How rejecting conventional wisdom led to our breakthrough

Pagebound is different from any book tracker or social media you've seen before, and it's entirely on purpose.

“How are you different from {insert book tracker here}?”

We get this question all the time and for good reason. In the book space alone, there are dozens of tracking apps, each with their own twist but generally offering the same menu of features. We anticipated the “how are you different” question from day one; in fact, we asked ourselves this every step along the way. How can we stand out? What makes Pagebound unique?

One thing became very clear: if we wanted to create the social book app of our dreams, we were going to have to break the rules. To be different, we had to reject conventional wisdom. Here are 3 of the rules we broke.

It needs to be easy to find your IRL connections on a new social media.

Why we reject it: In our hyper-connected online world, anonymity grants authenticity.
PB Feature Outcomes: Pagebound-illustrated avatars (no personal pics!), no data connections to your external social media or phone number, anonymous usernames, no public follower counts.

When I was 22, my boss—who I was cool with—found me on Goodreads. It wasn’t hard; just type in “Jennifer Dobak” (please don’t), and I pop right up. What wasn’t so cool was coming into work the next day to jokes about my 5 star rating of 50 Shades of Grey.

Reading is so personal it can feel private. Whether it’s your guilty pleasure or 1 star review of a beloved bestseller, you don’t want your coworker or your aunt seeing this info uninvited. Pagebound’s default anonymity gives readers the freedom to be their authentic selves without fear of who’s watching and gives users who only lurk on other sites the courage to actively participate. No public follower counts or personal photos mean no clout chasing; connection is made exclusively through discussion and participation. And no, your boss cannot find you unless you intentionally share your profile.

To serve quality content, you need complex algorithms, AI, or machine learning.

Why we reject it: People crave simplicity in tech and value the human over the machine. Also, f*** AI.
PB Feature Outcomes: Community-sourced book recommendations and lists, chronological feeds, no timestamps on posts or comments, a commitment to zero AI.

Go on X or Reddit, and you’ll see many a tech bro evangelizing the superiority of an algorithmic feed. Look for book recommendations on the other big name apps, and you’ll find AI or algorithm–driven selections interspersed with paid placements. Conventional tech wisdom says algos cut through the noise to show the best content, but I disagree. When you go on TikTok or Instagram, you’re not seeing the best content. You’re seeing the content the algo thinks will keep you on TikTok or Instagram the longest.

We have a different goal on Pagebound. We actually do want to show you the best content. We don’t want you to doom-scroll; we don’t have ads, so it doesn’t matter if you check PB for 5 minutes or 3 hours. Our top priority is giving you such an incredible experience that you keep coming back and hopefully support us with a contribution.

A chronological feed keeps it simple. There’s no content farming or performing for an algo; it feels more peaceful and less like a rat race, especially since posts and comments don’t have timestamps, so everything is truly timeless. Our human-curated recommendations and lists may take more time to aggregate, but they aren’t the copy-paste suggestions you see elsewhere. They’re interesting and include genuine under-the-radar selections. We aren’t anti-AI just because it’s the moral thing to be—we genuinely believe humans are better at curating and recommending books than machines (just ask your local librarian or bookseller).

To beat the competition, you need to do what they’re doing but better.

Why we reject it: Our competitors do many things excellently, yet they still aren’t fulfilling readers’ needs. We can have a more well-rounded product without reinventing the wheel.
PB Feature Outcomes: An investment in community first, data second.

In the pre-launch days, there was a huge temptation to include and improve upon all our competitors features while *also* including all of our Pagebound-specific innovations. There’s a fear there that says: if you don’t have stats, people will leave. If you don’t have a 30 million book catalog, they’ll hate it. But as a one-woman engineering team, doing it all from day 1 was simply not possible. So we doubled down on what makes Pagebound different—forums, quests, human-curated lists and recs, our innovative reviewing and tracking system—rather than worrying about being yet another place to track a reading streak. In those early days, we actually positioned ourselves as a Goodreads or Storygraph companion rather than a replacement.

While we will have stats and streaks soon and will always continue expanding our book catalog, investing first in community and book tracking immediately differentiated us and gave readers a reason to check out the new kid on the block. Had we started with the basics—stats, streaks, edition tracking—we’d be virtually the same as every other book tracker out there. Opting to develop some of these “essentials” later was definitely a gamble, but it’s one that has paid off. Pagebound’s community is unmatched in the book space, and we’re in a league of our own as the only forum and discussion based tracker.