<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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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.
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:
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.
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.
The experience was re-centered around two key ideas: