This is great but I'm not going to sign up just to see what the site looks like. There's no reason for a large part of the functionality (book info, ratings, reviews) to be behind a login wall. As it stands right now Goodreads is a lot more open.
* Dashboard/feed: https://i.imgur.com/bUGZX27.png
* Book page (from search): https://i.imgur.com/9BQK7hF.png
* Bookshelves (adding a book is just a modal on this page): https://i.imgur.com/sHzorJE.png
* "Community": https://i.imgur.com/nzI9FNZ.png
* Profile: https://i.imgur.com/kcxitYb.png
There isn't a lot of content to showcase, but the screenshots on the homepage (at https://www.booqsi.com/) seem to show off each of the currently-available pages. It'd be nice to have some kind of search to see book search result pages for yourself without signing up, but honestly there's not much to see (yet?). You can see for yourself: https://app.booqsi.com/books/9781408865446
We built it to be a social platform for you to engage with your community about books, with the underlying motivation that a book recommendation from a friend (or seeing what their favorites are) is inherently more powerful than a random review online.
Having a login and simple profiles that represent your person seemed like the bare minimum for a social platform to function. Also worth noting... we're trying the magic link approach for logins, so a one-time email input is all that's required.
If people weren't able to understand how email worked before signing up to it, you damn be sure that no one would sign up for it. But email is ubiquitous enough today that people don't need to understand how it works before signing up, because they likely already understand it.
But "social media for books" is different. Show me how the feed looks, show of it looks when people are using it. It's likely I either ignore it because I can't understand what it would give me without viewable screenshots about how it works before, or I sign up and land on an empty feed, getting discouraged from even using it because it's so empty when I first arrive.
Showing people how a product works before asking them to sign up is not a big ask, and something vital especially when trying to get people to sign up and commit to a new social network, when there are new ones created everyday.
People just want to see how stuff works before, and it'll take a couple of hours tops to add to the landing page.
Pass.
Why are you more trustworthy than Amazon with my book reading habits?
NOTE: Your IP address for booqsi.com appears to be run on ... AWS ... seems ironic or shady, can't tell which.
> "... having Booqsi be independent of Amazon was one of the inspirations for wanting to build it in the first place"
There is no evidence to support the claims this person makes that it's not a part of Amazon itself. (I don't believe it it is a part of Amazon either, btw) It's a huge en devour to make a social network and it's got a slick interface and design.
My gut says this is not a one man show (he says "we" alot), they have _legal_ pages on their site (evidence of their priorities?), but no details on who they actually are on their about page, (lowers my trust factor by a lot) unlike a lot of other projects around here.
So, there is more evidence to support skepticism than there is to support carelessly believing some marketing blurb.
(edit: for clarity)
OP, you need to deliver lots of public value to customers who haven't converted yet.
Always remember. "3 free articles a week" isn't you giving your stuff away.
It's marketing that costs you nothing.
Free marketing. Keep repeating it to yourself. Free marketing.