We're Hiring!

Today, we’ll tell you a story about the Bookly app - а cool Book Tracker for passionate readers! For the past 6 years, the app is a go-to assistant to millions of people around the world helping them effectively monitor their reading sessions in real-time, keep themselves accountable, and foster the development of their reading routine.

How Bookly was created?

The creator of Bookly is Iancu Tudor, who’s also a founder of Twodoor Games - a small indie studio making games for mobile devices. He has more than 10 years of experience as a developer and he has always been passionate about building tech products that improve people’s lives.

Bookly was actually born out of Iancu’s personal needs. His desire was to engage in more reading, yet whenever new goals were established, they often resulted in unsuccessful outcomes. Upon researching the available solutions, it became evident that numerous apps existed for enhancing fitness or memory, while none were dedicated to helping one read more. So he decided to close that market gap by creating Bookly together with his team at TwoDoor Games.

Iancu realized that the secret to building a strong reading habit is to show up every single day, even if it’s for 10, 30, or even 5 minutes. If you read daily, you will form a pleasant reading habit that will bring you countless benefits in the long term. And this is how Bookly started. Initially, his team launched with just a few features, and in time, they customized and developed the app based on their users’ feedback and needs as any good software developer would.

Bookly’s success

Nowadays, Bookly has thousands of positive reviews from happy users on Apple App Store and Google Play and it is ranked #29 in the Books category for iOS users.

Millions of people are using Bookly today to track their reading progress, which means a lot of information, plenty of new features, more data to stock, and more data to analyze.

But unlike other mobile apps, we’ve focused on data and tracking from the beginning, and we chose the best tech stack to help us monitor and visualize better all this information, and SashiDo is a significant player in this equation. - says Iancu Tudor.

For the past 6 years, there have been many successful stories around the app like the launching of the Bookly Readathon, a reading competition that gathers together tens of thousands of readers every quarter and pushes them to surpass their reading records.

Another great achievement is the Discord community that formed around Bookly where people share and debate novels. There is also a significant number of young writers who saw success with their first book due to the fact that it was promoted within Bookly’s community.

But by far, the greatest success as the founder feels is:

...something that I experience daily, and that comes from people who write to me everyday saying that they read more due to our app. Sometimes, people progress from 50 to 100/200 books, which is impressive, but most people are progressing from reading nothing to 5-10 books per year, and, honestly, that makes me really happy. I feel like we have an impact and that we actually help people become better versions of themselves. Reading makes us better.

Why choose SashiDo for building and hosting Bookly?

Since the beginning, Iancu Tudor, the creator of Bookly, has chosen SashiDo as a backend solution for his app. Previously his team was using Parse and wanted a backend that was reliable and fast to implement. They were also looking to have control over their database and be able to use servers closer to their users' locations. So when researching what platform to use, SashiDo covered all those requirements.

One of the issues the team had in the past was keeping the data in sync between devices, with SashiDo, the team managed to make this process seamless for their users.

Our users love their reading data and it’s extremely important for them to know the data is safe. Using SashiDo we can offer that. With regular backups, and a professional team that tackles any issue that might appear extremely fast. - states Bookly’s founder.

Throughout the years Bookly’s team has been choosing SashiDo mainly because of its ease of use, scalability, and user-friendliness. Another very valuable aspect for them was without a doubt the documentation, the well-explained step-by-step guides, so they could deploy everything they need in their own time and manner.

In our case, we’ve been improving and changing the product constantly. We’re in the market of product-led growth, which means that our backend needs to move as fast and simply as our marketing and growth requirements do. SashiDo allows me to focus more on product and business and move faster with the backend implementation without heavy coding, which is mandatory when you don’t have limitless resources, and you need to move fast. - shares Iancu Tudor.

Furthermore, when it comes to SashiDo's support team the software developer says:

Not only have they been helping me every time I needed, but I’ve learned a thing or two from our interactions and applied them in our company as well. But, to be honest, I rarely needed that much support. The API is pretty straightforward and easy to use; you don’t need heavy dev skills to implement and operate with it, so I haven’t really had big issues so far.

Fin

When it comes to reading, the Bookly app has stood out as a remarkable companion appreciated by readers all around the world. Created by Iancu Tudor to address his own reading goals, Bookly has evolved into a powerful tool that not only tracks reading sessions but also transforms lives.

SashiDo's backend solution has played a crucial role in supporting Bookly's app's growth, scalability, and user-friendly experience. And when it comes to choosing a technology stack Iancu gives one final piece of advice to all developers:

Even if at the beginning, you have more time and you want to develop everything yourself, you’re building a business, and in time, you’ll need as much focus as possible on product and business development. So I’d recommend them the API way whenever possible. And, of course, to choose a reliable, stable, and innovative partner.

SashiDo offers a lot of personalization in terms of server usage, database, and requests. We recommend everybody experiment with their platform as we are confident it will fulfill any cloud needs.

As Bookly continues to make a positive impact, its partnership with SashiDo remains strong.

If you’re passionate about building mobile applications and solving real-life problems, SashiDo’s team we’ll be happy to help. Drop us a line at hello@sashido.com and let’s start writing your success story together!