<aside> ⛰️ Context

I have been working at Koober since July 2022 as their CPO.

Since the team is small, I am effectively doing everything product and design related there.

Koober is a competitor to Blinkist (non-fiction book summaries) focused on the French-speaking market.

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The Problem

Koober has had severe retention problems since it started and solving them was my unique focus from the start.

I had identified two “zeros”: key moments of the experience that, if broken, prevented the app from delivering the promise.

1. “Find content”: you get out of the house in the morning, ready to take the car or the metro for the delay commute. You open Koober, scroll and search but you don’t find something that appeals to you. You close it and listen to music instead.
2. “Great koobs”: you start a koob (a book summary, in audio). The voice is boring and mechanical. You still listen to it because you think it’s good for you. At the end, you don’t remember anything useful.

The Situation

In November 2022, after a series of incremental improvement that failed to bring the expected results, I decided that we had to try a more radical approach and change the core feel of the app.

We still had deep-rooted problems and we were running out of cash. Mainly:

• A. We had many koobs of poor quality, as highlighted by their low completion count
• B. The high number of koobs made it hard to make a choice

We did not have the resources to counter Problem A by remaking all the content with the time we had left, so we decided to change the positioning of the app and go for curated quality instead of quantity.

The goal

We wanted to go from a tired directory of 2000 books summaries to a modern and dense self-help guide that could hold its own against other reference mobile apps.

What we tried

The experience was re-centered around two key ideas:

1. Extreme curation of only the best non-fiction books on each topic, rather than unopinionated lists of so-so books.
2. Visualising your own progress.