How a 6 months partnership has ended

BookWiz partnership journey

👋 Hey, it’s Orel here! Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share my journey and lessons as a solopreneur who quit his job to chase his dreams.

I am a software developer, and so far I have x3 failed projects, and x2 ongoing.

I also publish Tech Books summaries along with Anton Zaides.

Last December I embarked on a new journey and started working on BookWiz along with

Anton Zaides

.

It started pretty exciting in the beginning but slowly lost it’s momentum to a point we almost stopped.

But we managed to find a working solution so we can continue working.

Until last week.

In today’s article I am going to share the story of BookWiz from my side and what I did wrong and in the next article I’ll share all the lessons from the project.

The beginning

On November of 2023, after the brutal massacre in my country on the 7th of October, my LinkedIn went quiet.

I, personally, lost the will to write anything that does not support the war efforts, so I didn’t write anything.
To be honest, I didn’t feel like doing anything.

I needed some company. So, I sent Anton a message and we started talking about the situation.
Then he said he has some ideas for projects, and one of them was something I had but wanted to rebuild and share with other people.

That was a books log manager, to help you manage the books you want to read, books you read, favorites etc.

I told him that the idea sounds good and that we should hop on a call and talk.

BookWorm

The chosen temporary name for the project was BookWorm.

We realized that there are a few competitors, but non of them provides the same experience we want to.

The hardest competition was Goodreads.
Our goal was to be better than them with a great UX.

So we hired a very expensive designer to build a beautiful and practical website.
Here are the results:

It looked good to us, so we started building the desktop version first.
This is will bite us in the butt later.

Working together

As soon as we were sure that’s the design we want, we divided the tasks.

Anton was responsible for the backend and I was responsible for the frontend.
We decided which features are critical to us for the first version and got to coding.

From the onset we had several problems.

First, we had our communication done over WhatsApp in the beginning.
That created a lot of stress. Imagine getting a barrage of messages from your partner about his work and a few related questions while you are at the gym.

So, we moved to Slack and a weekly zoom meeting.

Now, the bigger problem we had is that Anton is very methodical and organized and I am the exact opposite.

So if we decide to do something a specific way, Anton will go all the way and finish it before considering something else.

I, on the other hand, will consider changing it as we go if I think that our assumption was correct.

For example, we agreed that the books search function is not that important right now.
A few days later I told Anton that I changed my mind and that I think it is important.

And these things drove him crazy. Understandably.

Changing course - our first crisis

Almost 2 months into the project, Anton decides he can’t handle it anymore.

He was back to work at that point after a parental leave and trying to squeeze a few minutes here and there to code the backend started hurting his personal life.

It felt bad to think that we’re going to close the project before getting any feedback.

Luckily, Anton thought so too so we decided on a new way of working:
Anton would be responsible for product+marketing and I would write code.

Plus, the equity and work division changed to 25%-75%, 5 hours of work a week for Anton, 15 for me.

And so we started a new road, hoping to complete the project asap and get feedback.

Plus, we decided on a new name.

BookWizard.

BookWizard’s first release

A few weeks later, the first version was ready for feedback!
Anton shared it with several friends of his and people that he knew.

The responses were almost unanimous:

Looks good, but not practical.

The design was beautiful, but it felt too “cyberish” and didn’t give the feeling of a library or books website.

Plus, many people have tried to access the website from their phone.
And…. It looked awful. So we set up this page for mobile:

That was a huge disappointment

Long story short, we understood that it’s time to figure out what kind of website we want and find a cheaper designer that can make our vision come to life.

At that time we also found a competitor that does exactly what we were doing, but much better.

That was a huge blow to our motivation. So much that Anton came up with a new idea to pivot to.

Shareable lists.

Content creators would create book lists and share them with their audience.
There was nothing like that and we thought we hit a gold mine!

Later we saw that goodbooks.io have reached 1st place in Product Hunt, and it has only premade lists of celebrities. That was a motivation boost.

Adding a friend to the mix

Anton told me that he has a friend that worked with him, who’s a strong frontend developer and also a designer in the beginning of the road.

On the first call he understood our goals instantly and built a first-impression design to show us what he’s capable of.

It looked awesome and we decided we’re going to continue working with him.

It started great.

We had a slack channel, we discussed the design and new ideas.
And we decided on a new, easier name: BookWiz.

But adding Anton’s friend also emphasized the problems we had in our partnership.
We would agree on a specific design, then as I coded it I figured out it’s not as good as we thought, so I wrote about it in the slack.

I believe our designer also didn’t like the fact that I changed my mind every now and then and I felt it in the Slack conversations.

And here’s the big problem with adding a friend into the mix:

The friend will feel more comfortable to talk about problems with the partner who brought him in, which creates more pressure on that partner to settle things.

In our case, the designer talked with Anton in WhatsApp about the problems and it made Anton feel like he needs to manage the project rather than being a part of it.

Long story short, a few months and several incidents later, I realized that I need to change things in order for things to work out well.

But it was too late.

The beginning of the end

We already swam in bad waters for quite some time, and even though Anton and I shared our feelings from time to time, it wasn’t enough.

The fact that I put too much pressure on myself to have something to show for every week for our weekly zoom really hurt my performance.

Every new version that I published for Anton and the designer to review contained a few problems with previous designs.

In short: I wrote bad code only to get things done fast. And it showed.

It drove the designer nuts, which drove Anton nuts which made this whole project a mess of stress.

And I didn’t know it at that time, because the problem didn’t seem severe at that time until

The end

2 weeks ago, the designer has had enough and he sent a lengthy message about the fact that he doesn’t enjoy to work like that anymore and that either things will change or he leaves.

I knew this message was directed at me. And it hurt.
My ego, mainly.

I believe that was the last straw for Anton and he decided that it does more bad to him than good, so before our weekly meeting he sent me a lengthy message about the direction of the project from his side (he was leaving).

That also was a huge hit to my ego. It felt extremely bad.

I thought that maybe I was not good enough.
Perhaps I am not a good partner and that I should stop pursuing my stupid dream.

I mostly felt rejected.

Today

After a few days of writing and sharing with my girlfriend I overcame that hurt and figured out what was right and what was not in the partnership.

I have learned a lot about myself and myself in a partnership, and so many lessons about build a product with someone else.

I will share them all in next week’s newsletter.

For now I feel much better, I have shared my thoughts with Anton and I moved on.
And I decided to give BookWiz one more try and see where it leads to.

Stay tuned for the following article! :)

📣 What I enjoyed reading this week

How I give the right amount of context (in any situation) by

Wes Kao

Toggles for your homepage 🕹️ by

Tom Orbach

Your Projects Will Change The Moment You by

Kyle Nitchen