Welcome back to the weekly update about my project, Booklet! Here, I’m documenting my journey of building something new.
It’s been about three months since I last worked on Booklet. During that time I moved cities and switched jobs. The transitions took a lot of mental energy, and change served as an impetus to reevaluate my priorities. As I settled into a new location and a new role, I paused work on Booklet and took time to explore. I read some great books (such as Shop Class as Soulcraft and Atomic Habits), experimented with some new potential hobbies, and thought about my long-term goals.
In the end, I returned to Booklet as the main project I want to commit to. I feel inspired by my vision, I have the skills to achieve that vision, and I believe that people want it. So, I’ve returned with a renewed excitement and optimism to working on Booklet. I’ve committed code to it every day for the last week, and intend to continue that habit!
What's Booklet?
Booklet is a tool for organizing private communities. Invite members, communicate on the forum, post announcements, and browse the directory. Every day, members receive a summary of new posts, discussions, and the latest members. It’s a better alternative to Google Groups, Slack, and Facebook Groups.
What have I accomplished this week?
I’m working on letting people create a new group:
When you create a group, you pick its username (such as `bestbloggers`). That username becomes the homepage on booklet (such as `bookl.et/bestbloggers`), and it becomes the group email address (`bestbloggers@bookl.et`).
Currently, I’m amid building the infrastructure for how group memberships are stored.
One design decision I’ve made is that your “profile” is unique to a particular group. So, if you’re in two different groups- you can have separate photos, separate names, separate biographies, and even separate email addresses. I think that in a post-Facebook world, people want more contextual control their information. (The Ruby library FriendlyId makes it really easy to keep URLs pretty, too).
What's next?
Finishing the ability for people to be members of a group and set up their profile
Creating a way to invite a person to a group, then a way for that person to accept the invitation
Things I’m thinking about
Pricing - I might launch with a $5/community/month plan instead of a free plan. I want groups to be accessible for people - not just companies. I had thought of one-time prices instead of a subscription to host a group, but this doesn’t seem to align the business with the users for long-term sustainability. In the future, I would add more expensive plans with more features - such as event invitations or sub-groups.
I’ve tentatively decided to eventually move this blog to the `bookl.et/hq` group (“Booklet HQ”) as the first community to test the product. So, be prepared!
I started testing Github Copilot, which is a tool that uses AI to auto-complete code. The high quality of its first code suggestion for Booklet surprised me:
How you can help ⬇️
What make sense or doesn’t make sense from the description? How would you use Booklet? What do you think of the pricing?
Thanks 🙏