How I Bootstrapped a F*ck startup for 2 Years, Spent All Money, Pivoted, and Finally Started to Grow...

A story about how I might have been upset that I wasted 2 years but actually got an awesome bonus in the Storist pivot.

Hi everyone!,

some of you know that I've had a pet project, Storist.me, for over 2 years. My original idea was to make cool, quality business book summaries for IT geeks, marketers, and entrepreneurs. I know these people; I'm like that myself. On the one hand, we don't have time to read many books, and on the other hand, we need to get new knowledge all the time (and preferably more in-depth than many SEO articles on the Internet).

At that moment, my team and I worked out a cool way of writing summaries, added quizzes on the content (yes, our brain remembers better that way), and developed unique templates and cheat sheets to "read, take a template, and immediately put into work." But it didn't work... There were only a few users, and it was not possible to close the operating system and confirm PMF.

I started to meet with these few users and interview them again, looking at the research, thinking, and discussing with my team. After spending some time, we noticed the same patterns. Some of our users (from India and some from Europe) used our app regularly. I struggled to reach them, but finally, I did and had interviews. All of them said that they read our summaries, wrote down unfamiliar words, and put them into Anki (an app for memorizing words using an interval repetition approach). Catch it! I realized that we were not about summaries; we were about English.

That's how we had a PIVOT (strictly speaking, not the first one anymore, but that's a detail).

Now Storist is an app for improving English through summaries of business books. We were right: everyone wants to read these famous books like The Mom Test, Purple Cow, Atomic Habits, and Principles -- but if that wasn't enough to get you started before Storist, we're not going to make you. So we threw in some internal resistance to a couple of objections:

• How about reading the book and also practicing the language? -- so we got original and simplified versions of the texts, as well as a dictionary with translations of words.

• How about not just reading but also learning new words? -- so we've got a word repetition trainer. So far, it's based on just one method, but there are a lot of tools coming soon.

• And let us also get "paws" (secret: it so happens that we have a hero kitty and he gives "five" paws ))) if you complete the tasks every day. The brain loves to play, loves quick rewards, loves to see progress.

CTA :)) Download the Storist app (https://storist.me), try it for free, and if you like it -- double your first subscription! To do this, email the email you registered with and I'll organize everything for you.