🌍 The beginnings
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I thought it would make the most sense to summarize where we are now and what milestones we've reached so far in the first letter, so that if someone reads it back, they know where it all started!
I promise only this first letter will be this long...
1. The idea of BookBase
The idea for the BookBase came to me about 2 years ago when I was looking for ways to accelerate my self-development.
At first, I just read random book summaries online, but I realized that they all had something wrong with them. They were either too short or didn't capture what I needed from the book.
Then I found a self-development club abroad, similar in concept to BookBase, which also had book summaries. The only problem was that they were written in very technical language and were so long 1-1 "summaries" that they were about as long as the book itself. So, I quickly realized that this was not the best mode for me.
But then my brain started to work and I started to think that if I had this problem, other young people must have the same problem too.
So, I posted an Instagram Story with a very simple poll:
"Who wants to accelerate their progress in terms of development, but doesn't like to read?"
The Yes-No ratio was about 87-13, 327 people voted Yes.
At this moment, I realized that I had finally found a problem that hadn't been solved yet!
2. Version 0
After the vote, I knew that I had to "get hold" of this idea now and start as soon as possible, before "someone else does it" (a typical fear of entrepreneurs who have not yet built a complete business)
side note: very few people will steal your idea, and even if they do, they can't implement it the way you envisioned.
The first version was to get 10 books a month abridged for the price of 1, which was 3,000 HUF back in the day (don't tell me... that goddamn inflation).
However, I had no idea how such a Club or system could be implemented, so I turned to Google for help. After 2-3 clicks I knew how to set it up, I just didn't know how to do it.
So, I stuck with the old "Lean Startup"...
Month 1 summaries were written from my own notes with the help of another guy and uploaded to a Drive folder.
And the Drive folder was sent by email... yes Email, to those who signed up for the Base.
side note: reading back it's pretty ridiculous, but at the same time it's really cool to see where it all really started. For us, it was like a "garage" for the big companies to start from. Totally basic and ridiculous, but a good story.
3. The much-anticipated Version 1.0
After a lot of Googling and phone calls, the web interface was finally ready.
It was still just a Wordpress based site running with Learndash plugins to allow for such a subscription system.
side note: it was brutally slow, laggy and not transparent... But at least it was ours!
Up to 300 subscribers, the BookClub existed only here!
When we realised that it was not going to be sustainable in the long run, because it was so hard to reach, that people were not going to wait that long every day, in order to read, we realised we had to do something different.
"We have to change this..." was in my head.
This was the point when we reached the next milestone.
4. Application 1.5 Version
I found an acquaintance of a friend of a friend who was into this kind of programming and had done 1 or 2 of these test Apps.
We discussed the details of what kind of App I would like and how long it would take to complete and what kind of scope we would be working in.
A month went by and then he showed me the first beta version, which was surprisingly quite good, very basic, you could only read and search for books, NO MORE!
Then the ball went back and forth a bit and finally we released it.
(iOS only)
Because that's when I found out that iOS and Android are not the same language and that if I wanted the App for Android, it would cost me 1x more...
This was like a cold shower for me...
I truly didn't understand why this was like that and why they didn't tell me about it. I thought about the fact that from now on every development will take twice as much time and money, which means that the speed of our development will be halved, which - let's face it, was not that fast...
I didn't want to believe that this was the only way, so I turned to one of my best friends again, Google.
After about 2 hours of searching, I learned that there are programming languages that are cross-functional, so you write one code language and it will work for both platforms!
One such language is "Flutter", which is still being used in BookBase!
However, finding a good Flutter developer is harder than finding a white raven, and the prices were very high, so I had no choice but to go to one of the "darkest holes" of the internet...
Fiverr!
side note: of course, I'm exaggerating because there are a lot of talented people on the platform, they are only about 1:10 up there and the other 9 are very difficult to work with and might cause an ultra-headache for me.
I had to go to Fiver because programming is typically a job that you don't need to know the language of the country to do, so you can outsource to countries where the cost of living is much cheaper (India, Pakistan and others) and get the same skills for significantly less.
A job in Pakistan...
Coming soon!
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Hope it was useful!