Read books by email

Bookman by Jean Philip (**@**jpfong) from Montreal, Canada

https://usebookman.com

What’s your motivation for creating your product?

I can stop reading but I prefer to read efficiently. Email can be accessed from any devices that’s why something like Bookman is really practical. Also, the inspiration for Bookman was a web app called gready that allows reading a book via SMS, but it was quickly discontinued.

What are your product features?

Users can upload pub files and receive text sections by email. They can then reply to an email to receive the next section. They can read up to 33% of ebooks they don’t possess.

– users can upload an ePub file to receive it by email

– users can reply to an email from bookman to receive the next section

– they can go to the discover section to read up to 33% of ebooks they don’t possess

– they can start reading classic books offered by Bookman.

When did you launch?

I”ve launched at the beginning of August 2018.

Where did you launch?

Product Hunt

Posted to many of the sites on this GitHub repo.

How did your launch go?

– 135 upvotes on PH

– 100+ registered users

– 204 visits from Product Hunt

– 267 visitors from Designer News

Any specific launch tips? Or things you would do differently?

What I would do is also to test the app before launching or to do a soft launch with friends. The reason is that you can catch bugs and also to test third parties. For bookman, malign to send email was not ready for production, it is only activated when you enter your credit card information. So at first, users couldn’t receive any emails, resulting in a really bad experience!

Not too much success with Hacker news, not a lot of message from them. I had success with articles, from example, Lifehacker which bring a lot of users too. What I would do differently is to try to build expectation before the launch.

Feel free to ask if you want other specific details. Thanks!

Get more stats and stories behind the product launches from makers all over the world at MakerLaunches.