Storist

We decided to have our first sales through face-to-face customer interviews. We asked some questions about users' behavior, restrictions in reading non-fictions, their goals and, then, we offered them to try our product. If they like it, they can buy a subscription (we told them our plans to produce more mini-courses based on particular books).

The first users liked it and they agreed to buy it. In other words, customers favored our product with their hard-earned cash.

Since money doesn’t lie, we began to develop the next version of Storist, a more convenient MVP which will have new features. We are also producing a lot of new mini-courses based on business bestsellers.

Before beginning to build our first MVP, we have spent more than 100 user interviews and highlighted the main reasons why people don't like reading non-fiction. Here are the most of answers:

– Reading a bulky book is a ponderous task.
– Some books are very boring to read.
– It is difficult to apply everything you have read to your day-to-day behavior.
– Some non-fiction books have only one key concept that is blown up to cover 200+ pages.
– Shortening of attention span due to technology and social media.

We had some ideas on how to address these problems. We chose bubble no-code platform because there are some useful features and we had experiences with it. After a while we created our first MVP. This was a great mini-course based on ideas from the very popular book “7 Habits Of Highly Effective People”.

Our MVP contains general ideas of each habit. There are different tests for each of the 7 habits that users could check their understanding. Furthermore, we added an interactive story where users could be the main character and try to use the book's ideas in particular situations. In the end, we share templates and check-lists like the Eisenhower Matrix, The Habit Tracker and the like.

I am Andrew, one of the founders of Storist.

Some years ago, I was the Chief Sales Officer of a large IT company.
I have read a lot of books about negotiations, building relationships with clients and sales. I realized that these knowledge and skills directly affect the profits of the company and employees. I tried to motivate my team to do this as well.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried to push them, no one reads. Some of their reasons were not having enough time, some non-fiction books were boring and so on.

That is why I started telling them the ideas of business books in the form of short stories with understandable examples during our meetings. My team liked such meetings. In 30 minutes, they received ideas and how to apply them in their work immediately.

This activity formed the basis of Storist. We take business bestsellers, invite experts to change book ideas to more interesting and useful forms, and then do mini-courses based on these ideas. It helps our users to quickly assimilate the key ideas of the business books and apply them in their work and life.