Shufflebook
Exchange used books locally.
We launched Shufflebook on ProductHunt! 🙌
www.producthunt.com/posts/shufflebook
With 120 upvotes and more than 150 sign ups in just a few days we were happy with the result and optimistic about the future of the platform! 🧡📗
Also be sure to check out the concept video we made for the launch:
Just as exciting it is to work on a peer-to-peer exchange service, it also comes with a list of challenges. One the most crucial things for a service like Shufflebook is dealing with the supply and demand. How do you start when you have nothing to offer? How do you get the wheels rolling? 🔥 ⚡️
When we made our first launch, all users could see what books that were available on the platform. This meant that people could easily see the books in their area and from this fact, decide whether to sign up or not.
Since then, we have rethought the design of our landingpage, disabling the feature of seeing the books in your area without signing up, which has lead to much better sign up conversion rates. So if you're tapping into the sharing economy business with your idea aswell, here's a tip: if you don't yet have a supply, don't show it. 📚 👀
The Shufflebook team consists of three students from the same class on Hyper Island in Karlskrona, Sweden. Therefore it felt natural to launch the very first version of Shufflebook for all our classmates, so they could start exchanging books within our trusted community.
However, it didn't go quite as smooth as we hoped for. It quickly showed that most students don't want to swap their old books in a one-for-one manner. They are too selective about their wants and highly conscious about the different prices of study books.
This helped us move forward and think harder about who would love Shufflebook the most. After further research we have discovered that the biggest potential lies not within students, but the dedicated readers who are open-minded about new reading experiences, conscious about saving money – and the environment – and wants to make the most of every book.
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Interesting! Thanks for sharing. What was the outcome of this learning?
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It helped us shape the direction for our brand and how we would market ourselves on social media. We also found it easier to evaluate what areas to focus on next. For instance, we had considered to implement the feature of adding your own custom price when selling a book, to meet the need of student books in different price ranges. Instead we realized that the main focus should be optimizing the core of the platform – instead of piling additional features on top of it.
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