PRODUCT UPDATE : Happy New Year, Update on Movies feature progress, What are we planning for 2023
Happy New Year everyone!
You may have been wondering what I’ve been up to and I apologize I haven’t updated you all sooner! I’ve been working on adding movies to the site (which i’ll discuss later), but right now, I just want to give a big shoutout to a great 2022!
What did we do in 2022?
- Added Forums!
- @cat started our first book club and @Megumin pioneered a product requests category
- Added some awesome stats tracking, full with charts on days read, hours read, pages read and much more
- Made progress on incorporating Movies / TV Shows
- Overhauled the user profile, allowing photos and more comprehensive details
- Business / Personal: Incorporated Natively in Seoul and moved there
Where is the site now?
- Fully graded 2,484 series comprising 16,702 unique books!
- 45,000+ user gradings
- 1,200+ written book reviews, 14,000+ book ratings
- ~5,000 site users, 1,971 forum users
Where are we going in 2023?
- Finishing movies / tv shows (very soon hopefully)
- Adding a second language Korean
- Content Tags, Book Descriptions, Book Provider Search, Favorite list… and working on the Trello backlog (tbd)
- Book Club support (?, tbd)
Some thoughts on the future roadmap
After we finish movies & a second language, V1 of Natively will have been completed. I know there are LOTS of things still to improve, but I think we’d have demonstrated a V1 of the core vision, that being a general language learning platform focused on helping users track and find native content.
So, after that point, I think it warrants a brief break to focus on smaller, high priority platform improvements (Content Tags… etc) before moving on to more substantive changes. We also will just need to digest a bit on Korean & Movies/TV Show.
What do I envision for V2? Well, I’d say there’s two different paths:
- Path One: Expand breadth of languages, Outreach
- Path Two: Dive Deeper into Significant New Product Features
To be frank, we’ll probably have a combination of both, so do one or two new languages and do one or two big new features… but those are the competing forces. A lot depends too on how difficult it is to add a new language. Honestly, I don’t imaging much difficulty from the product perspective… it’ll be more an issue of performing outreach, which I very well may hire for.
As for big new product features, what are my thoughts? First, I’d note that these are separate from the ‘medium size’ and below trello tickets. Those I don’t consider core initiatives but ones which I do hope to be more diligent in completing in a timely fashion. Big new features would be: Content Recommendation Engine and/or Book Club Support.
I think I’m more inclined to do the latter and I think there’s a lot of exciting things we could do around book clubs / movie clubs which fit nicely into growing the site. However, when we get here, I’ll be chatting with you before moving forward.
What’s happening with Movies/TV Shows
- It’s coming! Hopefully soon. See notes below.
- I was hoping to have it done by Feb 1, but it looks like Feb 8th is more realistic
Why has it taken so long?
Well, I won’t lie… my move to Korea and trying to learn Korean has been a bit of a distraction. It’s a lot to move to a new country and learn a new language as you all probably know! 
I’ve really been focusing on Korean, but i’m feeling more comfortable now. Looking to focus more on Natively this year.
Secondly, this project also turned into a MUCH bigger project than I expected. I’ve essentially had to go through each interface on the site and re worked it to make sure it worked with both movies & books & potentially some more things down the line. That’s a lot of work and the more complicated the development, the exponentially more difficult it is to complete. But we’re close!
Sneak Peek into Movies
I won’t go through all of the changes, as movies will mostly work just like books do!
However, there are two substantive changes to know:
Subtitle information
Subtitle information will be required for your watched/watching audiovisual items. This influences which things you’re prompted to compare when grading difficulty. However, making a clean UI that is intuitive for inputting this information was slightly tricky. My solution:
- allow you to easily set a default subtitle setting, so that you can quickly watch a bunch of movies as ‘watched’ and ‘with JP subs’
- showcase this information via a little symbol (loudspeaker icon means audio only, text paragraph means subtitles)
- can always specify the info in the big item popup form
Marking TV season progress
TV season progress will be based on num of episodes completed, not minutes watched. These particular episodes can be manually toggled as watched/watching/not watched or you can simply input a current episode number & current_minute and It’ll auto mark the episodes watched.
Auto Marking:
(book page - auto marked episodes)
Manual Marking:
(book page, manual marking)
There’s also one exciting thing we’ll be able to do with movies I’d like to mention. Our movie database (TMDB) has a partnership with justwatch.com and they provide streaming information based on location! I’ve played around with it, and I’ll definitely be able to allow you to search for content based on your location and preferred provider (like Netflix). It’ll be a followup, but i think it could be a gamechanger!!
That’s all I have for right now! As always, let me know your feedback and here’s to a great 2023! 
Edit: I’ll add this as a blog post soon, but on vacation right now
