462: StoryGraph with Nadia Odunayo

Nadia Odunayo is the Founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, a new website and app for avid book readers because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for. The StoryGraph helps you track your reading and choose your next book based on your mood, favorite topics, and themes. Victoria talks to Nadia about coming up with a product based on the concept of mood, what you're in the mood for to read, i.e., this book made me feel this way. How do I find a book that makes me feel similar? They also talk about keeping yourself open to feedback, the ability to flow and change direction, and developing a reviewing system that keeps biases in check. StoryGraph (https://thestorygraph.com/) Follow StoryGraph on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-storygraph-limited/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/the.storygraph/), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/thestorygraph). Follow Nadia Odunayo on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nodunayo/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/nodunayo). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Nadia Odunayo, Founder and CEO of StoryGraph, a new website and app for avid book readers because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for. StoryGraph helps you track your reading and choose your next book based on your mood and your favorite topics and themes. Nadia, thank you for joining me. NADIA: Thank you for having me. VICTORIA: And you are a repeat guest at Giant Robots. But for those who missed that episode, tell me a little bit about your journey. And how did this all get started? NADIA: Okay. Yeah, so that first time was in 2015, and that was not too long after I had just got into tech. I did a bootcamp in London in 2014, Makers Academy, and that's where I learned to code. My degree was in philosophy, politics, and economics, so rather different. I worked at Pivotal for about a year and a half after I graduated from Makers Academy. And during my time at Pivotal, I got into conference speaking, and my first talk was around game theory. So I took my favorite topic in economics, game theory, and I combined that with distributed systems because that's what I was working on at the time in Pivotal on their Cloud Foundry PaaS. I think I gave it at RailsConf, and I think someone there recommended me to Giant Robots. And so Ben Orenstein interviewed me, and it was all about different types of conference talks and that kind of thing. So after Pivotal, I left and started a hybrid kind of consultancy/product company with a colleague, did that for about a year, left that, worked for about a year with my friend, Saron Yitbarek, on her company CodeNewbie. And then, when that partnership ended, I essentially had five years of runway from money that I got from the company that I started after Pivotal because we did some consulting with a bank. I'd always been entrepreneurial. I'd been doing various entrepreneurial things since secondary school, actually, high school. It was time for me to just have time on my side projects. And so I started hacking away on one of my side projects at the beginning of 2019 in January, and I haven't stopped since. That's what the StoryGraph has developed into. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And yes, I saw that the very early stages of StoryGraph started as a creative writing e-publication. Is that right? NADIA: So what happened was when I was at university, I started a creative writing e-publication, came up with the name The StoryGraph. Because we had won or we were going for some grant funding or something like that, I set up a corporate entity. And when I stopped working on that e-publication, I remember my mom saying to me, "Don't shut down the entity. I really like the name. I feel like you'll use it for something," that was in 2012. And so fast forward to 2019, and the side project that I was working on was called Read Lists. And it was very specifically focused on tracking and sharing progress through reading lists on a dashboard. But when I was doing customer research, and the scope of the project grew, Read Lists didn't fit anymore. And that's when I realized, oh, I can use The StoryGraph thing again. And so it's basically had two different lives or two different forms, the StoryGraph company. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And I'm reading about StoryGraph and how it's an Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. Can you talk a little bit more about the product and why people would want to use it? NADIA: So, as I said, it started life as a very specific focused side project. And I just had so much fun working on it and working in the book space. I'd always been a reader since I was a kid such t