Blossom

Blossom our mascot reading her book!
Blossom Studios Icon
A screenshot from one of my marketing materials, but also showing the reservation system

Inspiration

It was 8 p.m on a Friday, I was finished work and getting ready to go out to find the fourth entry to a book series I love, Dungeon Crawler: The Gate of the Feral Gods. I went to every book store in Downtown Toronto, searching for this book. And believe me I was careful, I went on their website if there was one to search for availability but everytime I went into the physical store it was missing. I think my T-shirt still smells of fresh book paper from all the digging that I did.

Ironically I found this book because a person had a Google review with a picture of the book at a book cafe. Lo' and behold after 3 hours I eventually found it, and dug right in.

I took to social media to showcase my victory only to have a friend message me saying "Oh I have that book". It dawned on me at that moment... I also have the three other books to this series, I have every A Song of Ice and Fire book there is, three books of Dune, etc. All just sitting in my home when someone is out there looking for the book somewhere or just dropping the idea completely.

I wanted to bring back the community of book sharing/borrowing and hey, why not also make a little money on the side by renting your books!

Thus Blossom is born in the world, ready to serve my (and hopefully others) Dungeon Crawler addiction.

What it does

Blossom is a book sharing app that allows borrowers and lenders alike to share their books. Not only does it have an e-shelf that allows you to share your books, ratings, and notes with each other but the biggest feature is that you can list your book.

Blossom enables an AirBnB marketplace but for books, you can borrow or rent your books with a full calendar reservation system, double-blind rating and chat feature to faciliate the process.

Check it out at: link

How we built it

I'm using: React-Native for my front-end, Astro for my website, .NET for my backend APIs, Azure for my hosting provider, SignalR for my chat features, Expo for my mobile build server, GCP for my maps and books search, OpenLibrary for my books searches, Firebase for my Notification Management and Stripe for my Payments Provider.

I also use Figma for my designs but... This is embarassing, but I actually use MS Paint for some of my designs. I grew up with it, and I feel like I'm such a pro at it haha.

Challenges we ran into

Honestly just learning all the compliancy rules, integration pieces and the biggest one of alll... Marketing.

From the technical point of view, I really want Blossom to be beyond the MVP but an app for all. Thus we must ensure:

All database queries/commands run under sub-second
Follow all best practices, Stripe's Idempotency is a recent example I had to restructure my architecture around. I of course can just regen idempotency keys per request, but I want to get this right
Learning Infrastructure as a Code. I am not a DevOps person, so learning K8s, bicep syntax and GH Actions is all new but fun!

And the thing that is not as obvious until you start building... Marketing! I have a 3/6/9/12 months plan with a weekly execution plan on marketing. I have installed I think every single app, and at the end of every build I edit videos for those platforms. On top of that, weekly dev updates to get some hype. And because I'm just an awkward potato, I also go out to book stores and start talking to folks about the app and get businesses feedback and their buy-in to advertise. Don't underestimate marketing folks!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am super proud of the community I have built thus far around the mobile app while it's in beta phase. But most of all, I am super proud of what I have built. The map, even though it just shows 10 books, really is something beautiful. To see the little circles representing individuals who want to share their books. That's what I wanted to achieve and seeing the spark of it is amazing.

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What we learned

Always have a Plan B, and trust your gut on things. Build proper observability without the cost of UX. Build asynchronous systems upfront and most of all... Do not underestimate marketing!

What's next for Blossom

Getting on the Google Play Store is my first goal, but I have a lot I want to do next:

Build business accounts in Blossom and advertise in your local community
Allow users to request custom physical shelves made. Go from the digital to physical!
My end end end goal is to have Blossom become a Book Publisher for upcoming Authors. I want to give a platform for those who write everyday a chance to shine in their community and beyond.