I'm hacking on a competitor (zeneca.io) with my best friend, and can relate.
I think one of the other big challenges to overtaking goodreads, is figuring a "hair-on-fire" kind of problem, where people would switch and use a different product frequently.
For us, one such problem was displaying lists in a way that you could share on your blog. This is getting traction, but issue there, is that this isn't something that incentivizes people to use the product frequently. Without frequent use, iteration is much harder. We're experimenting with deeper social, discovery, and tracking to solve this. If anyone has ideas, feel free to ping me!
For a long time I had a "todo" to make a better way to display my favorite books. Before we started working on Zeneca, I had a bullet list on my personal website. I noticed so many other people did the same. For example in Naval's Almanack he also has a bullet list with some comments on his favorite books. It struck us that a better experience could exist, and for now most people just accept the status quo.
Having a nice way to display my books was enough of a "hair on fire" problem for us to start working on Zeneca. It's been cool to see other people using the platform and asking for more features to solve broader problems and engage more frequently.
I'm hacking on a competitor (zeneca.io) with my best friend, and can relate.
I think one of the other big challenges to overtaking goodreads, is figuring a "hair-on-fire" kind of problem, where people would switch and use a different product frequently.
For us, one such problem was displaying lists in a way that you could share on your blog. This is getting traction, but issue there, is that this isn't something that incentivizes people to use the product frequently. Without frequent use, iteration is much harder. We're experimenting with deeper social, discovery, and tracking to solve this. If anyone has ideas, feel free to ping me!