Hello, kittens!
If you're curious to learn more about what this thing is all about, I'd encourage you to check out a story I wrote about how we came up with the idea and what the product does: https://medium.com/@nbashaw/a-ne...
If you want the TL;DR—
• Books are awesome, but take a lot of time and energy
• Social apps are less awesome, and make you feel kind of empty inside if you use them too much
• Scrolling through a bunch of text gets boring pretty quickly unless the writer is amazing
So, we created Hardbound!
• We create 5-minute, illustrated stories based on bestselling nonfiction books (specifically focused on business, history, and science for now)
• We use a unique, "tap story" format that combines photos, illustrations, animations, and text in a way your brain will love
• Our team of writers and designers in New York crafts every story with a lot of TLC, and our goal is to be the opposite of the traditional dry, boring "book summary" genre
If that sounds interesting, give our app a try! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/...
And definitely let me know if you have any feedback!
@nbashaw Congrats on the relaunch!
I tend to dislike reading book summaries (e.g. Blinkist) over the actual book as I believe you'll need to spend some time on a topic to really grasp it, but these stories seem like nice introductions. A quick way to get familiar with a topic and see if it's something you want to dive into deeper by buying the book. (which lets you make an affiliate commission) Smart approach! :)
@nbashaw This is exactly what I've been wanting and exactly what I wanted Hardbound to be when I first saw it...
But you've made it even better than that.
This is seriously awesome. I cant even start bigging it up enough.
I have so many books on my 'to-read' list, that I'd love to flick through 5 mins like I just did on Hardbound!
Do you and the team condense the posts yourself?
Also love the whole flow, and at the end the prompts to buy the book, discuss, share etc. So nice
@nbashaw Congratulations on the launch! Love this idea. Any plans to import an amazon list? It would be awesome to get a gist before I decide what to buy. At the moment book recommendations from twitter end up in that list.
@bentossell oh boy, have I got the Medium post for you! https://medium.com/@nbashaw/a-ne...
But seriously, we saw that people LOVED our format, but our content wasn't quite as sticky. So we knew we needed to make some sort of change. We considered focusing on a specific topic, but that felt wrong. Then, we realized that 4/5 of our best performing stories were based on non-fiction books. And it just kind of clicked. Two months later, here we are!
@nbashaw Congrats Nathan and team 🙌 Love your work and the app! I understand the pivot but I'm gonna miss stories😢
I use Blinklist, mainly in audio, to discover books I should read. So I like the difference in focusing in a fact or a view rather than a summary. I think this is what gives more value to it.
But still, I'm gonna miss a lot your stories !!
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