Hey HN,
We're Joe & Stopa, from https://zeneca.io. We're building the successor to Goodreads. For now, you can create public bookshelves (i.e https://zeneca.io/stopa), discover like-minded readers, and share your favorite quotes and thoughts (i.e here's all I learned from PG: https://www.zeneca.io/stopa/details/shycAgAAQBAJ)
We left our jobs in June last year to build a company together (but we didn’t have an idea… yet!). Since then we’ve shipped several projects. Our criteria for each project was 1) it had to be something we wanted for ourselves and 2) each project had to be more ambitious than the previous.
One day, Joe said that he wanted to share his favorite books online, but found most places did not do this in an elegant way. We noticed that the people we admired used plain lists on their personal websites, rather than Goodreads.
So we thought, hey, surely this can’t be the best way to do things. Maybe there’s a space here to fill what’s missing. From there, we built a static version of the site, and shared it with our friends: https://zeneca.io/joe + https://zeneca.io/stopa
This got enough interest, that we coded up the backend, so anyone could create public book pages. So far, 300 people have created their own public book pages.
Once book pages were in, more ideas start to sprout. We try to discuss books all over the place: from twitter comments to sparse reddit groups. What if there was a place just for this? You could find like-minded readers, have deeper discussions, and save all those conversations. When you wanted to share a book with a friend, they'd be able to "see" your experience of going through it.
To support that, we introduced quotes and thoughts. You can write thoughts about your favorite books, and they'll show up on your public page. Others can send you super cute hearts.
This is still very rough. We want to hack together more features, that can help you really engage with books. One thing we hope, is to siphon time off of Twitter and FB, and move it to something much more enriching: discussing and exploring favorite books.
Please try it out, we'd appreciate your feedback : )
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For the technically curious, the site was all built in Clojure. It's been a joy to use. One surprise for us, was just how powerful Postgres is. Coming from big companies, it's easy to move towards more complicated setups -- however Postgres does a phenomenal job of helping you handle a few users without getting in your way, and going much further.
We're Joe & Stopa, from https://zeneca.io. We're building the successor to Goodreads. For now, you can create public bookshelves (i.e https://zeneca.io/stopa), discover like-minded readers, and share your favorite quotes and thoughts (i.e here's all I learned from PG: https://www.zeneca.io/stopa/details/shycAgAAQBAJ)
We left our jobs in June last year to build a company together (but we didn’t have an idea… yet!). Since then we’ve shipped several projects. Our criteria for each project was 1) it had to be something we wanted for ourselves and 2) each project had to be more ambitious than the previous.
One day, Joe said that he wanted to share his favorite books online, but found most places did not do this in an elegant way. We noticed that the people we admired used plain lists on their personal websites, rather than Goodreads.
So we thought, hey, surely this can’t be the best way to do things. Maybe there’s a space here to fill what’s missing. From there, we built a static version of the site, and shared it with our friends: https://zeneca.io/joe + https://zeneca.io/stopa
This got enough interest, that we coded up the backend, so anyone could create public book pages. So far, 300 people have created their own public book pages.
Once book pages were in, more ideas start to sprout. We try to discuss books all over the place: from twitter comments to sparse reddit groups. What if there was a place just for this? You could find like-minded readers, have deeper discussions, and save all those conversations. When you wanted to share a book with a friend, they'd be able to "see" your experience of going through it.
To support that, we introduced quotes and thoughts. You can write thoughts about your favorite books, and they'll show up on your public page. Others can send you super cute hearts.
This is still very rough. We want to hack together more features, that can help you really engage with books. One thing we hope, is to siphon time off of Twitter and FB, and move it to something much more enriching: discussing and exploring favorite books.
Please try it out, we'd appreciate your feedback : )
---
For the technically curious, the site was all built in Clojure. It's been a joy to use. One surprise for us, was just how powerful Postgres is. Coming from big companies, it's easy to move towards more complicated setups -- however Postgres does a phenomenal job of helping you handle a few users without getting in your way, and going much further.