3 reflections after 1 year, $8500, trying to connect total strangers together based on books
The Origin
I just finished reading a book that meaningfully shifted my perspective and wondered, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could snap my fingers and instantly meet 10 other people who wanted to nerd out about this book?”
That was the birthplace of this idea.
A year ago, I launched The Book Connection and using some guerrilla marketing on Goodreads and Twitter, we brought on nearly 1000 users.
I had my super reliable virtual assistant (VA) help me run most (basically 99% of it) of the project.
How it worked:
Using the google form, people would submit up to 5 books they were excited to talk about
My VA would go through submissions once a week and manually match people who had the same books
My VA would send out an email to the pair asking if they’d want to be introduced
If both of them said yes, my VA would send an introduction email
After 30 days, my VA would follow up to check in on the introduction
Impact
In total, we sent 400+ introduction emails, connecting hundreds of total strangers with each other, purely over the love and interest of a book.
We ended up confirming 68 introductions and gathered feedback about what went well and what we could do differently.
Here were some of my favorite testimonials:
Jane and I have been chatting ever since, and it’s been going great actually. This service has been really useful and helpful so thanks a lot 🥰
What a life-giving match-up! We're going to stay connected via email and meet again to continue the discussion.
Thanks so much for connecting Jane and I! It's been fun to email back and forth and we've been chatting about other things too - it's like having a pen pal 😊
Yes, we are exchanging emails weekly and talking not only about books, but a lot of things. We’re recommending books to each other and supporting each other on our reading journey.
It's one of the best conversations I've had in a while!
We had a lot to talk about based off our experiences and how the book addressed them and it was just....perfect.
First of all, let me thank you and compliment you for this amazing thing that you are doing. You are a revolutionary in my eyes.
Yes, Jane and I did converse and it was amazing. We still exchange emails at least twice a week. Thank you for gifting me a friend who reads.
Hi! We have definitely gotten the chance to converse, in fact, we talk to each other I think every day. We get along great, she is so much like me. It’s almost odd, in the best way, possible lol we have very similar situations with our parents, we talk about books, like the same TV shows, overall we get along great, I’m actually really appreciate of of book connections, I just got done sending her a message, she lives in the UK so she is eight hours ahead of me, but I was just thinking of how grateful I am that I have her as a friend now. So whatever you’re doing I’d say it definitely works and I’d be happy to meet more people through book connections.
Reflections
Money, Privilege, Values
I understand that saying that I spent multiple thousands into a side project a pretty privileged statement to make — not everyone has that kind of money to burn for an experiment.
I find it a little weird that I feel some shame having the financial capacity to do something like that. I understand it’s likely because we have so many shit examples of how people with money abuse it.
But isn’t that the purpose of money?
To amplify the values that you have?Playing Cat and Mouse
Generally, I wouldn’t be proud of something like this. But Goodreads is owned by Amazon, so whatevs.
My VA probably made 100-200 Goodreads accounts to send over 160,000 friend requests over the span of the project. By the time we wound down the project, Goodreads had shut down most of them.
It was a constant back and forth of figuring out how to evade Goodreads’ detection mechanisms and getting our account banned.
Twitter shut down a bunch of our accounts as well.
This was actually the biggest contributing reason to shutting it down. It just got really tiring to keep spinning up new accounts after they got banned.
I understand the need for rate limiting and preventing abuse on these platforms.It was both fun and eventually frustrating to try to outsmart them.
We tried using VPNs, we tried warming up accounts, we tried rate-limiting ourselves… but eventually, all of them still got banned.The Nature of Funnels (again)
62,261 outbound messages were sent.951 users actually signed up.
That’s a 1.5% conversion rate.This reminds me of the funnel I built during my first job hunt.
63 applications that led to 3 offers (4.5%).I’m 245 days into running a Hinge experiment, I’ve had 130 women “like” me but I’ve only matched & swapped numbers with one person (0.7%).
I’ve been running YouTube ads for a course I’m building, I had 29.2k impressions that led to 56 clicks (0.19%).
Seeing the scale of these numbers helps explain why some of my past businesses haven’t done well, we simply needed more eyeballs on the offering we had. In theory, if I had triple the VAs (and budget) I could have 2-3x the user base!
It also makes me think about friends who have started companies, agencies, or consultancies, and struggle to find clients/customers. Perhaps, they didn’t know how to play the marketing-numbers game?
This makes me want to make marketing more of my core competencies…
Closing Thoughts
Despite the bummer of having to shut this down, there was some upside for me.
While running the project, I did connect with someone who I am still in touch with.
This user had listed John Maxwell, Reinventing Organizations, Give and Take (one of my favorites) as some of his books, it made a ton of sense to reach out — we met in Vancouver and are still in touch to this day 😊
In this day and age, community and connection are things so many people are starving for.
I tried to create something around that idea.
I’m glad I could create that for a handful of internet strangers.
If were retired and had more cashflow, I’d keep funding this work and run it at a loss.
But until then, on to the next project!
If you’ve ever wanted to host a retreat in a beautiful space on a budget, you might be interested in the next thing I’ve been working on:
Book Connection Stats (for the data nerds):
Most popular book on our platform:
It Ends With Us (60 users)
Total number of unique books submitted on our platform:
1076 titles
IG:
2300 followers
Twitter marketing stats:
43,616 tweets/mentions sent
4.4% CTR
6.57% conversion rate (126 sign ups)
Goodreads marketing stats:
164,739 friend requests sent (~14% acceptance rate)
18,645 DMs sent
4.4% conversion rate (825 sign ups)
Service stats:
951 sign ups
430 introduction emails sent
68 confirmed matches
61 NPS
Cost Breakdown
$8500, 13 months
$9.17 per user
$19.75 per introduction email
I’m always working on 2-3 different side projects.
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