What’s next for Lendle?
Over the past two or three weeks, we’ve crossed a few milestones, and we’ve had a chance to evaluate the success of two of our biggest initiatives. What’s next?
Site Design
We love rolling out new features and “game changing” concepts, but at this point, we think it’s time to assess our strengths and our weaknesses and make some evolutionary changes based on everything we’ve learned over the last several months.
This will mean re-working the layout of some of the pages on Lendle, in an effort to simplify. We’ve been growing at an unbelievable rate and we’ve been shuffling things around to make room for new features. There’s a lot we can do to make sure that the site is as usable as possible, and now is as good a time as any to tackle the project.
We firmly believe that we already offer an unbeatable combination of usability, fun, and lending success — we just think we can make the best even better.
Patrons and Payouts
We love our “it pays to lend” initiative, and we’re really excited to have come up with a lending incentive that actually encourages lenders to buy more books.
Everything we put into this site is made possible by the generosity of our Patrons, and we’re happy to see that program perform as well as it has.
We’ve now wrapped up our initial Golden Ticket opportunities, which means some of our lucky Patrons have earned $50 Amazon gift cards, a Kindle 3, and an iPad 2.
We expect to add even more value (including more Golden Tickets) for Patrons in the future, so be sure to sign up and take advantage now!
Growth
A large part of growing Lendle, of course, involves bringing in new users.
We think a singular focus on quantity, though, would be a huge mistake. If we add 10,000 new users tomorrow, that won’t necessarily translate into a better experience for our existing users, or more lends. In fact, it could mean exactly the opposite.
We think refining the experience, adding useful features, and — above all else — promoting a culture of reading will be the single best way to add users who will, in turn, add value to the community.
We’d rather have 50 Lendlers who are actively engaged than 1,000 who don’t ever lend books. We’d rather have 2 who love reading than 10,000 who just want to win something.
Half the battle is the way we talk about our own service: If we avoid promoting Lendle as a repository for obligation free borrowing, our Lendlers know not to expect that. If we focus our blog posts and our social commentary on relevant topics, and the future of the publishing industry, we present an image that is attractive to those of you who actually care about reading, about sharing an experience.
Judging by the speed at which our lends are fulfilled, we think we’re onto something.
Growth should never come at the expense of usability. Growth for growth’s sake is kind of pointless. We are, in the end, a social-lending site, and “more users” will never be more important than the lending experience our Lendlers have come to expect.
We’ll certainly do what we can to attract new Lendlers — but we’re not looking to inflate our numbers via gimmicks.
Another area of growth is our catalogue of lendable titles. We’re not only adding thousands and thousands more to our total, we’re consistently adding unique titles. Despite that, we recognize that many books simply aren’t lendable, and that is why we will continue to strive for change in the industry.
We think the right kind of growth is the first step on the long road to demonstrating that we can actually have a positive impact on the sale of ebooks. If lending sites aren’t taken seriously by publishers, or if we give off the impression that we’re not interested in pushing the industry forward, no one is going to make big moves.
That’s bad for you, it’s bad for us, and it’s not going to do much for the publishing industry, either.
We’ll continue to ask questions, to push for a dialogue, and, of course, to promote the culture of reading that we so often talk about.
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