Hardcover Internal MVP Released!

After 5 months of building a team, user research, and book data, we've reached a big milestone - our internal MVP!

This phase is a big step for us. It means that the application is in a state for the team to use it. Right now it's still very rough, with plenty of bugs. The goal of this internal MVP release is for the team that's been working on Hardcover to hit it with everything they have – and create bug reports in GitHub for everything that doesn't work as expected.

So far all of the bugs have been quick ones to fix. Like most products at this phase there are also some interactions we realize didn't "feel" right once we started using them.

One example of that is our List page. A reader can make a list of any books organized into a list. This can be favorites, books they want to read in a genre – any grouping the reader wants.

To simplify things from a code standpoint, we created a separate edit page for lists. You head to the edit page, make any changes and can reorder the books in the list from here.

Using this though, we quickly realized that this should all be on the list page readers see, but with additional options for the list owner.

Those recommended enhancements are relatively few – something I credit our awesome research and design initiatives with.

So what's next? We're hoping to fix all bugs in the next week or two then start letting people use the app! For now we're going to allow anyone to sign up to use Hardcover, but require a promo code to unlock the app after signing in. This is simply to limit the number of people using it until we can work out the most pressing bugs and make sure it'll be an experience we can be proud of – or at least one that actually works.

If you'd like be notified when we open up, please join the Hardcover mailing list: https://hardcover.app/