hazzajay

Wow, that's awesome to hear. Sydney is founding a lot of startups. I live in Melbourne. Stay in touch, mate.

Awesome, thank you for your response mate.

Hi Pete!

It's free to sign up now :)

Pete, thank you so much for your feedback! Love everything that you've said, it nailed everything I was confused about. I appreciate your advice a lot. And its cool to hear that you were thinking about doing the same idea earlier. I'm happy to provide you with a forever free account. So whatever happens with the website, you'll always get free access :)

And you're spot on, with regards to pricing, quiz availability and crowd-sourcing. Those are definitely the hurdles at the moment. I'll explain a little about them and would love to hear your thoughts on them.

On pricing: I took advice from Dan Martell, Noah Kagan, and Derek Sivers whom all said to first set a price and let the users provide feedback. I'll probably remove the subscription in the coming days. I really don't want to make a book recommendations product, because there are a lot of them out there. I'll have to think about the pricing/business model more. Do you have any other thoughts?

Can you delve a bit deeper into why you wouldn't pay a one-off $5 or a $10/per year price? My reasoning behind it was (1) it's a similar price to one ebook, (2) $5 or $10/year is a small expense for someone that is actively interested in self-development (best-selling non-fiction book reader) and (3) Blinkist creates book summaries and sell their service for $10/per month. If you've taken the sample quiz, you'll see that BookGym is a combination of quiz & book summary (detailed feedback).

On quiz availability: it's a project at the moment and I'm validating the idea. I didn't see any point creating many quizzes if the market isn't interested in it. However, if there is enough interest, I'll set an official launch date. It's true that there won't be a lot of quizzes available on launch, but I don't plan on creating a "startup" or taking outside capital. I think I'd like to keep this a small project and grow it slowly over time. I'm happy to help a very small amount of people. Eg. if you're a paying customer, I'd be creating quizzes based on your requests.

On crowd-sourcing: an end-goal would be to make BookGym a place where people can contribute their own notes, learnings and questions about a book. We can use this crowd-sourced information (as well as our own research) to create summaries, courses & quizzes based on best-selling non-fiction books. I don't have the resources (money & time) to do this straight away, but if I did, I probably would! Nevertheless, I can always start small and grow into that. But this is just hypothetical right now.

Thanks again, Pete. Hope you're having a great day. If you're on twitter, I'd love to follow you. I'm @hazzajay.

Okay, so five of you checked out the website. Champions! I really appreciate that A LOT.

Can you please leave your feedback? Would love to hear your thoughts. You can be as honest as you want. Thank you again!

You aren't "earning 12K" you are using that 12K to kick start your idea.

Hand-written!

Definitely send a hand-written one. Mark Suster wrote on twitter once that he appreciates hand-written thank-you letters from other investors, founders and employees!

I hope that the same dudes that are against this aren't the same douches that were for the fappening.

This is my first time on HN. Don't know what the chances are, but what a coincidence. I'm building a startup that solves this exact problem. I have been struggling with social anxiety & introversion for years, so I'm sick of it.

As the OP has mentioned, "it saddens me that I find myself idling on weekends, doing everything by myself. Its really painful on times when I have a lack of self-confidence." Don't worry OP, you're not alone :)

Not going to post links or names of the startup because this is my first time posting. If anybody is interested, feel free to ask me.