Finished MVP for book club hub
Finished my MVP!
After weeks of building my online bookstore, I finally plucked up the courage to show my site to another entrepreneur I met online.
One of the main pieces of advice he gave was that I needed to give people a reason to engage with the site and come back, not just make a purchase and never return.
Taking that advice on board, I've pivoted the idea into a hub for online bookclubs, where people can create and host bookclub meetings and connect with other people who are interested in the same topics.
For the tech stack, I've used React on the front-end and Django on the backend, with AWS for the database. I'm using a great service (https://www.daily.co) to host the club sessions and I've just finished adding a chat widget from https://www.hubspot.com.
It needs a lot of work but I'm proud to be shipping and putting it out there.
I'd love to get feedback on what you think, if it's a good idea and what I can do to make it more usable.
Thanks,
Kibari looks very nice! I was a little confused about what the purpose of the site was and what I was supposed to do when I first landed on it. Maybe change the headline to "Join an online bookclub"?
Communication amongst my current bookclub is a huge nightmare. It's just constant emails that split into new threads and you don't know who is talking to who. I tried creating a little forum app to fix this but it was never adopted because people didn't want to check other places besides their email :/ Not sure if other bookclubs have this problem, but if so, this would be an awesome problem to tackle.
I tried signing up for Kibari. The page didn't refresh but the sign up worked. And then I tried to create a bookclub but couldn't get to it's page. They are tests so feel free to delete them!
Hi Allison,
Thankyou so much for checking the site out!
This is great feedback, i will add a link to the bookclub page as soon as it's created so creators can find it and see what the public page looks like.
I'm deploying daily at the moment, I've been working on adding features which will make it more usable and easier to navigate.
I'll let you know when these changes are live. When the site is more polished, would you be willing to consider using Kibari for your current club? Perhaps we could offer an incentive in the form of book discounts to lure your members away from their inbox?
Thanks,
Marilyn
I'd definitely consider it! I'm not the one that runs the book club, but I could probably persuade them to give Kibari a try.
Hi Allison,
Following from the feedback you gave, I've made changes to the site to make it easier to find the club you've just created:
-when you create a new club, a confirmation message is shown with a link to take you straight to the club's page
You can see a preview of this here:
https://www.loom.com/share/326bf5c4914a46e2b3edfaf9382acc68
I've also added other changes such as
If your club has any requirements, I'd be happy to implement additional tools / functionality they'd need to make organising easier.
Thanks,
Marilyn
Wow that was fast! I'll pitch this to the other girls and see what they think :)
Thanks!
I've been thinking about what you mentioned re how hard it was to communicate via email. I've started fleshing out the chat functionality to try and address this.
The first part is adding mentions, so you can address the entire club or a single member, you can see a demo here: https://www.loom.com/share/f143e13c30ab4bd0acd5e5b884d4e328
If you mention @club, the entire club will be notified, if you only mention a specific member, only they will be notified.
The second part is adding notifications so you are notified
Let me know what the initial response is from the club, I'm open to answer any questions they may have or features they'd like to request.
Marilyn you are AMAZING!
Thankyou!
It'll be quite a meaty chunk of work but I'll let you know as soon as it's ready :)
Congrats! Is there a link we can check it out on yet?
Hi @rosiesherry!
Sure, you can check it out at https://www.kibari.co