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Product Value Proposition

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Great!

Based of these app, I’ve used them all but it seems they all lacking of what I actually uses in my daily life.

Can you help me create a complete PRD, using some of the context above, and expand on my pain points and proposition below?

  1. The readwise main and most important feature was the syncing highlights, export options and readwise reader. However, as of now I’m only using Obsidian (we can scrape everything else like Notion, evernote, Roam etc). The spaces repetition don’t matter, cause we export it to Obsidian, obsidian already have that features.

  2. The Readwise reader is great, however it’s lacking organization. It’s really to organize there, as the app was meant to store books in one places, become a reader where you can highlight etc, and tagging. This is all great, but the lack of analytics and organization make me want to use storygraph. Everything else within Readwise Reader is great.

  3. Storygraph great as it have better organizing (tags, lists, stars), engagement (challenges), status, up next queue, and journaling. I don’t like the community part, cause I read for myself.

The above are based of synthesis of these apps, and what I would love to build in my app.

The below is what I needed, but none of these books gave.

  1. Context and Prioritization.
  • Storing books can be hard, I have 1300 ebooks in pdf and epub locally, where it’s hard to manage, also since it’s local I’ve tried to post it on Reader, but it just hard to organize there.
  • Not all books are equal, books that have more recommendation hold surface value higher than books with no recommendation. Some recommendation also holds more value, for an example a random comment on youtube vs. Nassim Taleb recommendation. I would prioritize Nassim’s Taleb recommendation.
  • It would be great if the app can prioritize books, and build next queue based of that.
  • It would also be great if the app can track progress as a whole (for an example user tag a book under “learning”, inside that tag we have 10 books, each books the user read 50%. The learning tag will have status of 50%”
  1. Upload, Availability Context.
  • Since all the other book app, relies on other party for their book availability, except for Reader where you can upload on your own. It didn’t tells you that.
  • For an example, I have 1,300 books list that I want to read. I’ve uploaded 200 of them on readers, but I can’t see that. I don’t which of that books I’ve uploaded at Readers, and at 1,300 books list.
  • Reader problem is that it tried to unified, but there’s no way you can manage the books, if the books haven’t been uploaded. If there’s ways we can have a list of books we want to read, a list of books we have downloaded and available, we can manage these books better. No stress of identifying which books we have downloaded, which books we haven’t etc.

Let’s add User Experience into the PRD.

  1. User open up web app and there’s login page.
  2. User login and end up in main dashboard (main dashboard component is analytics)
  3. There’s sidebar on-left with (Search, Home, Library)

This is how the user would feel. 4. Home: Just like a real library analogy, this is where user can see their activities in their own library. What do they do, etc their analytics/stats. They can also see their current read, their goal, challenge, mission to self etc. It’s a combination of real library, but more personalize to self.

  1. Search Engine: The search Engine can be mimicking the “Catalog Search” of a real library, the differences is that, it now can also search quotes, or highlighted before, aside of the standard search title/tags/author. Search can filter etc, status.

  2. Library : This is where user would spend most of their time aside from reading. This is where user can manage their library and make it truly their own.

  • The library organization would be the Wishlist, Prioritization/Planning, Status, Tags, List
  • Wishlist is where they just add the name of the book, this is where they have to enrich to ensure user have enough context why it’s even in the wishlist
  • Prioritization/planning is where the user can input such thing like Recommendation, Scoring, Notes (specific to Why I Want To Read / Blank Slate Method Shane Parrish), Tags, History
  • Status is simple sort out the listing based of what we want to see, user can set out their status (filter by Availability, Filter by Tags, reading progress etc)
  • Tags is simply showcases tags and inside the tags is the whole list of the books
  • List is simply all the books list out
  • Essentially what we want to create here is that, all books have their own “Book Profile” where user can personalize that book profile. Inputting text, etc and also see related files (for an example, user can put context, that there’s a summary of this book somewhere, or they wrote about it in their obsidian, all this can be input here, so user don’t miss anything)
  1. Reader
  • in-app reader, to imitate user taking a book out of bookshelves to the reading desk
  • in-app reader, for focus, highlight text, make annotations, bookmark pages, Manage reading progress manually. Here, instead of automatic progress tracking, you could implement: A manual progress bar or slider where users set their current page or chapter. Checkpoints where users manually confirm they’ve completed specific sections. Alerts or suggestions to save progress at regular intervals or when closing the book.
  1. All highlights etc, is stored first at the web app. User can open up Obsidian, where we have our plugin. This is where they can login, and “Sync” highlights to obsidian.

Readwise + Goodreads + Personal Pain = Booky

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