Part 1: Big stories for small hands
Wanderly's biggest pivot to date + mobile app launches! 🚀
I’ve been working on a major go-to-market pivot for the last eight months, and it’s finally launched! This is part 1 of a two-part post about the pivot. This post will focus on the pivot itself. Part 2 will focus on my journey.
It would mean a lot to me if you reviewed Wanderly on the App Store / Play Store. Or, better yet buy a Wanderly gift card for a loved one! You can use the code RUNNINGTOWARDS for 20% off all book + subscription packages until the end of the month. Thanks so much for your support. 🙏
I just launched Wanderly’s biggest pivot to date: Wanderly is now a book publisher! Any Wanderly story can be turned into a hard-cover keepsake book with the child’s name and image right on the cover.
I’m optimistic and excited about this direction. First, my daughters love their books. Alanna (now 6) got her first Wanderly book and was glued to it for 20 minutes straight when it arrived. Selena (now 2) has been too young to really interact with the phone version of Wanderly, so we made a book based on the types of choices we thought would fit her. It’s been her “favorite book” since it arrived, and she’ll eagerly tell us about her favorite pictures.
Bringing Wanderly stories off the screen and into a child’s hands also lets me do some things that have been hard to do:
Marketing is a LOT easier. It was always hard to market Wanderly; a lot of parents are anti-screen, it’s hard to get photos of kids using Wanderly that don’t make them look like screen zombies (even though their imagination and reading skills are engaged), and subscriptions can be hard to sell. With this publishing pivot, I can:
Market a physical book, which plays better with screen-cautious parents and feels more tangible to gift-givers
Expand my total addressable market (many friends who were previously lukewarm for screen reasons are now enthusiastic)
Create packages of books + subscriptions + add-ons, which give me more room for pricing experiments
There’s now a tangible reminder to engage with Wanderly that’s physically in a child’s space
I can do some pretty cool things with the art (more on that later)
There were a couple of key moments that convinced me that this pivot was the right direction to go. I’ve been getting consistent requests for printed copies of Wanderly stories since we launched, but I wasn’t sure how common that request was until I did a focus group with my daughter’s Kindergarten class. After spending about 30 minutes with Wanderly, at least 50% of their “I wish” statements were “I wish I could print out the story.”
A week later, I met with Nick Baum, the CEO and founder of Storyworth1. He and I originally met at Google, but since then, he’s built a beautiful business that helps families document and print their stories. He pitched me hard during our meeting: I really needed to get into the printing books business. He had originally started Storyworth as a subscription-only service, and it was only once a friend pushed him that he printed his first book. Holding his own father’s stories in his hand, he knew publishing was the go-to-market strategy he'd been looking for.
Nick’s pitch on the heels of my library focus group sent a strong signal: at the very least, I should try printing out a story. So I did … and Nick was right: having a book in my hands felt different! The images, which I had always gotten great feedback about, really popped. Putting Alanna's name on the cover and the spine made it feel like it was hers, not just words from an app. And I didn’t feel like my phone was the only way to experience Wanderly anymore.
In addition to being something you could hold, I can also do something really special with Wanderly images. For long-time readers, you know I’ve had to walk a tightrope between AI-image generation, safety, and the latency demands, opting to parent-review each Wanderly image and then do real-time matching. With a little extra offline time, I can transform a Wanderly story image into something really wonderful and personal:
An additional layer to this pivot is that Wanderly is now an app on the App Store and the Play Store! 🎉 When I started the app in late Nov ‘23, I thought porting Wanderly to the app stores would change Wanderly’s trajectory. Since it took far longer than the six weeks I was quoted (more on that in Part 2), I had lots of time to think about “Is this the answer?” I still think that porting Wanderly to a mobile app is the right call for my target audience and what can be enabled in the long term, but it didn’t solve marketing challenges. I think this publishing pivot feels correct for so many reasons. I hope I’m right. 😀🤞
Together with Wanderly on iOS and Android and publishing books, I hope the pivot resonates with potential customers. I’ll be reporting back in the coming months. 🫡
It would mean a lot to me if you reviewed Wanderly on the App Store / Play Store. Or, better yet buy a Wanderly gift card for a loved one! You can use the code RUNNINGTOWARDS for 20% off all book + subscription packages until the end of the month. Thanks so much for your support. 🙏
I bought a Storyworth subscription for my mom a few years ago and got some incredible stories (before I knew Nick was the founder). I’m an extremely satisfied customer, and would highly recommend if you have anyone in your family who likes to write or tell stories.