run a very tight ship,
just three people from what I understand.
And you were a solo founder in the very sense.
It was just you running this amazing growing product
and company for a while.
You mentioned that some partnerships didn't work out.
Are there any learnings from that?
By figuring out those first,
and that first team you work with
to getting your product from zero to one,
(16:24):
what are the learnings?
What works for you and your partner right now,
Rob on the team?
What have you learned?
I remember.
That's the question.
So the second partnership that didn't work out
was actually with the wife.
Yeah, with the wife of Rob.
So my friends were on, right?
And before that, it was a colleague from Pivotal.
And I remember a conversation
after the partnership with Soron fell apart.
(16:45):
I remember a conversation I had with a friend, Adam Cuppy,
at a conference.
We were in Australia.
This was beginning of 2019, actually.
So I was beginning of 2019, February.
And he said to me,
this was his theory on the difference
between romantic relationships and business relationships.
Because he said, people always say business relationships
(17:07):
are like a marriage, and I disagree.
This is what he said to me.
And he said, I think that with romantic relationships,
focus is on the partnership, the duo,
like staying tight across everything else.
And you're the unit that, whatever you're tackling,
whether it's a work thing, whether it's having kids,
whatever it is, it's like you are a unit together,
(17:27):
and then you approach your challenge
or whatever you're doing your day to day.
And he said, I think business partnerships are different
and they should be different.
I think that when you've got a business partnership
that works well, it's because there's this goal
that's over here on the other side,
and you both have a similar vision
of how you move that boulder, if that makes sense.
(17:50):
And so when he said this, I realized that
with the two partnerships that I had had before
that didn't work out, the focus was very much,
and it's in my mind, and I also think
with the other parties too, was very much on our partnership.
And we weren't necessarily aligned on a product
or a vision of a company, but we were like,
this is a really great partnership.
So when certain things came up,
(18:12):
and things were struggling, it was because
there wasn't a unified vision or a particular product
in how we were gonna build a company or grow,
it was more like, we're the partnership.
And I think with Rob, although we're super close friends now
and we have an excellent partnership
because of all the years of working together,
when it started, it was just like,
okay, this is a vision of a company,
and what type of company do you wanna build?
(18:33):
And we're aligned, we're aligned on
the type of company we wanna build,
we're aligned on our ambition levels,
we're aligned on so many things,
and that just means that the partnership just works.
The other thing is the division of responsibilities.
It's very, on my roles and responsibilities,
and he has a very limited realm,
which is mainly to do with the AI machine learning
(18:54):
and the infrastructure.
And obviously, he is a business partner,
so he helps me with some business admin
and decisions and things like that,
but ultimately, I have the main responsibility
in terms of business day-to-day,
then the app and web development and all that kind of stuff.
So those, I guess the two key learnings,
it's more important to be aligned
on how you wanna build a company,
(19:15):
the kind of company you wanna build,
and what the product is.
And then the other thing is just clear lines
of responsibility and just sticking to them
and trusting that the other person's gonna have
their side held.
Love that, and I guess practically speaking,
how do you assess that alignment in mission
and vision and so on?
Because very early on,
(19:35):
sometimes that can be quite difficult to assess.
So how do you go about doing that
for anyone that's listening?
Regular check-ins at different intervals.
So in the first, before Rob came on officially
as a co-founder, we had questions of like,
okay, how do you see, one of the first questions
he asked me before he was considering
quitting his job is, how do you see me?
(19:57):
Do you see me as a partner or do you see me as a CTO?
Or like, you know what I mean?
Where do you see me?
We had those initial conversations.
But then it was also like, okay,
what type of company do you wanna build?
Are you trying to build it really fast?
Are you trying to get investment?
I, at the time, was manually doing
personal recommendations for people.
And we spoke about, okay, if we scale this out,
do we like the idea of a company
(20:18):
where we're hiring dozens of people
to also do personal recommendations?
And we were both like, no way.
So we were both aligned on, okay,
we wanna do as much tech as possible.
So those kind of things.
And then, you know, the beginning of every year,
we'll do our new year reflections and like,
okay, what's the goals for this year?
Where do we wanna, what do we wanna,
I have this prompts that's like,
what do we wanna be saying on January 1st,
(20:41):
current year plus one?
But then, on the other end of the scale,
we have weekly retrospective,
which is something I picked up from working at Pivotal.
So every week, it's like, what went well this week?
What didn't go so well?
What do we wanna talk about?
And they can be anything from company things
to interpersonal things.
So if we feel like a certain type of communication
(21:04):
didn't go down well,
if there's a performance issue on the product
that's just not being fixed,
completes any type of saga or issue.
So I would say that's how we make sure
we're in sync all the time.
Because we have-
I love that.
We have a monthly team meeting.
There's no need for a weekly team one.
So we have a monthly team meeting,
which is a great way for the monthly goals.
(21:25):
Rob and I have a weekly meeting,
but we're talking every day anyway,
but we have that weekly structure still.
And then annually, both with the team,
and then also with just Rob,
we look at where we wanna go, where we're headed.
And that would be a great time.
If you see someone put something on the board
that's like, hi, 20 people,
I don't know what it would be.
That's when you would start to sense like,
I'm not down for that.
(21:45):
So let's talk about that.
But Rob's always put ideas.
That's the other thing.
Rob's always put ideas to me about certain things,
certain approaches.
And we'll talk about it.
And I think, again, that's a great way of seeing
where someone thinks the business is gonna go.
But also if I say, oh no, because of this, it's twofold.
One is, oh yes, I understand that reasoning.
(22:06):
And yes, we don't wanna build that type of company.
But it's also ultimately an idea.
You have the executive decision-making ability.
Even if I disagreed with you,
sometimes we have to make a call
and you would be the one to make that final call.
But like almost 100% of the time,
just through communicating clearly
and having patience with it,
we always end up on the same page anyway.
(22:26):
Even if we started from a different space.
I love that.
Yeah, I think that is so interesting
because you started the product, right?
Like you thought, and how long did you run it before?
So Rob joined, started helping out.
So in 11 months, Rob started helping out on the side,
just as a side project, just on a whim.
He noticed something in one of my newsletters
(22:47):
and he started helping out
with building a machine learning model in November of 2019.
And then he officially joined.
Yeah, he officially joined in February of 2019.
But he'd been helping.
Well, and building and scaling story graph
as a sole developer in the early days is no easy feat.
I'm just curious, like being both the sole developer
and this year requires wearing multiple hats.
(23:08):
How did you balance the technical aspects of the platform
with the strategic responsibilities of leading the company?
So even today, if someone asks me,
what's your main issue, pain point or for improvement
that you think you could address?
And I would say it's like spending my time wisely.
And that could mean I'll have weeks.
(23:29):
I have my own weekly metrics as well.
A great way of looking at,
okay, you did not spend enough time on development,
like actually product development.
Is there a way that you can eke out more time?
Is there something else you need to not be doing?
So I would say, again, similarly for me,
it's something I'm always asking every week
because I think it also changes based on the season,
based on what's happening.
(23:49):
But I think my weekly reflection points,
personal, these are just on my own, my personal reflection,
because my personal reflections don't just cover work,
they cover the rest of my life.
And so that's a great way of checking,
am I on the right track, am I balancing?
And if not, how do I balance it,
rebalance it for next week or next month?
Because I also do monthly retros for myself
and I do my annual.
(24:11):
And also my birthday is in September
and I feel like it's a perfect time
for that's three quarters into the year,
my birthday is end of September.
So I always have a, okay, we're now three quarters in,
we've got a quarter left, what has not been,
what do we need to switch up for the final quarter?
So I have all these checkpoints.
So that helps.
But I do think it's a trade-off ultimately still
(24:33):
on a bunch of levels.
One is it's a trade-off on speed
and the speed one goes both ways.
Because in some ways I can go really fast
because it's just me, I don't have to worry
about anyone else's code in the code base,
I don't have to check with anyone,
I don't need to review anybody else's code,
nobody needs to review my code, I can just put stuff out.
On the flip side, I am still just one person.
(24:54):
So I'm only ever doing one thing at a time.
And so there are features like on our roadmap
that have been there for years that I wanna do
but haven't done yet.
Having said that, and some of you,
you might have, either of you might have experienced
with this either as a user or an investor.
Even with companies with dozens of employees,
there are things that customers ask for for years
and the company doesn't get round to it till years later.
(25:16):
So I have to always remind myself of that.
But there's also a trade-off of like,
people think, oh, just hire someone.
Then once you're paying someone like a decent salary,
now you're gonna be worrying about,
okay, now I've got someone else's salary
that I'm responsible for.
And some money in the bank that can look like,
oh, that's a decent amount of money,
it's gone like that once you have one hire.
(25:38):
And so there's another stress now that's on my head
of like, not only is it everything else,
now I've got someone else's salary,
now you have more pastoral and managerial roles as well.
And there's that trade-off.
Like I said, when you have more people,
they have the whole pizza box thing or whatever it is.
It's just the extra connections,
the extra things you now need to deal with.
(25:58):
And so I just choose, even though I have to wear many hats
and it's not necessarily optimized,
I'm not the best at the social media,
I'm not the best developer,
I'm not the fastest developer, whatever.
It's working for us.
Yeah.
I think ultimately it's leading to our success.
And I think, so I'll take the social media
(26:21):
as a great example.
Yes, I'm not a social media expert.
I just do what comes naturally
and I post about the product.
And on Instagram, we've grown to 115,000 users,
nothing paid, nothing sponsored,
just organic me showing up every day and just talking.
And it's not just talking about the product,
I am a reader.
And so I really connected to our users being a reader
(26:42):
because I am a reader with people about,
there are a bunch of posts that's just me saying,
I'm reading this book, this is what I think.
And then people connect with me on that level.
So yeah, it's a lot of different hats.
Yeah, showing up as yourself.
Yeah, I can imagine that that actually resonates
on like a social perspective.
I was curious about fundraising.
From what I understand, you didn't go the VC route.
(27:04):
How did you think about fundraising?
My high level journey in terms of how I've seen VC is,
when I was younger, like high school and university,
I would follow things like TechCrunch,
all those kinds of stuff, deal book.
And I would see these rounds of funding and think,
wow, those people made it, that's so cool.
(27:26):
I wanna have that.
Then you get older and you realize, no,
raising a big does not mean you made it, far from it.
Now the real work starts and you're gonna figure out
how you're gonna get your investors that money back.
And I also heard a bunch of like scary stories
of like, oh, the board fired the founder or all this stuff.
And I'm thinking, wow, that is wild.
Like you could start a company and then you get investors.
(27:49):
And then they say, and I understand that obviously
in some of these cases where the founder's been removed,
it's because they're not actively helping the company.
I understand it's not all just investors going rogue
and because an investor wants their money back.
So they wouldn't get rid of a founder
if they didn't feel like they weren't the best person
to run the company.
But still, I had all these things in my mind.
And I remember thinking, I started moving more
(28:10):
towards the bootstrapping.
Like I just wanna be able to build something, my own thing,
make it profitable, be my own boss,
not have to be accountable to anybody.
And there was a period of my life
where when I was getting into tech
and I was in my first tech job,
before I ended up with the partnerships that I did,
where I genuinely thought, you know what,
I'm gonna learn how to write Objective-C and then Swift.
(28:32):
And I'm just gonna be that developer
that has a few iOS apps that just do really well
and brings in what would be a really good dev salary
and that's gonna be my life and I'll be my own boss.
That was my idea originally.
But then when I started Storigraph, as I explained,
as it was growing, I was like, I cannot scale this manually
because every book needs some notes and pays
(28:54):
and everyone needs a recommendation.
So then I started thinking,
I'm gonna have to get investment
because I don't have any co-founders around me.
There's no one around me who has these skills.
I'm gonna need some machine learning capabilities.
I'm gonna need some other types of expertise
that I don't have and that it would just be a bit mad
for me to try and learn.
And so I was thinking,
oh, I'm gonna be forced to get VC investment.
(29:16):
And when I went to a couple of meetups and stuff,
I kept hearing the same thing.
This is not investable.
There's Goodreads.
Whatever you do, Goodreads is gonna copy you.
It's just not investable.
So I just was like, well, I'm just gonna keep going.
The funny thing is, obviously I was very lucky.
Rob came along.
There's a funny story about that too
(29:36):
because I hadn't, I was working with his wife before.
We didn't speak for a while.
We had reconnected.
But the reason why Rob even got in touch
was because he saw a newsletter that I posted on Twitter.
So that's a whole other story
of how he ended up working with me.
But, so he was like cold.
Kind of, it was like a, hey, long time.
Yeah, long time no speak because originally when I wasn't,
(29:59):
when Soran and I weren't speaking for a little bit,
I wasn't going to be speaking to her husband.
So we kind of, we had had a friendship,
but obviously my main friendship was with Soran.
So when we weren't speaking for a little bit
after the partnership didn't work out,
I also stopped speaking to Rob
because I just didn't feel it was appropriate.
So then when we had reconnected,
I didn't then immediately rush back texting Rob.
(30:20):
What happened was now we're on Twitter.
Like he's seen me on Twitter again
and all this kind of stuff.
And so he saw my old newsletters.
And because I had posted all the ones up until that point,
he went back and read them all.
And the thing that he originally messaged me on
was not about the help for the machine learning,
which he'd just been learning on the side.
It was because I had computer issues
(30:40):
and he was telling me about, as opposed to time machine,
being able to make a carbon copy clone backup,
where then you can attempt it to another computer
and still be able to do your work.
So that's how the conversation started.
We were texting, we were like, let's just jump on a call.
And during that call, he said, by the way,
I've also noticed that you were struggling with this.
And he was even hesitant to offer his help
because he was like, I'm literally just learning this on the side.
(31:02):
What's up, guys?
So I don't know if I'm going to do anything good,
but maybe I can help.
So that was that whole thing.
But anyway, because Rob came along and was amazing
and fit all the needs I had,
I never needed to go back to that investment thing.
And we're very staunchly now, like, no, we're just bootstrapping.
We don't need investment.
And it's funny now, all the VCs that reach out every week.
(31:25):
They're like, oh, no, this is great.
We want to invest in this.
And I'm like, hmm, sorry.
Not that.
I love that.
Now, one of the things you mentioned earlier,
which I thought was super interesting,
was just around how reflective you are personally,
but also with your team.
So I'm just curious, like, how has your definition of success
evolved since the platform's exception?
(31:47):
And like, what are some of the key metrics,
milestones that you currently focus on?
And how have they shifted over time?
That's a good question.
How?
Because I'm pausing,
because there are many different things at play.
But also I know personally, I am very ambitious and hard at it.
(32:11):
In that, people will look at what I've got now and go,
you're successful.
And I'm thinking, no, I'm not.
I know I am, obviously.
Like, there are, I mean, going a book's bootstrapping
and then you're bootstrapped.
This is like your standard freemium kind of thing
that would need investment to get off the ground.
And the fact that the money that I put in to bootstrap it
(32:34):
and then Rob eventually put in,
we've got that money back and we've got salaries,
good salaries.
Like, that is a great mark of success.
So there was a period of time where it was just like,
is anyone using this?
So we would be looking at just user numbers
and retention, that kind of stuff.
And then it became, once we started spending
thousands of dollars a month just keeping the app running,
it was like, well, this isn't a sustainable business.
(32:54):
So the mark of success became,
how do we get to sustainability and profitability?
And now we're there in terms of this current set up,
but it's kind of like, well, we see this as our life's work.
So how do we set it up to get to that next level
of sustainability and profitability?
For example, we're doing well,
but if we did hire a developer now,
(33:16):
then suddenly what looks like doing well is now like,
oh, we need to make more money.
So I think around focusing on like that long-term longevity
and also cementing our spot as the main good news alternative,
because I would say right now we are,
but there are other competitors out there
and there are things that we fall down on.
Another metric for me is I really wanna make an app
(33:39):
where the UX, UI and performance is stellar.
And so a good metric is how often are people complaining
either in support tickets or social media
about things that fall under those branches.
So a good sign of, oh, we're doing well on this
is a reduction in tickets,
asking question about how to do something or find something.
And also people going, story graph is ugly or whatever.
(34:01):
And so that is a more anecdotal,
I mean, I guess I could count and tally per week,
but roughly I'm keeping an eye on that.
And that's something I'm really focusing on a lot now.
And then in terms of that's kind of product wise,
those are the main kinds of things,
the profitability, sustainability,
and also the user experience, like just being known.
(34:22):
I just want us to be recognized as this app is a joy to use,
it's a delight to use and looks great, it's fast.
Those kind of metrics, those kinds of statements.
And then like, for example, we released a new section
for book reviews on the book page
and the stories that people are posting,
this is so beautiful, I could cry, this is gorgeous.
(34:43):
And I kept on sending them to the team
and reposting some of them saying,
this is what I want people to see,
the whole app, not just this section.
We're on the right track.
And then in terms of the team,
I make sure that everyone's happy,
that they're enjoying what they're doing.
Yeah, and we're very,
as much as I'm a very ambitious, hardworking person,
(35:04):
I don't do deadlines, I don't like giving deadlines
to people, it's kind of like you do them when you do them.
And if there is a deadline externally,
like for example, we have giveaways,
the giveaways are starting on the 19th.
So before the 19th, we need to do this, fine.
But in general, I don't like deadlines
for a bunch of reasons.
I just wanna make sure that people are happy,
people are enjoying what they're doing,
they don't feel like unnecessary pressure.
(35:24):
And I guess this is mainly with Abby who works with us.
And now we've got a new designer, Yeji,
who's a student in California, who's doing our design
and helping us get to that vision that I have.
And it's just been interesting,
figuring out with her, okay, I didn't give you a deadline,
but it's now been four weeks and I haven't heard anything.
So just having that conversation of like figuring out.
(35:45):
And by the way, this is a great example of how
just one extra person and there's a lot of extra
just kind of communication that now needs to happen
that is me not doing development or anything else,
which is good, but it's just that thing where people are,
just like more people, it's not as straightforward.
But anyway.
Changes the fabric of the business as you go
and the things you have to think about.
(36:06):
But I think a key insight there that I'd like to flag
is that success looks many different ways for a start.
For you, you designed what that looks like for you.
In your conversation and in measuring success,
not once did you mention amounts raised.
You talked about sustainability,
you talked about your team, I think what they do.
You talked about the fact that people,
customers or users who use a product love it.
So I think it depends on whatever business,
(36:27):
but making sure that you set what is success to you
because you might need to measure success differently.
I know that you experienced quite substantial growth
over a period of time.
You went from like 1,000 users to 20,000.
Speaking specifically about consumer companies,
when you experienced that sort of viral growth,
how did you manage that sudden influx?
(36:48):
What strategies did you implement to support this growth?
And then looking ahead, how have you consistently
been able to engage that community?
So just to be clear, that 1,000 to 20,000 users
was across three days.
So it was 16th of June to 18th of June,
something like that.
So it was one of my hardest times in the company.
(37:08):
And it was probably the closest I ever came
to thinking this company is gonna die and I can't do this.
The closest I ever came to it because I would like to stress
that I didn't ever say I can't do this
because I don't believe in that.
So I just had to take a deep breath in terms of just mentally
before even digging into the product.
I just had to say to myself,
Nadia, you are not the first person to have an app
(37:30):
that's exploded and you're not the first person.
All the issues that are meaning the app
is not working right now, someone else has had them before.
So that kind of gave me the confidence to be like,
you will find the other because this is not new.
And I had a network of people online
that I knew could help me if needed.
So that was the one stage.
And then essentially, each time we run into performance issues
(37:50):
or bottlenecks or things like that,
we first have to identify the problem
and then we need to re-architect or rewrite.
And it's just a learning process of doing that.
And so there are times when the app has been down
or slow for periods of time,
especially in the beginning of the year.
And we just have to figure out, okay, what's the problem now?
Because you sort one bottleneck
and then you figure out the next one.
And so that's just been continually doing that.
(38:12):
And as you do that, one, the bottlenecks decrease,
as in because you've sorted out more,
but two, the domain of what you're aware of,
of what could be the issue increases.
Do you identify it faster, fix it faster,
or maybe the fix is easier
because you've already done the main fix
and now you just need to increment a number
or increment something.
(38:32):
And so that just means you're down for longer
when you do have issues.
So that's the high level.
And in terms of engaging the community,
this is another thing when we spoke about my many hats,
I run our Instagram, Twitter and threads.
To this day.
Rob does TikTok, to this day, just me.
And so there's, again, it's a lot of time,
but it's so powerful in the narrative of the company.
(38:53):
It's so powerful, especially for people
who've been around for years,
who are like, the founder is here, she talks with us,
she's a reader, this app is built for readers, by readers.
They feel a connection and they feel brought in.
Because it's genuine.
It's me being me, it's genuine.
And I remember even when the product, pre-product,
when I was doing just community building,
(39:14):
and then in the early stages of the product,
I remember saying to myself,
if this product doesn't work out,
I think I'm gonna continue this account
as like my personal books.
Because I felt a connection
to the people I was talking books with.
So I would say just continually buying them in,
and then it has compounding effects.
So I do polls a lot of the time.
I do Instagram stories, talking to people saying,
this is what I'm working on, this is what happened.
(39:35):
And you see over time, it buys us trust,
it buys us time, so whenever I'm struggling
or something hasn't come out for a while,
everyone's like, oh, I know they're working hard,
I know there must be a reason.
Or people don't even notice.
Sometimes I'm hard on myself,
because I'll say, wow, this thing took six weeks,
this thing took seven weeks.
And then I have to remind myself,
or somebody else reminds me,
that Goodreads never changes.
(39:57):
And why I'm stressing myself out,
just me being like, I haven't delivered anything
in like weeks.
And I'm like, Goodreads hasn't changed really much
in the eight, wait, 2012 to 2020, that was eight years.
It's now like 13 years.
So I'm still stuck on that eight years,
because that's the eight years I used it.
And so, yeah, it's just continually showing up
for the community every day and being transparent
(40:18):
and being upfront, and that builds that relationship.
And then as the relationship builds,
it's easier to sustain,
because I feel like I just, I'm in the habit of it.
I love that.
And I think it's very clear,
when it comes to communities,
people really do engage with people, right?
And so be in the face of it,
and people engaging directly with you is so powerful.
And one of the reasons why you seem to really resonate
(40:39):
with your community.
Yeah, just two quick points on that.
One is, it makes me chuckle every time I see someone post
about our Instagram account, and they'll say,
it's a great account.
And sometimes the founder comes on.
I find that so funny, because it's always me.
So that's funny.
The other thing is interesting,
is sometimes I'll get some rude messages,
(41:01):
and then I'll reply very politely,
and ask the question or whatever.
And the number of people who go,
oh, I didn't think anyone would reply to me.
And it just goes to show that they have this anger,
which cannot, the anger that they feel,
where are books at?
I know it has to be coming from somewhere else.
Because even if we were frustrating you,
because something didn't work,
the anger of which you sent this message,
(41:22):
there must be something else happening.
It can't solely be, to me,
it can't solely be the book that annoyed you.
But then, clearly, people just want to be heard.
Because when they get responses, they sent it,
because they probably just thought,
I'm just getting out, and it's a company,
so they're probably not going to reply anyway.
Now, I don't know.
And then like, oh, wow.
And then the final one on that is,
(41:42):
when people assume that I'm only
a social media manager person.
So they'll say, can you pass this on?
Or they'll say, wow, that worked.
Or would you know this?
And I'm like, yes, I do know,
because I'm the developer.
And then I'm like, what?
That's wild.
That's wild.
So it's very fun, and it definitely helps
in terms of building that rapport
and that brand trust and loyalty.
(42:05):
Amazing.
Thank you so much.
I think we tend to go into reflective posters
for the end of the episode.
And we just want to go back in time
to try to understand what you would tell yourself
heading out into this journey.
Everyone's journey is different, we know.
But sometimes, maybe the first principles
from those experiences resonate to someone
(42:25):
listening or watching.
And then also any resources
that you've particularly found helpful over time
that has really moved the needle for you as a founder,
helped you scale, helped you think of things differently.
I think I was very lucky to the parents I was born with,
that they, despite their hardships and struggles,
they instilled in me this can-do-anything attitude.
(42:46):
And then I had some educators that continued that,
particularly my economics teacher, Mr. Brewer.
And then Rob is very much that speed
of you can do anything.
His mom always used to tell him that,
and he always told me that as well.
So I think I would really tell myself,
Nady, you can do anything, you can do this.
(43:06):
And just keep going.
And remember, because I am very like,
I've got to do it myself, I don't want to...
In the earliest days of String Off,
sometimes even with struggles,
where maybe there would be a friend
who would be able to answer the question like that,
I would feel like, this is my company, this is my business.
It says that these people have their own jobs
and their own lives.
I've got to figure this out, you know what I mean?
(43:27):
But then it's realizing that, you know,
you can lean on your network, you can't ask people for help.
And it doesn't mean they did the work or it doesn't...
Friends, you know, I feel like I've continually put
out good energy, so keep doing that.
And I would say, don't be shy.
I would tell myself, don't be shy to reach out
when you need a little bit of help.
(43:48):
Those are the main things, but this main,
like you keep believing that you can do it
because you can and you will.
And then in terms of resources,
I think it could be books, it could be podcasts,
it could be people.
I love how I built this.
Just hearing the variety of stories
is amazing and inspiring.
So I love how I built this podcast, that's a great one.
(44:10):
I was thinking that this is more high level
just making you a better person,
but it applies to being a better founder,
a better team member.
And that's the book, Nonviolent Communication
by Marshall B Rosenberg.
It just shows you a way to be able to express things
that you're not happy with in a way that's productive
and moves the conversation forward
without the other person being defensive.
A lot of how we communicate with people is violent.
(44:34):
And you might be surprised when you're reading this book
and you see the examples of what counts as violent,
it could be implicit assumptions about something.
So for example, saying, you know, I'm disappointed
as opposed to I'm sad, saying I'm disappointed is violent
because I am expressing the disappointment on you.
And other person's natural inclination
is to feel hurt and attack.
I disappointed you.
(44:54):
Whereas if you say, I'm sad, first of all,
that's just an internal feeling.
And then you explain why you're sad.
So it just breaks down this great way of communicating,
which I think has put me in great stead,
just for all of my relationships, but especially in a team.
And I think founders can be more perceptible maybe
to poor communication,
especially in high stress situations.
So I would recommend Marshall B Rosenberg's
(45:18):
Nonviolent Communication.
That's one that I've added to my list.
Also, I am someone who, I love reading
narrative nonfiction that's filled with drama
because my life is so drama free.
So I would just for fun recommend Bad Blood by John Cameru
and Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton,
for examples of like, you know, avoid these things,
(45:39):
but have a fun startup story.
It's interesting.
So yeah, those are just fun startup books.
Amazing. Okay.
Thank you so much.
It was so lovely to speak with you Nadia.
Wow, Yvonne Maria, this is a real pleasure.
Time for us to say goodbye.
Thank you.
Leave a review.
Tell us what you think of this episode
on all of our platforms at the Startup Leap pod.
(46:00):
Do you have a question?
Ask us and we'll ask our guests.
Go to the startupleap.io.
See you next time.
See you next time.
I started moving more towards strapping.
(00:02):
I just wanted to build something, my own thing,
make it profitable, be my own boss,
not have to be accountable to anybody.
We have millions of books viewed every day.
Did you know that you wanted to build
a technology company in the future?
We're very staunchly now, like,
no, we're just bootstrapping, we don't need investment.
It's funny now, all the VCs that reach out.
Every week, yeah, now they're like,
(00:24):
oh, no, this is great, we wanna invest in this.
And I'm like, sorry.
Not now.
I remember saying to myself,
if this product doesn't work out,
I think I'm gonna continue this account
as like my personal books.
I felt a connection to the people
I was talking books with.
I wanted to talk about team.
You run a very tight ship, just three people.
And you were a sole founder in the very sense.
It was just you.
(00:45):
What made you feel like,
okay, I won't stop this side hustle?
We're super excited to have Nadia Odiayo join us.
Now, Nadia is a CEO and founder of The Storygraph,
which has disrupted the traditional book
tracking landscape by creating alternative means
by mainstream platforms such as Your Good Reads,
with a real focus on community.
We have over millions of books viewed every day.
(01:07):
I'm super excited to have this conversation today.
Thank you.
Welcome.
It's good to be here.
You started Storygraph as a side project.
How did you get there?
Did you know it would become this?
Tell us the backstory.
Wow, okay.
Where do I start?
So yes, I had a side project
that was a companion app to Goodreads.
(01:27):
So I used Goodreads from 2012.
And there was one thing that I wanted to do
in Goodreads that I couldn't do.
And that was being able to have
that I could either personally
or share with a select group of friends
and basically track my progress through those lists
on a pretty dashboard.
(01:48):
And with Goodreads,
you could either make your own private shelf,
or you would have these large collaborative lists.
And there wasn't that thing in between
that I was looking for.
So I started this side project
that was just a companion app to Goodreads.
So you would sign in using Goodreads.
It would pull up your shelves
and then you could add new lists and see your progress.
(02:08):
And essentially because of other work and things like that,
this project kind of never moved anywhere.
Until the beginning of 2019,
when I'd had a couple of founding partnerships
that didn't work out.
I had four years of runway
because from one of those partnerships,
we'd been building up a lot of money
(02:28):
in order to invest in our own products.
But I left that partnership.
And when I did,
I took 50% of the money we had in the bank
because I owned 50% of the company.
So that gave me five years of runway.
And then I spent a year working with another friend
that didn't work out.
So now I've got four years of runway.
So I'm thinking,
oh, the last founding partnerships that I've been in
haven't worked out.
I've got four years of money based on my current spending
(02:52):
before I would need to get a job.
So I don't need to get a job.
I don't really have any burning startup ideas right now,
but I know I've always been entrepreneurial.
I've always wanted to found something.
That's partly how I ended up learning to code as well.
So I said to myself,
well, you've got these side projects
that you've wanted to work on for years,
(03:13):
but you've never, you pick them up, you drop them.
And there were two main ones.
One was the reading one that I just told you about.
And the other one was a running one
where it auto-generated running routes
for you starting and ending where you were standing.
And the point of that, the idea for that came from,
I'd been running, one, I got bored of the route
(03:36):
around my house, the 5K route around my house.
But two, when I went traveling
and I was unfamiliar with the location,
I was like, oh, I wish I could have an app
that I said I want to run 5K or 10K.
And I would put it in
and it would generate like a safe route for me.
And you could even say like avoid traffic lights
(03:56):
or not too hilly, more flats, whatever it would be.
So I had these two ideas
that I'd been sitting on for a long time.
And I just said to myself,
just spend January of 2019, just working on both of them.
Just don't put any pressure on it, see where they go.
I was telling myself,
oh, I know I'd love to have like a startup
and build something, but don't worry about that for now.
(04:19):
Just work on your side projects and see what happens.
So on the first Monday of January, 2019,
which was the 3rd of January,
I sat down at my desk and I said,
okay, which one should I start with?
Because I can't work on both simultaneously.
And I said, I'm gonna start with the reading one
because I'm a lot more excited about that idea.
(04:40):
And I decided to go for the reading
because I was much more excited about it.
I was much more excited about books than running.
The running one was more like,
oh, I know if this existed already, great.
Whereas the reading one, I felt like,
oh, I've got to do this.
And so I just started working on that.
And just to fast forward to today,
I essentially have not stopped working on that idea
(05:03):
since that day.
But to go back to that first week in January,
I just had so much fun building this prototype
of this idea I had.
And from that week, I said to myself,
okay, it might not be this specific idea,
but I have to work in books.
It was the first time I felt really fulfilled while coding.
(05:23):
And so I showed some friends,
like I did custom interviews with that prototype I hooked up.
And I realized from those interviews that people were just like,
oh, it's cool, but there wasn't a real excitement
or a real need.
And so I said, okay, if you're going to try and see
if you can build, found a company within books,
(05:44):
then you have to put this idea that you've really got away
and just start talking to people,
do custom interviews without a product
and just find out, are there pain points?
Are there any issues?
So I started doing that and I did that for three months.
And essentially, after those three months,
I ended up building, as part of that time,
I ended up building a personal recommendation service
(06:08):
because the main pain point I ended up with
was people struggled to find
consistent high quality recommendations.
And then when I, the next phase of that was,
okay, now I actually need to build
a fully fledged reading tracker
that helps people choose their next book
because a lot of readers,
it's not that they don't know any books to read,
(06:29):
it's that they just don't know which one to go for next.
I would check in with people a week later and say,
have you read the book yet?
And they'd say, no.
I mean, it looked amazing,
but I'm gonna first read this book that's on my shelf,
then I got this, and so that's when I was like,
okay, I need to build something
that helps people make their decision
of what to choose next.
And just, we can maybe dig into this a bit more later,
(06:51):
but I never, for the longest time,
I never said I was building a Goodreads alternative
for two main reasons.
One was that it could become quite an intimidating thing,
right, like I'm just me alone at home.
For most of the first year, I was completely solo.
And to just say, yeah,
I'm gonna build a Goodreads alternative,
knowing several people tried before,
it was kind of like, why do you think that you can do that?
(07:13):
It sounds like you were anchored on the problem,
the excitement that you felt, the energy,
whilst you were building, it was some sort of signal to you.
But then you also went and validated the problem.
I'd love to talk about the transitions from,
I want to build this because it excites me,
but I need to validate that there's something here.
What were the insights you started seeing
(07:34):
that made you feel like, okay, I won't stop this side hustle.
Okay, so there are a few factors at play
in terms of me continuing to keep going in that first year.
And actually one of them was the founder product fit.
So it was the fact that I just felt this calling
to work in books in a way I had it,
because there were customer interview rounds
where it felt like there was nothing.
(07:54):
And the only two things that kept me going
were I have runway,
and so there's no rush for me to go get a job right now.
And I'm so excited about working in books.
So I will say that not all the research rounds
in that first year were, yes, I have something.
So that's what I want to start with.
So I feel like I was very lucky
with that founder product fit part.
(08:15):
And then in terms of the, like in the interviews,
why I felt, for first of all,
how did I identify that I didn't have something
with the first one?
I had read the Mum Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
And in that book-
That's a book that has come out of our podcast.
Has it?
Yeah.
And in it, he talks about how to spot
when people are just lying to you,
(08:36):
or the types of questions.
And I realized I'd fallen into that trap,
because I'd essentially been going like,
would you use this?
Does this look good?
And it's hard for someone to go, no,
because they kind of go like, yeah, sure.
But that's not a real test.
That's not real validation.
And so my number one fit,
to more directly answer your question, Maria,
in terms of balancing that passion and excitement
(08:59):
with actually properly validating is,
I had this runway, and the freedom that this runway gave me,
I was like, I can't imagine going back to a full-time job.
So that was my fear.
And I also had founded products before,
read a lot of startup books,
read and listened to a lot of founder stories.
All of that meant that I was very paperly aware
of the danger of building the wrong thing.
(09:21):
And also how you could end up building the wrong thing,
but not realizing it until later, like trying to force it.
So all of these things meant that as much as I was excited
about building something in books,
I knew the risk was high of me just building
my own passion project,
building something that wasn't quite right
and trying to force it.
And then in three years, four years,
needing to go back to a job
and having a product that coasted.
(09:42):
So that is what made me be like, no,
you have to validate this properly.
And I was prepared to walk away
if I didn't build something.
I said to myself, Nadia,
if you do these customer interviews
and nothing comes up in the book space that's worth building,
you have to be prepared to let this go.
And so I went into it being prepared to let it go.
So I would say less so than the actual
(10:02):
customer interview learnings,
which some bits of validation came later,
like when I got my first pain beta testers,
there were signs that, okay, I'm onto something here.
Or when people would tell me,
oh, I've deleted Goodreads or blah, blah, blah.
I did have signs in my interviews,
but in terms of high level,
I think it was more that I was prepared to walk away.
And so I was just really analyzing it
(10:24):
without like removing my personal emotions from it
and setting up. Got it.
So it sounds like the runway really helped
and you having time and also just enjoying it
to kind of sustain you enough
to get those initial points.
Cause trying to build a book, analytics or referral to,
at the time people were like,
but Goodreads exists, but there were gaps within Goodreads.
(10:46):
I wanted to ask a little bit about how you got,
did you have any entrepreneurial ventures before Storygraph?
I understand that you had a publication before Storygraph,
but I want to answer like,
were there any early signs that you would,
cause you're a coder, you're a builder naturally,
but were there any signs that you would
kind of lean towards the entrepreneurial path
(11:07):
as opposed to the traditional finance?
I'm laughing because you'll hear why I'm laughing
like very shortly.
Cause there's a bunch of stuff you said that is,
so for one, I was not a coder technically.
I was doing the investment banking track.
I had a job at Deutsche Bank.
I was going to be an investment banker.
So I was your typical finance consulting.
(11:29):
My degree was philosophy, politics and economics.
I was going into banking.
I only became,
and I didn't see myself as a coder and a builder
because I won a competition.
I won a couple of free places at coding boot camps and things.
It wasn't by choice that I invested to learn how to code.
It was more like, oh, when I won the competition
to go to boot camp, Makers Academy in London,
(11:51):
this will probably be smart for me
because when I am an entrepreneur,
like just using it as a kind of empty high level term,
when I'm an entrepreneur,
I'll be able to communicate with my developers.
They won't be able to pull the wool over my eyes
and trick me because I'm going to be,
I'm going to know how to code.
That's how I went into it.
So I didn't see myself as-
But at that point in time,
did you know that you wanted to build a technology company
(12:12):
at some point in the future?
So to go back, I always knew I wanted to start a company.
My mom had been very entrepreneurial.
She's the one that got me onto economics.
I didn't know about that subject
when I went into sixth form, I changed schools.
I did the international baccalaureate
so I could take six subjects
as opposed to your normal like four for A levels.
(12:33):
And so I, one of the subjects I chose was economics.
And the summer before I started studying it,
my mom got me this economics textbook.
And I always remember the first thing,
the first concept I learned from it
was the sunk cross fallacy.
And it used this idea of going to a buffet,
a buffet where you can eat.
And it was this idea of people feeling like,
(12:54):
oh, I need to keep eating to make the most of my money,
but the marginal returns are decreasing.
In fact, it becomes negative
and now you're uncomfortable and full.
And this just suck with me.
And I was like, this subject seems so cool.
So in sixth form, I also did Young Enterprise.
Oh yeah, I did that too.
Yeah, and I was the finance director of my company.
So I was always entrepreneurial,
(13:14):
but I had no technical skills.
And I remember when I, in my final year of university,
I met Alice Bentink of Entrepreneur First.
And we had coffee and she said,
yes, we run this thing called Entrepreneur First.
And she said, having an issue
with the women founders right now
and that a lot of them are coming
and they wanna start stores or things
(13:34):
that don't scale as quick as tech company scale.
And I would love for more women
to be wanting to start tech companies
because those are the ones that scale.
And I think I'd always been more interested
in tech companies anyway, even though I wasn't technical.
And Maria, you mentioned that I had this publication.
So I had a publication, a creative writing e-publication
called The Story Graph that I ran while I was at university.
(13:56):
And me and my friend who were running it,
we had to rely on a technical friend
who we originally paid for the first website,
but it was a very, very discounted rate.
And then he continued to help us.
But I felt the pain of relying on someone else
to make what were seemingly to me simple changes,
and they were simple changes to a website.
And so I just felt that pain, met Alice,
(14:18):
who was also like, you know, women, we want more women,
but women who want to start tech companies
always been entrepreneurial.
And that's kind of how I ended up.
I applied for entrepreneur first,
and when I got to the final round,
but I didn't make it, but I had checked the checkbox
that said we are going to be piloting
(14:38):
this coding course for women, do you wanna be considered?
And they gave me a place on that course.
And that was me starting to do tech,
like twice a week I would go to London
because I stayed working at my college in Oxford.
So twice a week I would go to London to learn how to code.
And it was when I started that,
that I realized the power of knowing how to code.
And then I applied for the competition,
the scholarship to Makers Academy,
(14:59):
and that's how I ended up transitioning into tech.
I love it.
And day after, or not long after I got the place
at the coding course, but also my college at Oxford
had emailed me to say, do you wanna stay behind in summer
and work on this website for 12 to 16 year olds
(15:21):
to get them starting to think early
about applying to the best universities in the country?
And they almost didn't email me because they said,
oh, Nady would be the ideal candidate,
but she's already got a job, hasn't she?
She's already covered.
And they almost didn't email me.
But I got place at that course, Code for the First Girls.
And then the next day I got the email and I just said,
I'm gonna spend, this is kind of scary for me
who's so like planned and whatever,
(15:43):
but I'm gonna turn down the Deutsche Bank job
and we're gonna spend three months doing this internship
and going twice a week to London
and we'll see what happens.
And it worked out.
It worked out.
And see what happened.
Yeah, it's so funny how that is such a nexus moment
in your life, but you probably couldn't have predicted it.
I wanna talk about team and co-founder partnerships.
(16:03):
You run a very tight ship,
just three people from what I understand.
And you were a solo founder in the very sense.
It was just you running this amazing growing product
and company for a while.
You mentioned that some partnerships didn't work out.
Are there any learnings from that?
By figuring out those first,
and that first team you work with
to getting your product from zero to one,
(16:24):
what are the learnings?
What works for you and your partner right now,
Rob on the team?
What have you learned?
I remember.
That's the question.
So the second partnership that didn't work out
was actually with the wife.
Yeah, with the wife of Rob.
So my friends were on, right?
And before that, it was a colleague from Pivotal.
And I remember a conversation
after the partnership with Soron fell apart.
(16:45):
I remember a conversation I had with a friend, Adam Cuppy,
at a conference.
We were in Australia.
This was beginning of 2019, actually.
So I was beginning of 2019, February.
And he said to me,
this was his theory on the difference
between romantic relationships and business relationships.
Because he said, people always say business relationships
(17:07):
are like a marriage, and I disagree.
This is what he said to me.
And he said, I think that with romantic relationships,
focus is on the partnership, the duo,
like staying tight across everything else.
And you're the unit that, whatever you're tackling,
whether it's a work thing, whether it's having kids,
whatever it is, it's like you are a unit together,
(17:27):
and then you approach your challenge
or whatever you're doing your day to day.
And he said, I think business partnerships are different
and they should be different.
I think that when you've got a business partnership
that works well, it's because there's this goal
that's over here on the other side,
and you both have a similar vision
of how you move that boulder, if that makes sense.
(17:50):
And so when he said this, I realized that
with the two partnerships that I had had before
that didn't work out, the focus was very much,
and it's in my mind, and I also think
with the other parties too, was very much on our partnership.
And we weren't necessarily aligned on a product
or a vision of a company, but we were like,
this is a really great partnership.
So when certain things came up,
(18:12):
and things were struggling, it was because
there wasn't a unified vision or a particular product
in how we were gonna build a company or grow,
it was more like, we're the partnership.
And I think with Rob, although we're super close friends now
and we have an excellent partnership
because of all the years of working together,
when it started, it was just like,
okay, this is a vision of a company,
and what type of company do you wanna build?
(18:33):
And we're aligned, we're aligned on
the type of company we wanna build,
we're aligned on our ambition levels,
we're aligned on so many things,
and that just means that the partnership just works.
The other thing is the division of responsibilities.
It's very, on my roles and responsibilities,
and he has a very limited realm,
which is mainly to do with the AI machine learning
(18:54):
and the infrastructure.
And obviously, he is a business partner,
so he helps me with some business admin
and decisions and things like that,
but ultimately, I have the main responsibility
in terms of business day-to-day,
then the app and web development and all that kind of stuff.
So those, I guess the two key learnings,
it's more important to be aligned
on how you wanna build a company,
(19:15):
the kind of company you wanna build,
and what the product is.
And then the other thing is just clear lines
of responsibility and just sticking to them
and trusting that the other person's gonna have
their side held.
Love that, and I guess practically speaking,
how do you assess that alignment in mission
and vision and so on?
Because very early on,
(19:35):
sometimes that can be quite difficult to assess.
So how do you go about doing that
for anyone that's listening?
Regular check-ins at different intervals.
So in the first, before Rob came on officially
as a co-founder, we had questions of like,
okay, how do you see, one of the first questions
he asked me before he was considering
quitting his job is, how do you see me?
(19:57):
Do you see me as a partner or do you see me as a CTO?
Or like, you know what I mean?
Where do you see me?
We had those initial conversations.
But then it was also like, okay,
what type of company do you wanna build?
Are you trying to build it really fast?
Are you trying to get investment?
I, at the time, was manually doing
personal recommendations for people.
And we spoke about, okay, if we scale this out,
do we like the idea of a company
(20:18):
where we're hiring dozens of people
to also do personal recommendations?
And we were both like, no way.
So we were both aligned on, okay,
we wanna do as much tech as possible.
So those kind of things.
And then, you know, the beginning of every year,
we'll do our new year reflections and like,
okay, what's the goals for this year?
Where do we wanna, what do we wanna,
I have this prompts that's like,
what do we wanna be saying on January 1st,
(20:41):
current year plus one?
But then, on the other end of the scale,
we have weekly retrospective,
which is something I picked up from working at Pivotal.
So every week, it's like, what went well this week?
What didn't go so well?
What do we wanna talk about?
And they can be anything from company things
to interpersonal things.
So if we feel like a certain type of communication
(21:04):
didn't go down well,
if there's a performance issue on the product
that's just not being fixed,
completes any type of saga or issue.
So I would say that's how we make sure
we're in sync all the time.
Because we have-
I love that.
We have a monthly team meeting.
There's no need for a weekly team one.
So we have a monthly team meeting,
which is a great way for the monthly goals.
(21:25):
Rob and I have a weekly meeting,
but we're talking every day anyway,
but we have that weekly structure still.
And then annually, both with the team,
and then also with just Rob,
we look at where we wanna go, where we're headed.
And that would be a great time.
If you see someone put something on the board
that's like, hi, 20 people,
I don't know what it would be.
That's when you would start to sense like,
I'm not down for that.
(21:45):
So let's talk about that.
But Rob's always put ideas.
That's the other thing.
Rob's always put ideas to me about certain things,
certain approaches.
And we'll talk about it.
And I think, again, that's a great way of seeing
where someone thinks the business is gonna go.
But also if I say, oh no, because of this, it's twofold.
One is, oh yes, I understand that reasoning.
(22:06):
And yes, we don't wanna build that type of company.
But it's also ultimately an idea.
You have the executive decision-making ability.
Even if I disagreed with you,
sometimes we have to make a call
and you would be the one to make that final call.
But like almost 100% of the time,
just through communicating clearly
and having patience with it,
we always end up on the same page anyway.
(22:26):
Even if we started from a different space.
I love that.
Yeah, I think that is so interesting
because you started the product, right?
Like you thought, and how long did you run it before?
So Rob joined, started helping out.
So in 11 months, Rob started helping out on the side,
just as a side project, just on a whim.
He noticed something in one of my newsletters
(22:47):
and he started helping out
with building a machine learning model in November of 2019.
And then he officially joined.
Yeah, he officially joined in February of 2019.
But he'd been helping.
Well, and building and scaling story graph
as a sole developer in the early days is no easy feat.
I'm just curious, like being both the sole developer
and this year requires wearing multiple hats.
(23:08):
How did you balance the technical aspects of the platform
with the strategic responsibilities of leading the company?
So even today, if someone asks me,
what's your main issue, pain point or for improvement
that you think you could address?
And I would say it's like spending my time wisely.
And that could mean I'll have weeks.
(23:29):
I have my own weekly metrics as well.
A great way of looking at,
okay, you did not spend enough time on development,
like actually product development.
Is there a way that you can eke out more time?
Is there something else you need to not be doing?
So I would say, again, similarly for me,
it's something I'm always asking every week
because I think it also changes based on the season,
based on what's happening.
(23:49):
But I think my weekly reflection points,
personal, these are just on my own, my personal reflection,
because my personal reflections don't just cover work,
they cover the rest of my life.
And so that's a great way of checking,
am I on the right track, am I balancing?
And if not, how do I balance it,
rebalance it for next week or next month?
Because I also do monthly retros for myself
and I do my annual.
(24:11):
And also my birthday is in September
and I feel like it's a perfect time
for that's three quarters into the year,
my birthday is end of September.
So I always have a, okay, we're now three quarters in,
we've got a quarter left, what has not been,
what do we need to switch up for the final quarter?
So I have all these checkpoints.
So that helps.
But I do think it's a trade-off ultimately still
(24:33):
on a bunch of levels.
One is it's a trade-off on speed
and the speed one goes both ways.
Because in some ways I can go really fast
because it's just me, I don't have to worry
about anyone else's code in the code base,
I don't have to check with anyone,
I don't need to review anybody else's code,
nobody needs to review my code, I can just put stuff out.
On the flip side, I am still just one person.
(24:54):
So I'm only ever doing one thing at a time.
And so there are features like on our roadmap
that have been there for years that I wanna do
but haven't done yet.
Having said that, and some of you,
you might have, either of you might have experienced
with this either as a user or an investor.
Even with companies with dozens of employees,
there are things that customers ask for for years
and the company doesn't get round to it till years later.
(25:16):
So I have to always remind myself of that.
But there's also a trade-off of like,
people think, oh, just hire someone.
Then once you're paying someone like a decent salary,
now you're gonna be worrying about,
okay, now I've got someone else's salary
that I'm responsible for.
And some money in the bank that can look like,
oh, that's a decent amount of money,
it's gone like that once you have one hire.
(25:38):
And so there's another stress now that's on my head
of like, not only is it everything else,
now I've got someone else's salary,
now you have more pastoral and managerial roles as well.
And there's that trade-off.
Like I said, when you have more people,
they have the whole pizza box thing or whatever it is.
It's just the extra connections,
the extra things you now need to deal with.
(25:58):
And so I just choose, even though I have to wear many hats
and it's not necessarily optimized,
I'm not the best at the social media,
I'm not the best developer,
I'm not the fastest developer, whatever.
It's working for us.
Yeah.
I think ultimately it's leading to our success.
And I think, so I'll take the social media
(26:21):
as a great example.
Yes, I'm not a social media expert.
I just do what comes naturally
and I post about the product.
And on Instagram, we've grown to 115,000 users,
nothing paid, nothing sponsored,
just organic me showing up every day and just talking.
And it's not just talking about the product,
I am a reader.
And so I really connected to our users being a reader
(26:42):
because I am a reader with people about,
there are a bunch of posts that's just me saying,
I'm reading this book, this is what I think.
And then people connect with me on that level.
So yeah, it's a lot of different hats.
Yeah, showing up as yourself.
Yeah, I can imagine that that actually resonates
on like a social perspective.
I was curious about fundraising.
From what I understand, you didn't go the VC route.
(27:04):
How did you think about fundraising?
My high level journey in terms of how I've seen VC is,
when I was younger, like high school and university,
I would follow things like TechCrunch,
all those kinds of stuff, deal book.
And I would see these rounds of funding and think,
wow, those people made it, that's so cool.
(27:26):
I wanna have that.
Then you get older and you realize, no,
raising a big does not mean you made it, far from it.
Now the real work starts and you're gonna figure out
how you're gonna get your investors that money back.
And I also heard a bunch of like scary stories
of like, oh, the board fired the founder or all this stuff.
And I'm thinking, wow, that is wild.
Like you could start a company and then you get investors.
(27:49):
And then they say, and I understand that obviously
in some of these cases where the founder's been removed,
it's because they're not actively helping the company.
I understand it's not all just investors going rogue
and because an investor wants their money back.
So they wouldn't get rid of a founder
if they didn't feel like they weren't the best person
to run the company.
But still, I had all these things in my mind.
And I remember thinking, I started moving more
(28:10):
towards the bootstrapping.
Like I just wanna be able to build something, my own thing,
make it profitable, be my own boss,
not have to be accountable to anybody.
And there was a period of my life
where when I was getting into tech
and I was in my first tech job,
before I ended up with the partnerships that I did,
where I genuinely thought, you know what,
I'm gonna learn how to write Objective-C and then Swift.
(28:32):
And I'm just gonna be that developer
that has a few iOS apps that just do really well
and brings in what would be a really good dev salary
and that's gonna be my life and I'll be my own boss.
That was my idea originally.
But then when I started Storigraph, as I explained,
as it was growing, I was like, I cannot scale this manually
because every book needs some notes and pays
(28:54):
and everyone needs a recommendation.
So then I started thinking,
I'm gonna have to get investment
because I don't have any co-founders around me.
There's no one around me who has these skills.
I'm gonna need some machine learning capabilities.
I'm gonna need some other types of expertise
that I don't have and that it would just be a bit mad
for me to try and learn.
And so I was thinking,
oh, I'm gonna be forced to get VC investment.
(29:16):
And when I went to a couple of meetups and stuff,
I kept hearing the same thing.
This is not investable.
There's Goodreads.
Whatever you do, Goodreads is gonna copy you.
It's just not investable.
So I just was like, well, I'm just gonna keep going.
The funny thing is, obviously I was very lucky.
Rob came along.
There's a funny story about that too
(29:36):
because I hadn't, I was working with his wife before.
We didn't speak for a while.
We had reconnected.
But the reason why Rob even got in touch
was because he saw a newsletter that I posted on Twitter.
So that's a whole other story
of how he ended up working with me.
But, so he was like cold.
Kind of, it was like a, hey, long time.
Yeah, long time no speak because originally when I wasn't,
(29:59):
when Soran and I weren't speaking for a little bit,
I wasn't going to be speaking to her husband.
So we kind of, we had had a friendship,
but obviously my main friendship was with Soran.
So when we weren't speaking for a little bit
after the partnership didn't work out,
I also stopped speaking to Rob
because I just didn't feel it was appropriate.
So then when we had reconnected,
I didn't then immediately rush back texting Rob.
(30:20):
What happened was now we're on Twitter.
Like he's seen me on Twitter again
and all this kind of stuff.
And so he saw my old newsletters.
And because I had posted all the ones up until that point,
he went back and read them all.
And the thing that he originally messaged me on
was not about the help for the machine learning,
which he'd just been learning on the side.
It was because I had computer issues
(30:40):
and he was telling me about, as opposed to time machine,
being able to make a carbon copy clone backup,
where then you can attempt it to another computer
and still be able to do your work.
So that's how the conversation started.
We were texting, we were like, let's just jump on a call.
And during that call, he said, by the way,
I've also noticed that you were struggling with this.
And he was even hesitant to offer his help
because he was like, I'm literally just learning this on the side.
(31:02):
What's up, guys?
So I don't know if I'm going to do anything good,
but maybe I can help.
So that was that whole thing.
But anyway, because Rob came along and was amazing
and fit all the needs I had,
I never needed to go back to that investment thing.
And we're very staunchly now, like, no, we're just bootstrapping.
We don't need investment.
And it's funny now, all the VCs that reach out every week.
(31:25):
They're like, oh, no, this is great.
We want to invest in this.
And I'm like, hmm, sorry.
Not that.
I love that.
Now, one of the things you mentioned earlier,
which I thought was super interesting,
was just around how reflective you are personally,
but also with your team.
So I'm just curious, like, how has your definition of success
evolved since the platform's exception?
(31:47):
And like, what are some of the key metrics,
milestones that you currently focus on?
And how have they shifted over time?
That's a good question.
How?
Because I'm pausing,
because there are many different things at play.
But also I know personally, I am very ambitious and hard at it.
(32:11):
In that, people will look at what I've got now and go,
you're successful.
And I'm thinking, no, I'm not.
I know I am, obviously.
Like, there are, I mean, going a book's bootstrapping
and then you're bootstrapped.
This is like your standard freemium kind of thing
that would need investment to get off the ground.
And the fact that the money that I put in to bootstrap it
(32:34):
and then Rob eventually put in,
we've got that money back and we've got salaries,
good salaries.
Like, that is a great mark of success.
So there was a period of time where it was just like,
is anyone using this?
So we would be looking at just user numbers
and retention, that kind of stuff.
And then it became, once we started spending
thousands of dollars a month just keeping the app running,
it was like, well, this isn't a sustainable business.
(32:54):
So the mark of success became,
how do we get to sustainability and profitability?
And now we're there in terms of this current set up,
but it's kind of like, well, we see this as our life's work.
So how do we set it up to get to that next level
of sustainability and profitability?
For example, we're doing well,
but if we did hire a developer now,
(33:16):
then suddenly what looks like doing well is now like,
oh, we need to make more money.
So I think around focusing on like that long-term longevity
and also cementing our spot as the main good news alternative,
because I would say right now we are,
but there are other competitors out there
and there are things that we fall down on.
Another metric for me is I really wanna make an app
(33:39):
where the UX, UI and performance is stellar.
And so a good metric is how often are people complaining
either in support tickets or social media
about things that fall under those branches.
So a good sign of, oh, we're doing well on this
is a reduction in tickets,
asking question about how to do something or find something.
And also people going, story graph is ugly or whatever.
(34:01):
And so that is a more anecdotal,
I mean, I guess I could count and tally per week,
but roughly I'm keeping an eye on that.
And that's something I'm really focusing on a lot now.
And then in terms of that's kind of product wise,
those are the main kinds of things,
the profitability, sustainability,
and also the user experience, like just being known.
(34:22):
I just want us to be recognized as this app is a joy to use,
it's a delight to use and looks great, it's fast.
Those kind of metrics, those kinds of statements.
And then like, for example, we released a new section
for book reviews on the book page
and the stories that people are posting,
this is so beautiful, I could cry, this is gorgeous.
(34:43):
And I kept on sending them to the team
and reposting some of them saying,
this is what I want people to see,
the whole app, not just this section.
We're on the right track.
And then in terms of the team,
I make sure that everyone's happy,
that they're enjoying what they're doing.
Yeah, and we're very,
as much as I'm a very ambitious, hardworking person,
(35:04):
I don't do deadlines, I don't like giving deadlines
to people, it's kind of like you do them when you do them.
And if there is a deadline externally,
like for example, we have giveaways,
the giveaways are starting on the 19th.
So before the 19th, we need to do this, fine.
But in general, I don't like deadlines
for a bunch of reasons.
I just wanna make sure that people are happy,
people are enjoying what they're doing,
they don't feel like unnecessary pressure.
(35:24):
And I guess this is mainly with Abby who works with us.
And now we've got a new designer, Yeji,
who's a student in California, who's doing our design
and helping us get to that vision that I have.
And it's just been interesting,
figuring out with her, okay, I didn't give you a deadline,
but it's now been four weeks and I haven't heard anything.
So just having that conversation of like figuring out.
(35:45):
And by the way, this is a great example of how
just one extra person and there's a lot of extra
just kind of communication that now needs to happen
that is me not doing development or anything else,
which is good, but it's just that thing where people are,
just like more people, it's not as straightforward.
But anyway.
Changes the fabric of the business as you go
and the things you have to think about.
(36:06):
But I think a key insight there that I'd like to flag
is that success looks many different ways for a start.
For you, you designed what that looks like for you.
In your conversation and in measuring success,
not once did you mention amounts raised.
You talked about sustainability,
you talked about your team, I think what they do.
You talked about the fact that people,
customers or users who use a product love it.
So I think it depends on whatever business,
(36:27):
but making sure that you set what is success to you
because you might need to measure success differently.
I know that you experienced quite substantial growth
over a period of time.
You went from like 1,000 users to 20,000.
Speaking specifically about consumer companies,
when you experienced that sort of viral growth,
how did you manage that sudden influx?
(36:48):
What strategies did you implement to support this growth?
And then looking ahead, how have you consistently
been able to engage that community?
So just to be clear, that 1,000 to 20,000 users
was across three days.
So it was 16th of June to 18th of June,
something like that.
So it was one of my hardest times in the company.
(37:08):
And it was probably the closest I ever came
to thinking this company is gonna die and I can't do this.
The closest I ever came to it because I would like to stress
that I didn't ever say I can't do this
because I don't believe in that.
So I just had to take a deep breath in terms of just mentally
before even digging into the product.
I just had to say to myself,
Nadia, you are not the first person to have an app
(37:30):
that's exploded and you're not the first person.
All the issues that are meaning the app
is not working right now, someone else has had them before.
So that kind of gave me the confidence to be like,
you will find the other because this is not new.
And I had a network of people online
that I knew could help me if needed.
So that was the one stage.
And then essentially, each time we run into performance issues
(37:50):
or bottlenecks or things like that,
we first have to identify the problem
and then we need to re-architect or rewrite.
And it's just a learning process of doing that.
And so there are times when the app has been down
or slow for periods of time,
especially in the beginning of the year.
And we just have to figure out, okay, what's the problem now?
Because you sort one bottleneck
and then you figure out the next one.
And so that's just been continually doing that.
(38:12):
And as you do that, one, the bottlenecks decrease,
as in because you've sorted out more,
but two, the domain of what you're aware of,
of what could be the issue increases.
Do you identify it faster, fix it faster,
or maybe the fix is easier
because you've already done the main fix
and now you just need to increment a number
or increment something.
(38:32):
And so that just means you're down for longer
when you do have issues.
So that's the high level.
And in terms of engaging the community,
this is another thing when we spoke about my many hats,
I run our Instagram, Twitter and threads.
To this day.
Rob does TikTok, to this day, just me.
And so there's, again, it's a lot of time,
but it's so powerful in the narrative of the company.
(38:53):
It's so powerful, especially for people
who've been around for years,
who are like, the founder is here, she talks with us,
she's a reader, this app is built for readers, by readers.
They feel a connection and they feel brought in.
Because it's genuine.
It's me being me, it's genuine.
And I remember even when the product, pre-product,
when I was doing just community building,
(39:14):
and then in the early stages of the product,
I remember saying to myself,
if this product doesn't work out,
I think I'm gonna continue this account
as like my personal books.
Because I felt a connection
to the people I was talking books with.
So I would say just continually buying them in,
and then it has compounding effects.
So I do polls a lot of the time.
I do Instagram stories, talking to people saying,
this is what I'm working on, this is what happened.
(39:35):
And you see over time, it buys us trust,
it buys us time, so whenever I'm struggling
or something hasn't come out for a while,
everyone's like, oh, I know they're working hard,
I know there must be a reason.
Or people don't even notice.
Sometimes I'm hard on myself,
because I'll say, wow, this thing took six weeks,
this thing took seven weeks.
And then I have to remind myself,
or somebody else reminds me,
that Goodreads never changes.
(39:57):
And why I'm stressing myself out,
just me being like, I haven't delivered anything
in like weeks.
And I'm like, Goodreads hasn't changed really much
in the eight, wait, 2012 to 2020, that was eight years.
It's now like 13 years.
So I'm still stuck on that eight years,
because that's the eight years I used it.
And so, yeah, it's just continually showing up
for the community every day and being transparent
(40:18):
and being upfront, and that builds that relationship.
And then as the relationship builds,
it's easier to sustain,
because I feel like I just, I'm in the habit of it.
I love that.
And I think it's very clear,
when it comes to communities,
people really do engage with people, right?
And so be in the face of it,
and people engaging directly with you is so powerful.
And one of the reasons why you seem to really resonate
(40:39):
with your community.
Yeah, just two quick points on that.
One is, it makes me chuckle every time I see someone post
about our Instagram account, and they'll say,
it's a great account.
And sometimes the founder comes on.
I find that so funny, because it's always me.
So that's funny.
The other thing is interesting,
is sometimes I'll get some rude messages,
(41:01):
and then I'll reply very politely,
and ask the question or whatever.
And the number of people who go,
oh, I didn't think anyone would reply to me.
And it just goes to show that they have this anger,
which cannot, the anger that they feel,
where are books at?
I know it has to be coming from somewhere else.
Because even if we were frustrating you,
because something didn't work,
the anger of which you sent this message,
(41:22):
there must be something else happening.
It can't solely be, to me,
it can't solely be the book that annoyed you.
But then, clearly, people just want to be heard.
Because when they get responses, they sent it,
because they probably just thought,
I'm just getting out, and it's a company,
so they're probably not going to reply anyway.
Now, I don't know.
And then like, oh, wow.
And then the final one on that is,
(41:42):
when people assume that I'm only
a social media manager person.
So they'll say, can you pass this on?
Or they'll say, wow, that worked.
Or would you know this?
And I'm like, yes, I do know,
because I'm the developer.
And then I'm like, what?
That's wild.
That's wild.
So it's very fun, and it definitely helps
in terms of building that rapport
and that brand trust and loyalty.
(42:05):
Amazing.
Thank you so much.
I think we tend to go into reflective posters
for the end of the episode.
And we just want to go back in time
to try to understand what you would tell yourself
heading out into this journey.
Everyone's journey is different, we know.
But sometimes, maybe the first principles
from those experiences resonate to someone
(42:25):
listening or watching.
And then also any resources
that you've particularly found helpful over time
that has really moved the needle for you as a founder,
helped you scale, helped you think of things differently.
I think I was very lucky to the parents I was born with,
that they, despite their hardships and struggles,
they instilled in me this can-do-anything attitude.
(42:46):
And then I had some educators that continued that,
particularly my economics teacher, Mr. Brewer.
And then Rob is very much that speed
of you can do anything.
His mom always used to tell him that,
and he always told me that as well.
So I think I would really tell myself,
Nady, you can do anything, you can do this.
(43:06):
And just keep going.
And remember, because I am very like,
I've got to do it myself, I don't want to...
In the earliest days of String Off,
sometimes even with struggles,
where maybe there would be a friend
who would be able to answer the question like that,
I would feel like, this is my company, this is my business.
It says that these people have their own jobs
and their own lives.
I've got to figure this out, you know what I mean?
(43:27):
But then it's realizing that, you know,
you can lean on your network, you can't ask people for help.
And it doesn't mean they did the work or it doesn't...
Friends, you know, I feel like I've continually put
out good energy, so keep doing that.
And I would say, don't be shy.
I would tell myself, don't be shy to reach out
when you need a little bit of help.
(43:48):
Those are the main things, but this main,
like you keep believing that you can do it
because you can and you will.
And then in terms of resources,
I think it could be books, it could be podcasts,
it could be people.
I love how I built this.
Just hearing the variety of stories
is amazing and inspiring.
So I love how I built this podcast, that's a great one.
(44:10):
I was thinking that this is more high level
just making you a better person,
but it applies to being a better founder,
a better team member.
And that's the book, Nonviolent Communication
by Marshall B Rosenberg.
It just shows you a way to be able to express things
that you're not happy with in a way that's productive
and moves the conversation forward
without the other person being defensive.
A lot of how we communicate with people is violent.
(44:34):
And you might be surprised when you're reading this book
and you see the examples of what counts as violent,
it could be implicit assumptions about something.
So for example, saying, you know, I'm disappointed
as opposed to I'm sad, saying I'm disappointed is violent
because I am expressing the disappointment on you.
And other person's natural inclination
is to feel hurt and attack.
I disappointed you.
(44:54):
Whereas if you say, I'm sad, first of all,
that's just an internal feeling.
And then you explain why you're sad.
So it just breaks down this great way of communicating,
which I think has put me in great stead,
just for all of my relationships, but especially in a team.
And I think founders can be more perceptible maybe
to poor communication,
especially in high stress situations.
So I would recommend Marshall B Rosenberg's
(45:18):
Nonviolent Communication.
That's one that I've added to my list.
Also, I am someone who, I love reading
narrative nonfiction that's filled with drama
because my life is so drama free.
So I would just for fun recommend Bad Blood by John Cameru
and Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton,
for examples of like, you know, avoid these things,
(45:39):
but have a fun startup story.
It's interesting.
So yeah, those are just fun startup books.
Amazing. Okay.
Thank you so much.
It was so lovely to speak with you Nadia.
Wow, Yvonne Maria, this is a real pleasure.
Time for us to say goodbye.
Thank you.
Leave a review.
Tell us what you think of this episode
on all of our platforms at the Startup Leap pod.
(46:00):
Do you have a question?
Ask us and we'll ask our guests.
Go to the startupleap.io.
See you next time.
See you next time.
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