Books Bank
Lent, Borrow or give away your books to people near you.
BooksBank is the result of a great community effort that took place during the pandemi. The main idea was pretty simple. Create the biggest community library, and give a second life to your books!
In the last couple of weeks, I have been working very hard to try and promote and increase the usage of Booksbank.
I am not a marketing guy, so I have not been really good at this, but since the last few changes I made to the site (see previous milestone), the visits and registration to the site have increased.
The site is now experiencing over 500 views a week, with 50 registered users.
There is still a very long way to go, and the site wont be fully functional until there are thousands of books, but it is great to see a steady growth.
The expected milestone is to complete beta testing in the first week of September. By this stage we expect the web application to have a number of users registered within south wales.
A successful Beta testing will involve:
- Organic user registration
- At least 50 users registered within south wales
- At least 10 books being borrowed
- At least 1000 books being help in the system
Booksbank is currently in what I believe to be the hardest part for a product launch, the initial Beta testing!
I have been listening very hard to clients, and analysing google analytics to really understand the user flow and try to understand what needs to be changed in the application.
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED
After the first few weeks, I have noticed that the flow to allow users to ADD a book (that is essential for the project to improve), did not have a good UX.
WHAT DID I DO
I have asked around (here on indie hacker and to real customer) and I tried to make the best changes that would not affect existing customer, but would still provide a good improvement in the current flow.
WHAT IS LEFT TO DO
Start again and listen to what people have to say! If you want to help, please join Booksbank on https:booksbank.co.uk and help me in finding any UX issues that may produce a drop in usage within the app!
Thank you all for following me and my progress!
if you have been following BooksBank update, you may know that we are now starting to manually share the application locally to friends and the wider community.
Today I am proud to share that the site organic views are slowly going up.. We have reached 200 views, that even if it is a very small number, it is still a good achievement for something that is not actually advertised, but it is just reached by people clicking on posts they find around the internet!
Our next aim is to have people starting to organically add books and grow out library! If you know anyone that is interested in either give away or loan their books, please forward them to Booksbank.co.uk
Today was a very busy day at BooksBank as we achieved two small steps toward our main goal. First we enhanced the user experience by adding FAQ page and Welcome email, secondly we had a great meeting with a member of an university in south wales that could potentially help the project growth massively.
Welcome email and FAQ
During the current beta testing, I have been informed that some of the main features and requirement of booksbank are not very easy to understand from a quick glance at the site.
To try and improve user experience, we have decided to add a simple FAQ page, and also develop a Welcome email that the users are going to receive at the time of registration. This is going to help user with some of the context and language needed to fully utilize the site.
Potential Support
While the development and beta testing continue, it is time to start and reach out to potential support. In todays meeting we were able to reach out to an university and started a great conversation.
Even if nothing is decided, the university will be able to help in a variety of ways:
- Share Booksbank with their internal alumni (over 20k)
- Provide some extra exposure with magazine article and social posts
- Provide students for free internship to support in many area (marketing, translation, development)
- Help gain some financial support with internal and external funding
After a busy day, it is time to go and relax!
We have achieved another important milestone today, but receiving the first real user experience feedback.
Receiving unbiased suggestions and feedback from real user is an invaluable resource (as usually the first testers are friends and family and they tend to not tell the full truth).
The feedback was honest, and most of the provided information can easily be actionable (that is a great success for me), furthermore the actual product and idea was very much liked and this is a super win for BooksBank!
Due to the recent Beta release, we have started to push for some social media interaction too, by manually advertisement the facebook and twitter pages:
Excited times ahead!
During the first few month of development and market research we have realised that the clients wanted some extra features that were not part of the MVP.
The most important one, was the ability for people to "give away" their books, instead than just borrow them temporary.
Due to the MVP being released, I have been able to focus on this new feature, that I think is going to be massive to support the initial Growth of BooksBank. This new feature is not only going to add extra support to the users, but it is going to increase the marker volume massively.
This new feature has created the need for some small enhancement that will need to be developed asap to really support UX.
This day marks a very important date as Booksbank has the first, unsolicited organic registration!
The idea is that Booksbank will organically grow due to its community based approach. This first user was a very important achievement for the product, as it turned a simple idea into something that people need.
The hardest task for any product (unless it is a funded one and not a side project), is to find the amount of time to develop the idea into a real project.
The development of the project started in mid 2020, and so far have taken almost an year to achieve all the MVP features that were decided back in 2020.
The development of the application was achieved with the great help from community members, and design provided by @roblorPow.
Currently the application has the following set of features that allow it to move into the Alpha testing stage:
- Authentication
- Ability to add Books
- API integration with Google Books api
- Ability to search books nearby using openstreet api
- Ability to define bookshelf settings to be able to lent books
- Full Emails reminder
- Desktop and Mobile responsive designs
- SEO definition
- Facebook and Google Single sign on
- Legal pages ( privacy, about, terms and condition)
The hardest part of creating a project is to find a name that is easy to remember and that summarize the core product, by still providing the flexibility to grow into different avenue in the long run.
The decision of the name was achieved following this step:
- Ask people to submit their names idea
- Come up with a list of 12 names that best fit the product (from personal and community suggestions)
- Share this names and let people vote on them
- Analyse the response and decide on the top 3 names
- Check domain and SEO availability of the name
- Register the domain
- CELEBRATE! :)