How Margins Built a Viral Reading App

20 million Americans read a book a week and they have been since before the internet came, since before smartphones came, and they are still reading at least a book a week. And who are those people? If you go look at the life of a reader, it's kind of spread out over like 5 10 different apps and they don't really play well with each other. It's like a specific pet peeve of mine that really annoyed me is I would buy a book on Amazon and then I would read it on the Kindle. I would track it on Goodreads and I would like go back to Amazon and Goodreads and it would be like what should I read next and the recommendations would recommend the book I just finished and I'd be like excuse me you're all owned by Amazon like you know what I read like why are you recommending me only books that I've already finished like I would like new things please what is margins margins is an app that helps people become readers

and if you are readers it helps you deepen your relationship with books overall my goal with margins is to just help the world read more welcome to Subversive, a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world. We'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business, including insights and inflection points that led to exponential growth from leaders at category defining companies and innovative startups.

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My guest today is Paul Warren, founder and CEO of the Margins reading app that recently won Apple's app of the day award and that reached hundreds of thousands of active readers in less than a year after it launched. In this episode, I talked to Paul about why most reading apps feel overly transactional, about how margins managed to go viral across both Tik Tok and X by obsessing over product quality, and about the specific growth tactics that helped Paul turn his personal obsession with reading into a rapidly growing consumer subscription business. All right, Paul, welcome to the Subversive podcast. I'm excited to have you on the show today.

uh you recently founded an app called Margins that's gotten a lot of attention within the reading world. So to start

with, why don't we just hear a little bit more about what Margins is and the path that led you to founding it. >> Super excited to be here and share more about the journey. We've kept it somewhat close to the chest. Um and so this is actually one of the first times I'm coming out to talk about margins more publicly um especially to this audience. And so I'm I'm excited to see uh to share a bit more. What is margins? Margins is an app that helps people become readers. And if you are readers, it helps you deepen your relationship with books. Um the phrase we hear a lot now that we're trying to move away from it productwise is margins is a better Goodreads. You know, that is people mostly use it to track their books. Um their want to reads, their finished readings, their ratings, their reviews.

Um, we just launched some social features and so they're starting to use it to see what your friends are reading, to discover cool new books that you might be really interested in. One way that I think about it is it's a habit tracker. Um, and so there's a lot of like number go up. There's a lot of pretty recaps at the end of every month and at the end of the year like our 2025 wrapped just recently went viral um in in the book and reading community and so we got a lot of downloads just from that. Um, so overall my goal with margins is to just help the world read more.

>> I love that. And on that topic, you've described yourself as an extreme reader, somebody who reads dozens if not hundreds of books in a year. So, how has

being such a voracious reader shaped your life and been part of your identity? I have been reading from very early on and I think it actually started in first grade with my mom reading Harry Potter to me and uh she had to bribe me with pizza to like make me sit and listen to her and when she got about halfway through the book reading out loud she like slammed it shut and then turned to me and said if you want to know the rest you got to read it yourself. Um and ever since I've read a couple hundred books a year. Honestly it just been one of those things that have stayed with me. When I want to learn about something new, I read a lot about it. When I want to escape, I read a lot of fiction, like escapism. When I want to like develop some more understanding of other people and totally different lives, I read, you know, there's a lot of like I read a lot of books that are in no way and characters and

protagonists that are in no way relation to like my daily life. I love it. I love that it's like I read a lot of different culture works. I read I've sort of read a little bit of everything as as the years gone by. And so it's it's certainly my my comfort activity. And I honestly would even call it my addiction. Like it's it's definitely not like I spend about a thousand hours a year reading. You know, I read probably like three three hours a day um on average. Um to not because it's a good ROI, but just cuz I I love it so much.

>> Yeah. Well, I suppose if you're going to be addicted to anything, being addicted to reading, you could do a lot worse. And it's funny that you bring up Harry Potter because I confided in you before we started the show that I have two daughters, an 8-year-old and a six-year-old. And when my oldest, Kinley, turned seven, that's when we started reading Harry Potter, of course, because seven is the magical number in Harry Potter. And between >> seven and eight, we read through all seven books and she was just so delighted by it. And she's become a voracious reader in her own right. She reads all the time now. Uh, and it's such a helpful habit to have. I'm embarrassed to say that I don't read nearly as much as I used to, although I get to read with her, which is nice.

>> I'm curious, you >> you built this product that is very much solving your own need as an avid reader.

Before margins, what tools or systems were you personally using and where did you feel like they fell short? >> So, before margins, I used a bunch of different I used Goodreads for tracking. Um, I read a lot on Kindle. Um, I've done a little bit of audible. Uh, I discovered books through online socials like Reddit, um, friend recommendations, Amazon.com recommendations. Um, and there were a few other apps here and there. Apple notes was, you know, a big part of where I like kept my own notes on what I was reading and things like this. And actually that was one of the big product decisions that I made early in the day of margins is I said hey if you go look at like the life of a reader it's kind of spread out over like 5 10 different apps and they don't really play well with each other. It's like a specific pet peeve of mine that really annoyed me is I would buy a book on Amazon and then I would read it on like

the Kindle. I would track it on Goodreads and I would like go back to Amazon and Goodreads and it would be like what should I read next and the recommendations would recommend the book I just finished and I'd be like excuse me you're all owned by Amazon like you know what I read like why are you recommending me only books that I've already finished like I would like new things please um and and so you know overall like one of the product thesis of mine and one of the design prompts has been if you take all of these books uh book apps and imagine if they were run by Apple and they had like Apple ecosystem integration And like the tracker was the same as your notetaker, was the same as your reader, was the same as your social experience, was the same as your discovery engine. And you kind of took all that functionality and put it under one roof and made it play really well with each other. And that's

been the long-term product direction that we're heading in. >> Yeah. Well, I I forget the name of the person, but somebody famous talked about how so much innovation and technology just comes down to bundling or unbundling. >> That's right. and and so you don't I mean if you have a really design well-designed consumer product even if all you're doing is bundling up experiences that already exist elsewhere but doing it in a really integrated and elegant way that could be significant value ad for the for the consumer and in this case for the reader. Um, last question before we jump into the core of the discussion today is just what inspired you to become an entrepreneur in the first place and what was the spark that led you to found margin specifically because you spent some time

earlier in your career as an engineering leader and as you know a member of a larger team but then you decided to go off on your own and start founding companies and you've been doing that for a while now. So what what led you down that path? My early career definitely was like machine learning engineer and software engineer. Um and what really led me to entrepreneurship was working at early stage startups and sort of seeing what they were doing and being like oh I could do that you know like that that that makes sense. And in fact I want to do that because sometimes I don't always agree with what you know the people above me are kind of doing and deciding. Um and I I think maybe there's a different way that's better.

And if I can't do it here maybe I'll leave and go try it my way and see if it works. So margins is my my third try at starting something of my own. Um you know the previous ones had some like very small amount of success enough for me to be like okay cool you know this is this is kind of working. Um, and the reason why I've kept going, you know, of course there's a it's kind of working and things are nice and things to be generally progressing in a positive direction career-wise, but uh, the biggest thing is when I'm doing it for my own thing, I feel alive.

>> And when I'm doing it for other people, I just don't quite feel as alive. Um, and I really like feeling alive, you know? And so that's actually how I organize a lot of my life is I try a bunch of different things and I just ask myself like what makes me feel good and what makes me feel bad and like not in like a hedonistic like casual way but in like a deepseated inner meeting you know peace with the world like kind of peace with you know I'm doing what I need to do. Um, and so just turns out surprising fun fact after trying many things and like nomading around the world for eight years and working at a bunch of other companies is like actually I really do just love being in Silicon Valley and trying to build tech startups from scratch.

>> Yeah. Well, I think that's refreshing to hear. I feel like there are so many people, myself included, at times in my career that have been more guided by fear or uh the desire to avoid risk. Yeah, >> I think more and more the way the world is going, you get rewarded for pursuing your passions. Obviously, you need to be good at what you do and you need to have real skills. But with that as a prerequisite, I think if you follow what you're most interested in, that will ultimately lead to the best long-term returns. And that's that's what you've done certainly as being a founder, but now being a founder of a company for readers of of which you one. So, let's let's get into the conversation about margins and let's start with what makes margins different from other reading and book tracking apps. And I know you said that you get a little annoyed when people compare margins to good readads,

but I'd be remiss if I didn't start there. Like it's it's not a space without competition. And so what has

margins done from the beginning to really set itself apart? So there have been a few strategic decisions that I made really early on. The first and most important one was a big emphasis on craftsmanship. I said, "Hey, this is an existing category. There have been apps in the space for two decades plus. There have been many new apps that have popped up here and there. Um, nobody's really tried to sit down and like do the linear approach, the superhuman approach, like the quality as a way of standing out across the dozens and dozens of other other apps out there. Um, so I said, okay, craftsmanship, that's something new. Nobody has tried that to stand out here in this space. And then the other thing that I said was, "Okay, well, let me go study all of the possible apps and products and things that exist and let me dream up a lot of prototypes." And one of the things I realized was that the foundation for basically every book

activity that you're interested in is book tracking. >> And if I explain a little bit more, let's say I want to recommend personalized books to you, then I need to know what you've read in the past, i.e. book tracking. Let's say you want to have stats and watch number go up. You have to be tracking your reading. Let's say you want to see what your friends are reading. They have to be tracking their reading. You know, let's say you want to be following authors and fandoms and getting interesting news about what's happening in the world of books. I have to know what you're interested in. Maybe by you tracking your reading. And so it turns out basically like all of the interesting really interesting products and features and experiences that I wanted to build, there's this like core underlying foundation um that I and I bucketed into two categories. I bucketed into a catalog of book metadata. So like the

titles and the series and the authors and the descriptions and publication dates and who wrote what. Um and so we we I spent probably like a year and a half and it's still not done and will never be done. But I spent probably a year and a half building our own catalog. Like it's a best-in-class catalog like to the point where other book startups sometimes pay to license my book metadata instead of using free alternatives like Google books. um like you know so we put a huge amount of effort into the book metadata and then the same way we put a huge amount of effort into the book metadata we did the same thing for the user tracking metadata. So our approach to tracking is like fundamentally different. Um you know in terms of like one of the principles that we hold is um track what you want than is if you go look at many other trackers in books and elsewhere and you like try to add a form or add a

add a workout or add a meal or add something a little sheet pops up with like 17 different boxes that you have to fill and it often feels like you're in the doctor's office and you're like man I really only care about two of these things. I don't really care about 15 of these things and so I'm just going to put in, you know, crappy, you know, crappy stuff or I'm going to, you know, totally ignore it and move on. And we said, "No, no, no. We really wanted a user experience that was like would you would track just the stuff that you cared about and everybody has different things that they cared about and so it had to be like a thread the needle." And so the the experience that we wanted and I'm very happy and proud of you know my my designer and the and the team and the engineers and the work we've done so far. The experience we wanted was, you know, people saying, I can, you know, this is so simple. The

tracking is so natural. It comes supernaturally to me, but there are like hundreds of thousands of people saying that and they all track different things in different ways. And it's like the one it's like the one solution that actually works for everybody. And so we put a huge amount of effort both design-wise and data model wise. Um, and that was like by huge amount of effort. I mean like a year, like literally like the first year of like I, you know, eight months of research, raised a bit of funding, hired a designer and engineer.

We did one year totally heads down, basically no beta testers, just building this catalog and book tracker, and that was the thing we launched about a year ago. And when we launched it, immediately went viral, got like 60,000 downloads in the first 10 12 days. Um, and that has been the main product that we've been working on and improving ever since. That's so cool. And and having the courage of your convictions to start there with a consumer product in particular is pretty unusual because I feel like a lot of consumer founders, they go straight to the UI and what's going to look good for the user and what's going to get people excited. But >> at the root of your product offering and the problem you're trying to solve is a great index of the books that exist out there. And so to spend nearly a whole year building it is is very impressive.

Um, I have to ask to the extent you're willing to share, what exactly did that process look like? I mean, obviously you don't need to go into painstaking detail, but how did how did you build

the world's best index of of the books that people can read? We looked at a couple billion data points from a bunch of different data sets online and then spent a huge amount of effort like dduping, consolidating like sort of comparing and sort of you know figuring out um like one of one of the interesting things about how we approached our catalog is um most book data sets out there are oriented around the concept of an addition of a book.

that is they'll say like this is the version of Dune published by ACE you know in 2012 with 650 pages and it's a hardcover edition and here's the exact title and description and cover and all of this and so if you go look at Goodreads and Amazon and you know open library and WorldCat and you know ISBN DB and like all you know Google books like all of these things the first class citizen in their catalog data model is the addition and what I what I said is wait that doesn't match how we humans think of the book like if I say Dune by Frank Herbert, you think of like the work and like the covers and the description and everything that's kind of secondary for that and especially in the world of ebooks and audio books and like new releases and 10th anniversary things and publishing in a new language.

Like for example in Dune there's like 600 editions of Dune out there. Um it's like quite a lot actually. Um and so I said actually like I don't I don't need the you know perfect edition level metadata. Turns out what I really need is just I need to have like this concept of Dune by Frank Herbert. I need to know all the different covers associated with the additions, but that's independent of like the titles and description and that's independent of like the page lengths and that's independent of like who wrote it and like so I took all this addition level metadata from a ton of different places and sort of massaged it into this like fundamentally different structure uh like that is treats works as the first class citizen, not additions. Um and so that you know at scale the data processing at scale like this is where my background in you know working with data and doing machine learning engineering and being a

software engineer like I was the one who did this like I was the one who sat down I I really obsess anybody who's worked with me at previous companies can tell you I obsess over data um and I obsess over clean data and I spend an absurd amount of my time just looking at raw data files and like seeing what my human brain like connections come out and being like aha eureka moment like it shouldn't be structured like this it should be structured like that. Um, >> yeah. Yeah. Well, it's one of those things I think so many people take for granted, but I think it it is what exists at the base of the iceberg that then leads leads to the tip of the iceberg, which is the consumer experience being 10x better. And I can see how it would be a viable path to breaking out in a category that already has other incumbents that are larger and further along. I also love what you said earlier about the decision to allow

people to only track what they want to track. And there are two reasons I love it. so much. One is I don't know about you, but I'm I can be a completionist sometimes. And so when I'm shown a form that has 17 fields to use your number, I feel like I need to fill in all 17 fields even though I don't really want to or don't think it's valuable. And so it's a much better user experience to just say track what you want. And then the second thing is it's actually valuable data in its own right to see what different customers choose to track both at the aggregate level because you can start to draw conclusions around which which fields are more important versus others but then also at the individual level because you can personalize the experience based off what you know about that user or certain archetypes of users. So, I think those are two very important product and design decisions that I that I can see

how they might lead to a much better experience. U, one other thing that I know you've done is, and I've played around this with this myself in the app, um, allow people to search by vibe. So,

like if you're somebody who reads a lot and you want to find your next book, you can go find reading lists everywhere in New York Times or whatever, right? But if if you want to go off the beaten path and find something you maybe haven't heard of before, this whole idea of searching by mood or vibe is really interesting. And so where did that insight come from? And what does that look like in your product? >> That feature specifically um and many of my other feature ideas actually come from uh Reddit from subreddits. Uh there there is a subreddit called r/suggest me a book which had you know like a few million people in it and people will post like I am 25 years old. I just went through a nasty breakup like what what should I read to help me get over it or like I'm moving to Portugal like you know I'm going to Portugal next week what are some like fiction non-fictiony things like I like these kinds of books

and then humans will just come in you people will come in and just respond on these comments and be like you know and again this is one of the it's last I I was like one of the top like 30 most active subreddits you know that are out there and so anytime I look at a subreddit and I'm like wow that has a lot of activity like how can I turn that into a feature like how can I make that into a thing that you know that people want. And with Search by Vibes, that's also one of those one of those examples of the emphasis on tracking paying off because with, you know, good recommendation algorithms, I can, as you track more data, I can make the results of a fuzzy query like I'm going to Portugal next week or I went through a breakup and what do I read? And I can say, oh, and this user has read this, this, this, and this, and these are their favorites and here are books they've written low and here books

they've rated high. And so the results can be personalized, you know, pretty pretty easy. >> Yeah, I like that a lot. Um, well, that sort of relates to my last question in in this part of the interview, which is

who are your early adopters and to what extent are they different from a typical mainstream reader? >> So, we did something a little I mentioned we had like a year of heads down, build a book tracker, basically no beta testers. Um what I mean is after a year of development I think we had a total of like 30 people that had tried the app at all. Um like we very intentionally would like work on the product for a few weeks on board exactly like two people take a bunch of notes like work on the product for another two weeks and the two people were mostly there to like sanity check things. Um and like there have been some changes that they did but mostly we were like is our perception of what users will be confused about or use like accurate? Um, and so we we we didn't really and then and we didn't we didn't really like follow up and like foster these were like friends and family and they were

happy to, you know, proactively share feedback and and then we just like launched and got went viral on book talk and that was like our launch strategy. We stayed away from most of our personal networks. We stayed away from like launching on Twitter. We stayed away from like the tech circles because most of reading actually there's a big trend. So maybe if I take a step back, it's probably helpful if I answer who is the typical reader. um and how many readers are there.

>> So, one of the facts that tends to really surprise a lot of people because you see a lot of a lot of headlines about like readers are dying and reading is dying and like nobody knows how to read when they get to college and you know, of course, some of that is true, but also Barnes & Noble is opening like 65 stores, you know, this year. Um there's there's a big trend in reading is like coming back again. So it really came back during co a lot of people that co like went back and started reading a lot more and it's like sort of been growing steadily ever since. Um, in terms of how many readers there are, uh, there is a survey that Gallup has done every couple of years since like the 1990s. And one of the survey questions they ask, uh, to Americans is, "How many books did you read last year?" And ever since the 1990s, there's been a consistent 6 to 8% of the American population that reads at least a book a

week. >> So if you run the numbers, that is 20 million Americans. 20 and 20 million American adults like 18 books like not counting you know kids like which is a whole another category cuz kids actually read a lot too. >> I I was going to say my daughter reads at least a book a week. She she reads a lot. So not even counting you know people like your daughter 20 million Americans read a book a week and they have they have been since before the internet came since before smartphones came and they are still reading at least a book a week. And who are those people?

You know, I when I when I saw those numbers, I like I called my, you know, I read a couple hundred, but most of my friends, most of my tech friends, like they don't like they read mostly non-fiction, little bit of fiction, and they're doing podcasts and substacks. And so, like in the in the tech world, they're like, I'm not reading as much. But I called my mom and I said, "Hey, mom, who reads 100 books a year, um, how many people do you personally know that read more than 50 books a year?" And she said, "Oh, at least 50. Easy." you know, and it turns out like the, you know, the middle-aged mom book club, you know, wine meetings every now and then where you geek out about the Harley Quinn romances and like the famous, you know, like books that are going viral on book talk. Um, actually that's pretty big.

You know, it turns out book talk is really big on Tik Tok. Like I'm talking like probably like billions of view, tens of billions of views, I think the last time I I checked like, you know, tens tens of millions of posts and tens of billions of views. And book talk is where we went we went viral uh when we launched. And that the typical book talk person. And when I talk about our target user of the app, what I say is imagine a 28-year-old realtor named like Crystal in North Carolina who has like pretty handwriting and stickers on the back of her Kindle and like is the type of person who like highlights her notes as she's reading stuff like to study things. Um and reads a lot of spicy romances. like that is our typical, you know, user is like the 20some, 30ome reading mostly spicy romances. Um, and so we like we didn't like we didn't really have like when people talk about early adopters, they usually mean like

techy people or people who are super gung-ho about trying new things all the time. And we kind of I feel as if we kind of skipped that phase like we just went straight to like the actual readers that are out there. Um, and people were from day one comparing us against like Goodreads and Fable and Story Graph, you know, some of the bigger apps in the space and like that, you know, that's been our our user base that we've targeted so far.

>> Got it. It makes so much sense. And it's funny, the more I time I spend in and around this space, the more I realize just how powerful the romance category is. We've had a couple clients like Incit is one of our consulting clients and that was their >> into the space, right? And so you see it everywhere you go. Like 11 Labs, 11 Reader, Romance has been big for them. Um, so it's it's powerful. This episode is brought to you by Paddle.

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Learn more at paddle.com/subversive. Well, let's start to talk about the path that you've taken to get to product market fit. I think that's a good segue into this topic. Uh, and let's just

start with when did you know that you had sort of hit that tipping point? You mentioned that you launched on book talk. I'm curious what that launch looked like and when you sort of realized, okay, we're on to something here. >> Yeah. So, one of the things that has been gratifying has been stumbling into verality a couple of times. That is I tried really hard to hire a marketing person and a growth person and we just never nobody ever quite fit right. Um, and so the team has really just been this like very internal product and engineering like build them, you know, have strong opinions about what the ideal experience is and just and just build it. And what happens in the world of books, there's this crazy spike in online book activity around Christmas and New Year's. And there are a couple reasons for that. People are buying books as gifts for other people during the holidays when it's on holidays. And

people actually tend to read a lot more. But of course, the real reason is New Year's resolutions is people are like, you know, I want to like what are the the most common things are like, I want to be healthier and I want to read more. Like those are usually the top two New Year's resolutions for basically everybody. I knew that like you know when we were heads down for a year building the product I was like whatever we have come December like 20th we're just going to launch with whatever we have because we cannot afford to miss this wave like we're just going to we're going to do that and then come like December like 15th I was like oh crap we should have a marketing plan you know we should like like what what does launching mean actually like what should we do >> and um I okay well I don't think I think we kind of missed it this year but that's okay we can do it next year but you know I'll just I'll just sign a

couple of influencers I'll ask them to post videos I spent like a couple thousand um and the very first influencer post that ever went live from the very first influencer we ever worked with um got 1.4 4 million views totally organically and like 100,000 likes and like 60,000 bookmarks and 20,000 shares and like tens of thousands of comments and that very first video was like just immediately giant spike and like couple days later we were featured in um some posts by USA Today by like book riot by like you know like roundups of book apps that you should try to use sometime this year that time period when I was like wow okay maybe we have something here like you know we did not put any real thought at all into this marketing plan or this launch plan and we still managed to stumble our way into verality and the same kind of thing happened this year actually we basically doubled our user base over this past New Year's rush and

um part of it was like I you know over this past year I was like okay I don't want a repeat of last year I want to hire the marketing person I want to have a real marketing plan and we just come December 10th I was like crap like you know whoops um you know we we just we kept focusing on shipping new features and launching social stuff and so you know we never quite found that marketing person and so I went and I hired a couple more influencers I spent like, you know, instead of 5,000 bucks, I think I signed, you know, like 20,000 bucks, like that kind of, you know, like nothing nothing crazy. Um, >> and uh and the influencers post and some of the influencer posts did did pretty well. Um, but then some users posted about our 2025 rap on Twitter and got like 3 million views uh totally organically. I had no idea who those user are users are, but like thank you so much. And so like actually Twitter

was where we stumbled into verality like this year. Um, so okay, cool. like it happened twice, you know, like like you know, two two times there was this big spike that drove this giant, you know, like best day evers. Um, and uh and throughout the year we've gotten, you know, as we've scaled, our our like retention curves have stayed pretty strong. Our like the intent of these users has stayed pretty strong. Um the like the ratings on the app store, that's something we're pretty proud of.

Like we have about like 2 thou 20,000 maybe 21,000 by now um ratings globally and we're still maintaining a 4.9 average. I mean, that's, you know, we're pretty happy with that. And so, we get, I don't know, like I get I get fan mail where people like invite me to a baby shower because they love the app. I get, you know, people like sending postcards from like Italy cuz they're like, "I was traveling at Merchants. Like, I love you." Like, you know, we have we have we say this wall of like five star reviews of people who are like super glowing that like makes the heart smile and wow, people love this thing. And like that's that's awesome. So, >> but even with all of that, I would not say that we have hit product market fit yet. This is this you know we we have a lot of user love that which is a critical you know a necessary but insufficient you know condition for like a viable long-term consumer business

because at the end of the day we've grown but it's not like you know locket or 11 labs where you just go from zero to millions like over you know instantly. It's not like where you, you know, have this super easy like turn on the monetization spigot now you're at 300 mil AR like you know from day one. Like it's not you know >> when I think of consumer you know if I put on the like the pessimistic or realistic like founder hat and I like analyze the business like I when I look at a consumer business I pay attention to three things. I pay attention to acquisition of new users. I pay attention to retention of those users as they try the app and I pay attention to monetization. And I would say that we have reasonable like reasonably good retention and reasonably good acquisition. We have very bad monetization right now, but we're not and we're not so we need to be reasonably good across the board. Um and

also we need to be like S tier in one of those dimensions. And I don't think we're quite there yet. Um, and I I think that is what makes a breakout venture scale venture track consumer business is you need to be good enough at all three aspects of the business and S tier in at least one of them. >> I couldn't agree more. That's so well said and I look at the same three things. In fact, in the growth models that we build for our clients, it's acquisition, retention, monetization.

Those are the those are the tabs. And then I also agree with you that you're not going to be best-in-class at all three of them. If for no other reason than being best-in-class at, say, acquisition can actually make it really difficult to be best-in-class at monetization because you're bringing in a lot of low to medium intent users. But you got to be best-in-class in one of them. And it sounds like you're off to a great start at the very least on acquisition and getting there on retention. We'll get to monetization in a moment, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit more around growth strategies and tactics that have worked for you. Now, I will say upfront, you're one of these rare cases where the product is so good and it struck such a nerve, at least with your early adopters, that it seems like you've just gone viral multiple times now on TikTok and then on Twitter or X. Obviously, not

every consumer founder can do that. And so, to what extent have you found ways, whether that's in the product, I noticed that you very prominently display, hey, you know, we're a small team, a fivestar app rating goes a long way. What what

sort of tactics like that have you used either in the product or as part of your acquisition strategy to give yourself every advantage you can in terms of building a replicable growth engine? >> In terms of a replicable growth engine, the closest we've come has been through a UGC program where you pay people to spin up totally new accounts, warm them up, post videos, you know, standard consumer app playbook. We've tried a few different versions of this. We've worked with a few agencies. We've worked with a few platforms. Um the biggest problem with those and something that we struggle with is we have gone viral but not as much as we would like. Of course, you know, more views is always is always good. And one of the issues is part of what makes our app really good is like calm, cozy vibes. That's those are like keywords that we think about design-wise a lot. But that means that if you take a

screen recording of any like 1 to 3 seconds of usage of the app and you try to post it on Tik Tok, like the screen recording itself doesn't like scream viral. Yeah. >> You know, and you know, it's not our app is not very Tik Tok legible. And so the videos that we've had that have done done, you know, the video the short form videos that we've had that have gone viral are like a person looking at the camera and being like, I found the best app for readers ever. And just talking for 2 minutes about all of the features and demoing everything. And it's like it's not it's not like the like the hidden hook with the 7-second viral format. It's like literally like a genu a person genuinely saying this is the best product ever. You know, you have to go download it right now. Like those are the videos that have done well. And then the things that went viral on on on Twitter or X um where the 2025 wrapped

where the like the very pretty like gorgeous like share like we call them sharables like the monthly recaps and the annual recaps like the we have a human illustrator that like does a bunch of you know really great design work. We have two of them actually. Both of them have done really well. you know, if I if I zoom it back, um the UGC has been one of those like I can put a dollar in and I know what I'm going to get out of it and it's like, you know, I can optimize the funnel over time and get better. And so like in terms of spending money for a repeatable growth engine, UGC has been has been the strongest. And our biggest challenge has been we haven't had any any real breakout hits with UGC. Um like I'm talking like million plus view videos that are like directly like you know make us drive a crapload of downloads to to margins. um because our app is not very Tik Tok legible. And so our our other repeatable growth engine

that I've been real one of my big realizations this past year is after we launched and went viral um last year, we were drowning in new users. And so we did nothing related to marketing or growth for like 4 months. Like I we launched, we went viral, we drowned in new users. I fundraised, I went to hiring, you know, we bug fixed for everything. like like for a period of like four or five months, we did nothing related to growth and marketing. And we were still growing. We were still top 200 in a category and we were still growing a steady amount consistently every day like you know a little bit from viewers in the past video but actually just through word of mouth from the existing users like it's very common for somebody to message me and be like I told my whole book club about you, I told my sister about you. I told my kids about you. I told my friends about you.

I told my bestie about you. Like I told my English class about you. I told my you know and and um so I've been realizing that that sort of word of mouth growth that's actually been like the most consistent thing. Um and we have done nothing to foster that and that is one of my big goals in 2026 is to like do something to foster that. Um and I don't know exactly what that's going to look like yet. Um but so if I you know put it back again there have been the other the other growth channel that I mentioned here has been influencer posts. Um, so those are the three things that we've tried that have been repeatable that we've definitely gotten a significant number of downloads from. It has been paying influencers to post videos on their own accounts. It has been paying creators to spin up new accounts and post book talk and margins related videos um, short form stuff on our account. Um, it has been like word

of mouth um, from users like talking about it with other people and posting about it on their own totally free no incentive on on other platforms. >> Yeah, it makes sense. And all three of those are somewhat complimentary because at least in my experience once you once you've built a great product and then once you've figured out the right positioning and messaging that strikes a nerve with your target customer then you can take that atomic message and like distribute it through paid influencers through organic content and through word of mouth.

>> Yeah. I also I hadn't thought of the whole book club angle, >> but that's sort of silly because it makes so much sense. And I think that's been a pretty big part of Fable's growth story is that they sort of orient their product around the book club. And so that gives you an inherent built-in advantage. And you did mention that you you have made it really easy for users to create these sharable artifacts like their margins wrapped at the end of the year. And so to some extent, it sounds like you've started to figure out scalable ways of doing this, but you're still in the early innings. Um, the last thing I'll ask before we get to monetization is you were recently

featured as Apple's app of the day. Um, how did that help to accelerate your growth? And then the other thing I'm specifically curious about is I know a number of companies that have had the luxury of getting featured as app of the day. And often times what it leads to is this huge spike in inbound traffic and a ton of downloads. But often times the average quality of those downloads is much lower. And so I'm curious to what extent your case it has led to retained users and then to actual paying subscribers.

>> Yeah. So first um app of the day basically did nothing download wise for us and that was not what we expected. >> Like it it it was like the equivalent of 3 days of passive growth for us. uh we got, you know, got a good amount of impressions, >> but it did not like we were expecting a lot of downloads and that did not materialize >> and we're a bit sad about that. And part of that is like it was it happened on a random Tuesday as opposed to like a good time of year. Like for example, this was so we were app of the day in the US app store on December 16th and then we were app of the day in the Australia and New Zealand app store on January 2nd and Jan and January 2nd was our best download day of all time partially because it was like the New Year's rush, New Year's resolution. So a lot more people had books top of mind on January 2nd than they did on December, you know, 16th um for example. And so that was one of the

like we prepared for like a crazy spike in users and then it didn't happen and we were a little sad and so you know right now it's kind of like a pat yourself on the back like hey it's cool like there aren't that many app of the day things and we were able to luck into it partially because books feel good to promote and everybody loves apps that help you feel good and you know so Apple you know probably gave us an extra leg up when we you know in the nomination process and things like this. Related to that though, you asked about like, hey, when you have a big spike of users. So, so there's this, you know, Andrew Chen has this blog post called like, I went viral and all I got are these crappy users where he talks about how often when you go viral, you get lots of views and you get a lot of downloads, but the retention curve is like terrible and people don't monetize as well. And um we actually have never seen that. like that

is our word of mouth passive downloads, our like influencer video do well download, you know, our like totally passive UGC sharable down like they're all high intent like every single like we have like there has not been a single occasion I can I can show you like the I can look at the growth growth graph and I can point at every single spike and I can point at every non-spike and I can show you the retention curves and it like is the same or better at just continually increasing like like so I don't know people say that going viral on social hurts hurts like gets you low intent users, but so far I haven't seen that.

>> Well, part of what I wonder, which might explain both why app of the day didn't drive as much of a spike for you, but also why when you do get a spike, it leads to more retention than in a lot of other categories, is because being a reader, especially in 2026, inherently means you have to have a certain amount of motivation, right? there aren't a huge number of people who just casually decide they're going to go a whole bunch of books at this point.

>> And so I could see how getting app of the day in an entertainment driven category would lead to much more of a sugar high but then very low retention and you almost see the opposite where there's less of a sugar high but the ones who come stay. >> Yeah. >> Um and ultimately if you had to choose one or the other I would pick retention >> because that's the engine for everything else. Well, so let's get to the last

topic for today, which is around monetization. And I guess I'd love to start with what made you confident you could monetize margins with subscriptions. And then maybe specifically, as I've been poking around in the app, there aren't a ton of premium features right now, right? It's it's premium customer support. It's sort of custom skins in terms of the UI, and then it's um really just supporting a community of readers. And so it feels like a big part of your pitch is like, hey, come be part of the, you know, the early adopters who are making all this possible. But that seems to be working for you, at least to an extent. Uh, and so what what what drove both of those decisions? The decision to monetize through subscriptions and then the decision to start with more of a, you know, altruistic angle of, hey, help us get this thing off the ground.

>> Kind of the same answer to both. um of the one of the things that I do when I'm planning out you know the week the month the quarter the year is um between acquisition retention and monetization what is our top prior what is our top priority and most of the time in the past like 2 yearsish that we've been working on the product um the answer has been uh retention like the answer has been like build the features that are driving negative reviews that are like obvious product gaps that are one of the things about working in a like you two decade old space is that there's like sort of pretty clear user expectations about like what other apps do and about what functionality there needs to be and a tracker to you know solve a lot of things and so I said okay cool like you know product gap wise and retention wise and like let's build these features that we think are going to be used a lot um

and when we ship them and then they are used a lot okay cool retention has been the big focus um monetization has been a very like retention followed by acquisition followed by monetization it's been in that order of priority from day one. And one of the reasons for this is because I don't actually spend that much money on marketing. You know, I don't have like a I haven't done any paid ads at all um beyond influencer stuff. Um but I haven't like paid, you know, for a spark code on Tik Tok to like boost a video. And by the way, I regret this. This is silly. I should have when a video goes viral, I really wish I was like super prepared for if a Tik Tok video went viral this year, I was going to do spark code it and make it go up and then we went viral on Twitter and I had no idea how to boost anything on Twitter and I was man like whack-a-ole. Exactly. Exactly. Um but you know, so we're not like we don't

have a consistent marketing spend or consistent marketing budget and part of you know, so like there's no like if I had an extra, you know, $10,000, $50,000, you know, million dollars like like I would hire another engine, I would probably hire like what I will do and what I plan to do this year is hire a marketing person that I can give a budget that like that will mean that we start optimizing for a lot of these things and then I will care a little bit more about monetization because it will be like a dollar in marketing spend and a dollar in revenue. Okay, you know, if I can get that funnel working well, then of course, you know, you're off to the races um like that. We we do know that we were leaving money totally on the table by not taking any money at all from our users. And so our very first uh payw wall that we launched um which shows up exactly once during onboarding and it's like and it's a hidden we we do

onboarding pretty differently from other people. And so um it is like a hidden step in onboarding that many users don't even encounter in the first place. messages exactly once and it really is just like do it cuz you love us and um a surprising number of people are willing to subscribe, you know, for that. Um and we we we put together the pay and I feel embarrassed talking to you because I know you spent so much time optimizing, you know, these a lot of these a lot of these funnels, but like we spent like 5 minutes on the design of that payw wall.

We have all these plans for membersonly features. Uh but currently in the app, like basically nothing is members only. And um one of the features that we get and you you asked earlier um this this ties into something you asked earlier about uh hey we're a tiny team of app lovers a fivestar rating would mean a lot to us. So one of the things that has driven like probably thousands of ratings at this point is if you go on the app and you go to the home tab and you scroll down to the bottom there's a there's a lamp and a reading chair.

>> And if you tap the lamp the light turns on and there's a little like light switch clicking sound. And if you like go to our app store reviews and you control F for lamp, you will see hundreds of people talking about how the lamp is so cute and so delightful and so amazing. And so we, you know, we just cuz like what you're supposed to do is like, >> you know, when somebody has a delightful experience in the app, you pop up a, hey, if you love the app, like give us five stars. And it just always felt a little tacky and forced to us. And so we just like, well, like let's just add an Easter egg and manufacture that moment of delight and just add had the add the little rating there. And, you know, we'll see how it feels. And actually, we just immediately got a crapload of reviews and we're like, "Okay, cool."

Like, you know, good. You know, we're going to stick with that. And the reason I bring this up is because um I have had many like multiple users suggest to me um independently that in that in that graphic of the lamp, there's a little bedside there's a little like stool, like a table where they have a stack of books and they say, "Hey, you should have a tip jar next to that because I don't I don't want to do a subscription, but I would love to do a like onetime donation." And so, you know, right next to the lamp, you know, I hope it continues getting us ratings, but also we're going to add a tip jar where users can do a one time, you know, because again, like people just people will come to me. We've had people like it'll show up once during onboarding and then they'll message me later and be like, I really love your app. I can't find how to subscribe. Like, how do I subscribe?

And we get those types of messages. And again, this is without any features at all that that are actually members members backed. >> Well, there are two key points I want to make here because to me, there's some of the through lines of this entire episode. One is be opinionated in how you build a consumer product because one, life's too short to build another boring consumer app. And two, the app stores have gotten so crowded that the more you can for better or worse like follow your own instincts and your own true north and build a product that has personality and that's opinionated software, I think it really does help you to rise above all the noise. And the second one is uh know your customer and be authentic to your category. Because I think what's come through in several parts of this conversation is avid readers are just a little different.

They're a little more patient. They're willing to watch a 2-minute Tik Tok video instead of a 20 second Tik Tok video and listen to all the different features that you have. U but they also want to be delighted. They still want positive ROI. They just have more patience. And so something like Easter eggs that would be lost in the noise of I don't know a Tinder or a Instagram, right? Like in your case, it really works because of the nature of your customer.

>> And so I guess let's let's close with you're just beginning to scratch the surface on monetization. And up until this point, it's been a lot of >> tip jar like behavior even though it's coming in the form of a subscription. >> How do you expect that to change over the next two to three years? How do you

think the premium product will evolve? what premium features are you excited to add and then what what if anything will that do to change how you approach monetization as a business? >> Yeah, I really so there are two things that we're going to do this year. The first one is I would like to make it so that every download encounter is a payw wall at least once in the app. >> Um I would like it to continue to be a soft payw wall and to have like mostly cosmetic features that are are blocking it. And like for example um one of the one of the membersonly features that we plan to launch a lot of them are related to streaks and maintaining streaks. Um and so if you miss a day and you want to streak freeze for example or you want to go back and rescue a streak cuz you didn't you forgot to update the app and track and you know these the kind of power user and cosmetic features that aren't part of the core experience but

when you see them you're like man I want that like I want that pretty thing around my profile. I see you know you know that those kinds of things. Um the reason why I don't want the core features behind is because I am still prioritizing growth and especially as a social product as we launch more and more social features. If we if we block a lot of our core features you know behind growth like actually that's not so good you know you behind a pay wall that's not so good. Um so I will I do I will have a payw wall. It will be like mostly the nice to haves in things. I will I will get to the point where you know most of the users encounter um a payw wall every now and then still soft cell. We're going to see how that performs. um based on the current conversion rates like we could like if we hit our growth goals like in terms of user base this year and we just maintain our current like give us money cuz you

love us um conversion ratios like we would probably be break even as a company actually. Um >> it's like you know of course more money would be nice um but certainly not the the top priority. Um, the other thing though that we're doing that I'm also going to be excited about, I mentioned way back in the beginning of the call that um, I really didn't like how like the Goodreads and the Kindle and the Amazon.com and the audible and the book talk and the Reddit, you know, book, you know, book Reddit and all these things were all different experiences. So, one of the things that I I really want is to sell books and eventually let people read ebooks and audiobooks. I want a buy button in this and I'm particularly excited about having a buy button and margins taking a cut of each of the books because usually the biggest issue with any e-commerce thing and this this is a whole like sneak peek into like the

master thesis of and my my my overall sequencing of of the app is like phase one is build an app that a lot of readers love and we're kind of there now >> and now now I have an audience of hundreds of thousands of people that are using my app and there are so many ways to monetize an audience of hundreds of thousands of and especially an audience that will continue to grow to millions of people as as time as time goes on. Um, and so the buy button is the other aspect of monetization I'm hoping to bring online at least a little bit this year. Yeah, I love that. And one of the other things that's so great about a buy button is it should allow you to capture a lot more consumer surplus from your whales, right? the the LTV or the ARPO for your whales will be much much higher than a typical consumer subscription app can get because a typical consumer subscription app just has a single subscription tier and so they get the

same amount of money from everyone. And that also means you can subsidize the cost of the subscription for everyone else because if you're getting enough money from your whales, you can offer targeted discounts or you can just keep your base subscription price lower in order to maximize your your total audience size. And and I'm hearing a lot of parallels to the Dolingo playbook, which is like give all your best features away for free, amass a huge audience, drive tons of organic growth, keep your CS down, and then find ways to monetize the power you through things like streaks, which Duolingo also did, right? Everybody can get streaks, but if you want streak repair or other other sort of advanced motivation features, Dolingo has over time monetized those more and more. And it makes sense specifically in the context of an educational product like theirs or a reading product like yours because

people are proud of putting time into the app in ways that they might not be with other categories. >> Absolutely.

>> Well, this is this has been such a delight. Let's get to our lightning round and we will keep it short because I know we're coming up on an hour here, but as I always do in the lightning round, I I love to just ask a few very brief questions and get one or two sentence answers from you. And I'll start with the one I always start with which is what is the best part about working at margins and what's one thing that you would change or as the founder are actively working to change.

>> The best part is working on a product that I use myself like multiple times a day every day and have wanted to forever and so like I'm like I as a user want this and then it happens and I'm like hey you know that's awesome actually. Uh in terms of one thing that I would change about margins um as a business I think we really should be focusing more on like a repeatable growth engine on monetization on those things like it is easy to overindulge and I am building the product for me myself and I um and like yes of course I want this but it is a venture scale business it is you know supposed to stay venture track and like I would like to to like remember that every now and then >> yeah it's very important and I'm glad you have that self-awareness. Uh as you know I I have this framework called the subscription value loop that I preach which is value creation, value delivery, value capture. And I find that

missionarydriven founders like you very product driven founders often intentionally or unintentionally overlook value capture because they want to just create value for their users and they spend all their time on that. But ultimately the more value you capture the more you can reinvest back into value creation and that's such a such a virtuous cycle that benefits everyone including the business. Obvious question who's your favorite author and what do you love so much about them? The one that is coming to mind the most right now is Ian M. Banks who wrote the culture series which was my first introduction to the concept of a post scarcity society where we've like we've solved death we've solved consciousness uploading we've solved you know faster than light travel like we've solved like in in multi-species intergalactic and I was like wow like that's what h this is what life could be like if we solved

tech like if like if we just solved all the problems and I was like oh my god like like people have always said like tech can be an answer and like that that culture series was like one of those things where I was like oh this is what they Like it's not an incremental improvement on my current life. It is a fundamentally different way of living and way of organizing people and life and society when you're in a postgradity society.

>> Yeah. Have you read the three body problem or that trilogy? >> I was going to say that's like I don't read nearly as much as you obviously but that feels like an application of some of the theory that you're describing from this author. >> Um next one is what single book has had the most profound impact on your life and why? When breath becomes air, which is a, you know, the biography of the Sanford doctor who, you know, was about to finish his medical training and then found out he had a terminal cancer diagnosis. Um, he wrote this really beautiful memoir, you know, about about his life so far. And, um, one of the things I've done every now and then is like a 10-day silent meditation retreat.

And every time I go into those 10day silent meditation retreats, I think I'm going to be thinking about work all the time because that's what I'm stressed about so much dayto-day and what I think about so and and as soon as I get in, work does not enter my mind at all. It is all about life and death and love and like the big questions of life. And so I like to say like there are work book related questions that are, you know, make an impact. But honestly, it's like it is the obsession about death and meaning >> that has probably shaped my life the most. You know, going back to Harry Potter, because I can't help myself. I feel like that's part of why Harry Potter's been so popular is because a lot of people don't realize this, but the unifying theme in Harry Potter is death. And something we all spend a lot of time thinking about directly or indirectly.

>> Um, last couple here. How do you think that AI is going to change how much people read >> and how they read? This is something that comes up all the time, especially because in books and reading, there's a huge amount, there's a very vocal minority of people that hate AI, that hate anything to do with AI. Like, one of the most common questions I get is like, do you use AI? Like, you know, does this app use AI? Um, if you do, how do I turn it off? Like, that just comes all all the time. And so we you know we have spent a good amount of time thinking about what are some of the cool interesting things that you can do with AI but we have to balance that against the fact that if you do a feature and call it AI and it's very obviously an AI feature we will get cancelled and there are apps in the world of books that like get cancelceled and people download it and there's lots of bad reviews that you

know that that relate to it. Um, so that's that's like an industry dynamic that we have to balance a lot. And so we keep our use of AI like super minimal. Like we did like we are of all the book apps in the space like we actually use the least amount of AI compared to everybody else. And that is not at all what I thought would happen when we started, but just market dynamics wise that's that's how it how it's turned out. Um, I do expect consumer sentiment to change at some point. Like when people call AI like they're like I don't you don't you know don't use AI and I'm like okay turn off your spell checker on your phone you know it's okay stop using Google you know right it's like it's it's like don't do don't take any photos and use any filters like don't stop using your iPhone camera you know right like because there's a lot of things that when it gets big enough and popular enough and common enough you just stop

calling it AI >> anymore um and that will happen in the world of books and reading um I have seen it in terms of how it's changed user behavior today um amongst the non-fiction reading crowd. There's a common question which is like why would I read the full book? why can't you I'll read the notebook LM you know podcast I'll do the book summary you know give me the recap you know like that comes up from the non-fiction crowd but again you have to remember that the non-fiction crowd is such a small portion of overall readers for most people they've been they're reading entertainment mostly romance mystery thriller airport reads like that kind of thing and they've been choosing books over Netflix over gaming you know over Tik Tok like you know there there's this crowd of people that you know especially the power readers that continue to choose that and so there there are things where you can you

can talk to your book boyfriend. Character AI, one of the biggest use cases is people talking to their imaginary book boyfriends. Um there's like there there are companies that AI generate books both, you know, for kids and for other people. There are um writing fanfiction so you can selfinsert yourself into the story. There choose your own adventure stories. Um you know, especially with like romance like you're you're a stewardist on a plane, you know, a flight stewardist and there's a a billionaire in first class who slaps your butt and like what do you do about it? do you you know splash a drink about it or go play into the pilot or like run away and like you know you press a button and it like runs the next scene and you know just sort of continues. So there's a lot there have been a lot of products that have manifested um as as it relates to reading. Um but I think nobody has cracked the like at the end

of the day especially a lot of the new AI stuff is around LLMs. What are LLMs good at? Big blobs of text you know what are books and reading big blobs of text. You know, there's some like there's definitely some super clear and but what is the future of books and reading in the age of LLMs maybe and I know we're over time, but this is one of the one of the things that I really love going back to the track how you want philosophy.

One of my beliefs is that uh the review is dead. That is the Yelp style. You go in and a random stranger on the internet has written a like couple sentence long, you know, description of the thing and left like a one to five star rating. it's just not trustable anymore. Already people did not trust like Amazon reviews and then LLM came out and it's only gotten much worse, you know, about it. And so like, you know, there's this whole like can you trust what random stranger on the internet says that much and the answer has like been heading towards no and is pretty clearly, you know, heading towards no. And so like one of the one of the impacts of AI is that if you go look at Goodreads, their title is like Goodreads book reviews.

and they're like a their entire site is oriented around reviews as the first class citizen >> and we don't do that. We we do not highlight reviews like it'll what your friends are saying about it there will be there are ways to like see reviews but they're like hidden behind different taps like the book review is dead you know what comes next we're very excited to find out. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I should have known better than to ask a question about AI in the lightning round because it's such a big expansive question and and I think so many of your observations are spot on. I think I think we can leave it there and uh I'd love to just wrap up by thanking you Paul for coming on. I knew this would be a delightful conversation and it was anything you want to leave the audience with before we wrap up.

>> If you don't feel like you read as much as you would like to, the most important thing is to find the kind of book that you yourself want to read. Not don't read because some bestseller list says you should read it. Don't read because like a influencer or a thought leader you respect is reading it too. Those are the books that you get halfway through and then stop. Like just figure out what personally speaks to you. Like walk around a bookstore and pay attention to covers and don't pay attention so much to like the social proof and reviews.

And it like what's most important for building that reading habit and getting back into reading is actually choosing the right books. Maybe using a tool like our search by vibes to find something that personally speaks to you. >> I love that and it goes back to where we started which is follow what brings you joy in life. Thanks so much Paul. This has been a lot of fun. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks again to Revenue for sponsoring this episode. If you're building a subscription app, you can use RevenueCat to power purchases, optimize pay walls, offer discounts, handle refunds, manage customer data, run AP tests, generate insights, and unlock more revenue. I work with dozens of subscription apps, and most of them are already using RevenueCat to power their businesses.

Learn more at revenuecat.com/subversive.