[HN Gopher] Show HN: My first side project, streamlined book clu...
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Show HN: My first side project, streamlined book clubs on Slack
Author : Papamanolis
Score : 82 points
Date : 2025-02-09 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (booktalk.club)
(TXT) w3m dump (booktalk.club)
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Hey people!
|
| After years and years of wanting to start something and build a
| product, I'm taking a jab at it!
|
| So basically, me and a few of my coworkers wanted to create a
| virtual book club since we are all working remotely and decided
| why not automate it.
|
| I've been working on booktalk, a Slack app that makes book clubs
| easier to run. For now it will allow the team to get details and
| suggestions about books, vote on books that they want to read,
| set a timeframe for their reading cycle, and when the cycle ends,
| it reaches out with a few relevant questions about the book!
|
| Has any of you organized or participated in a virtual book club
| before? What was your experience, any challenges that you faced
| or features that were missing?
|
| Fire away!
|
| PS: Let me know if you have any feedback about the website too,
| it was my first time creating a landing page!
| gostsamo wrote:
| Funnily enough, recently we started a bookclub in our office
| and we are using slack. Not sure if we need the app, but we
| might try it.
|
| The biggest challenge for me is to accept when the team chooses
| an obviously bad book, but they will learn with experience. A
| feature about book details sounds good but depends on the
| source and if it is marketing or a good critical one. Finding
| the book in print would be a nice feature which is easy for
| english and big countries, but might be hard otherwise.
|
| Edit: maybe consider a feature for setups where people rotate
| to choose the book if there is not one yet.
| agscala wrote:
| Maybe it would be valuable to have an anonymous "onboarding"
| experience where people choose the genres they like or
| dislike, and then the people choosing the book can be
| informed a summary of the groups preferences.
|
| Also an anonymous thumbs up/down after the book is read could
| help the group choose a better next book
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Such a cool idea! I'm definitely going to explore this
| feature for the upcoming release.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| The biggest feature that I'd love to see with a virtual book
| club would be a way to "unlock" discussions based on how far
| the into the book you are. The goal would be to make things
| asynchronous (so you could read at your own pace) without
| getting hit with spoilers.
| fm2606 wrote:
| That is a good idea.
| Ntrails wrote:
| > The goal would be to make things asynchronous (so you could
| read at your own pace) without getting hit with spoilers.
|
| I don't, personally, think that works super well?
|
| I don't want to join in at the tail of a thorough discussion
| and add my 2 cents to people who have moved on.
|
| I also wouldn't want to keep getting dragged back to prior
| threads on bits I won't remember as well (most specifically
| where the spoilers start).
|
| So, I could well be wrong, but it sounds awkward to _me_
| dewey wrote:
| Some landing page feedback: As Slack is mostly used in a
| corporate context the first thing people will look at when they
| add an app to their workspace would be the privacy policy and to
| see if it's trustworthy. Would maybe be worth it to expand on
| that a bit?
| Papamanolis wrote:
| That's a great point! Privacy is really important to me as
| well, and I'm strongly against collecting anything beyond
| what's necessary for the app to function. I'll work on adding a
| dedicated section to clarify this as soon as possible. Really
| appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback!
| sudodan wrote:
| Edit
| ericholscher wrote:
| Love this idea! We wrote up a post about the book club we were
| running at our small company, and it was great for expanding
| people's interest and understanding of different topics:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/05/running-a-company-boo...
|
| Picking a book was often the hardest part though, so this tool
| having recommendations and voting seems like a really nice
| solution.
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Hi, and thanks for the feedback! One of my top priorities right
| now is learning as much as possible about online book club
| experiences from others, so I really appreciate you sharing the
| blog post!
|
| Interesting to hear. Personally, finding a book was usually the
| easiest part (probably because we have dozens waiting on our
| 'to-read' lists). I'll do my best to make the book
| recommendation experience as smooth as possible.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Yea we all have a lot of books to read, but trying to figure
| out how the group wants to learn something and discuss is
| hard. Especially when the goal is having some business
| benefit, not just reading for fun.
|
| There's a lot of "paper reading" clubs which might also be
| interesting to look in to.
| Papamanolis wrote:
| That's a really interesting angle, I've never thought about
| paper reading clubs before. They seem much more fast-paced
| and could probably benefit from a shared notes side
| feature! Thank you for the food for thought!
| gmargaritis wrote:
| I've been a part of various book clubs in the past, mostly in
| person and few on Discord. One thing that really turned me off in
| virtual ones was how people would post while reading, sometimes
| creating small spoilers for others. I always wished for a way to
| mark spoilers to avoid ruining surprises. Is this something you'd
| consider adding?
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Thanks a bunch for the suggestion! I've run into the same issue
| in online book clubs, so it's something that I'll definitely
| add in the upcoming version!
| angoragoats wrote:
| Why would you build this on a platform that 1) is mostly used for
| business communication and 2) requires a monthly per-user payment
| if you want to see content older than 90 days? Why not make it a
| standalone tool? Then you could always offer an optional Slack
| integration for those who wish to use it at work.
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Good point! I know there are a lot of book club communities on
| Discord and other platforms, but we were already using Slack
| and didn't want to migrate to another platform just for the
| book club. It just felt like the easiest way to get started.
| layer8 wrote:
| Regarding #2, this book club service will presumably become a
| paid service anyway, so it's only a matter of how much you need
| to pay.
| angoragoats wrote:
| It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to compare paying an
| indie hacker for a service that you actually find valuable to
| paying Salesforce for a text communication tool.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Looking at the first few questions from the survey, this seems
| geared specifically to work-oriented book clubs. I.e., book clubs
| in a professional context. FWIW, I was hoping for/expecting one
| that was free of those associations. It might be worth spelling
| that out more explicitly on the landing page.
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback! The app isn't specifically centered
| around work-related book clubs, and it can be used in any Slack
| workspace. It's just that Slack is often thought of as a work
| tool, so that association tends to stick. I'll make sure to
| clarify this on the landing page!
| bmelton wrote:
| Not surprising that Lighthouse didn't catch it, but the white
| text on the peachish background lacks contrast for accessibility
| and would be quite hard to read for the visually impaired / older
| audiences.
|
| (If that's something you're concerned with)
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Agreed, the white text is very low contrast against the plasma
| background. Did you intend dark text?
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Great point! I've just updated it. Thanks for the feedback.
| bmelton wrote:
| MUCH improved!
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Why slack.. cuz it has huddles integrated?
|
| Just build on Zed at that point.
| leetrout wrote:
| I built the bones of the same thing! :)
|
| Curious what stacks and tools you are using. I went with Bolt on
| AWS Lambda.
| dyeje wrote:
| Congrats on shipping. Curious, why Slack? Is this intended for
| book clubs at companies specifically?
| treylayton wrote:
| landing page is super aesthetically pleasing. for my last
| project, i built v1 as a discord bot, and my conversion rate from
| "yes i'll try it" to sign ups was abysmal. kept asking and
| finally realized it was because people didn't want to use discord
| or slack or some third-party service to access the tool. others
| have touched on it, but if you want to expand beyond corporate
| book clubs, would probably recommend building it out as a
| standalone service, or maybe into imessage or whatsapp?
| catinblack wrote:
| I can't submit the form. I have "something went wrong" error
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Sorry about that! The site was hugged to death, you can retry
| now!
| ignaciodiaz wrote:
| The landing page looks great. What did you use for the
| animations?
| Papamanolis wrote:
| Thank you so much! I built the website using Framer. For the
| animations I used https://particles.page/ but as i see now the
| component is no longer available.
| kojeovo wrote:
| is discussion history retained? or is it wiped cuz of free slack
| tier?
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Jira integration next! This sounds great for leadership and team-
| building literature.
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