Hacking on Zeneca: a place to share your favorite books

Hey fam,

Wanted to share the journey of building Zeneca with you: (https://www.zeneca.io)

A few months ago my co-founder asked me: "What would I do with 10 million dollars?"

I said, the main thing I would change, is that I'd buy a large personal library.

He thought, hey I can't get him a physical library, so why not a virtual one?

We got excited. It dawned on us that most places where you can share books today look kind of meh.

A few weeks in, we built a rough version. There was no signup, and no backend. It was just our own personal libraries:

https://www.zeneca.io/stopa
https://www.zeneca.io/joe

This got us to about 100 people on a waiting list. This gave us momentum. People wanted it enough, that we decided to go ahead and build a full-on v0. That's the ~current site today.

Right now, you can create books, quotes, and send love. Eventually, if it catches on, I hope it becomes a place where when we want to discuss a book, we go there.

For the community, I wanted to share 3 things, that made it possible for us to move quickly on this:

1. Disproving first, by building what's most important.

• Initially we had no backend, and I'm glad we made that choice. We could focus on the real issues (UX), without having to go through the trouble of auth, etc

2. Building momentum

Having those early sign-ups, and then early users, made working on this much more engaging -- especially when things looked tougher. Getting any user as soon as possible can change the way you think about your startup -- from a simple side project to something with a heart beet

3. Simple algorithms and simple data structures can cut dev time by a magnitude

Both of us worked at big co before: FB + Airbnb. We know how to build a feed that scales, and what the right way to models books is. But, we did what felt almost like "shocks". We intentional denormalized book data, so we didn't have to worry about complex fetches. For discovering similar users, we scanned all users into memory on every request -- which would be kind of funny in fb-land*

I think tech debt at early stage isn't tech debt, because you don't know really know if the project has any legs at all. If it helps you move fast and iterate quickly, it's worth it. Our heuristic was: if we doesn't slow us down in a month, we take it on.

Here's to the hacking!