Show HN: A simple way to remember (and learn) the key messages of books | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A simple way to remember (and learn) the key messages of books

3 pointshazzajay8 comments

Hi everyone,

Would love your feedback and questions on this project I started a couple weeks ago.

After finishing Robert Greene's book Mastery, I searched for ways to see how much I learned from it. I wanted to check how much I actually learned, as well as take my understanding of Mastery to another level. But there was nothing available online that tested me.

There were only YouTube videos, podcast interviews and book summaries. These are all fantastic for revision, but not so great for testing oneself. I remember thinking: "I wish there were quizzes based on non-fiction books."

And so, seeing that there was nothing available online, I decided to try create a quiz myself. I had recently read Derek Sivers fantastic book Anything You Want. It's a short, quick and brilliant read for first-time entrepreneurs. So I made a quiz based on that, which you can take yourself here: http://www.bookgym.xyz/#anything-you-want. I showed the quiz to Derek Sivers himself and his response was: "BookGym looks like a wonderful idea! I just did the quiz based on my book. That was so cool!"

The basic premise of BookGym: after you finish reading a best-selling non-fiction book, you can take the accompanying quiz for that book and check how much you learned. After each question, you'll get detailed feedback, depending on whether you got the question right or wrong.

I am dedicated to doing one thing, and one thing only: creating the best interactive quizzes based on best-selling non-fiction books. I want to help you remember (and learn) the key messages of a book.

The main question therefore is: would you pay for this service? If yes, why? If no, why?

Here is the URL: http://www.bookgym.xyz

Thank you for your help!

First off, nicely designed site, and nice description of how it works.

This is something I was thinking about early in the year, and as a result, I started taking notes while reading. Though, that assumes I'm a good note-taker, which I may not be.

I'm not a fan of your pricing model, I'm sure you've thought of freemium, or affiliate models, and personally, I think that you'll get more traction with that.

It also appears that only you create the quizzes. That's interesting. Why not get the community to build the quizzes? That gets you more books, and if the community can update each others quizzes, etc. likely you will end up with a better overall quiz along with more of them.

My father always said that teaching somebody else is the best way to ensure you know the material. He used to be a teacher, so I guess there is some truth in that.

If I were you, I'd make the site free to use. Free to take a quiz.

After I have taken a quiz, you know what book I've read, so you can make recommendations on books that I should read. How many books do I have to buy via affiliate links to get you the same revenue as your $10/year?

I'm not ready to convert yet, but I'd like to give a quiz a try at least. But I'd need to know that you have quizzes for the books I've read. I think that is your biggest hurdle at the moment. Crowd source it.

Keep up the good work.

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.

Hey, sorry for the late reply.

Just to clarify, I didn't have the same idea, I had the idea that I wanted to make sure I was learning the material, I'm not sure/convinced a quiz is the way to do it, but at least you are doing something. I just had a thought and too many other projects :)

There may be a lot of book recommendation products out there, but name one. I'm not suggesting you build a book recommendation product but as a side-effect of your product, you could help people to buy more books.

The difference between blinklist and bookgym is that they are selling access to the content. Sure, it isn't the real thing, it's like they are selling a knock-off. Not as good as the real thing, but you're getting it cheaper.

For one, I wouldn't spend $10/year for what is currently there. And I don't see how you can scale without crowd-sourcing, so you've got a bit of a chicken/egg problem where people won't want to pay until you have content, but you won't have content until you have people supplying it, whom you're expecting to pay.

I completely agree with you not creating a ton of quizzes at the moment, until you see the market is interested. That's the right thing to do. But you also have to be able to measure market interest, which is a bit difficult to do without content. I don't have a clear answer for you there.

Awesome, thank you for your response mate.

I saw 'mate', and just realized you're Aussie, I live up in Bondi.

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

Hi Pete!

It's free to sign up now :)

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!

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