Booklight

I want to tell you a story, the story of a simple idea which won the hearts of many people. Booklight just turned 4 years old and I never expected such a big success for such a simple idea. I was the first to believe in it and the rest just happened.

The spark

In the winter of December 2018 I was at my parents' house, sleeping in the room with my brother. While he was sleeping I wanted to read a book but we didn't have a reading lamp. I didn't want to turn on the light and I didn't want to use the flash on my phone because its light was too strong. For this reason, I started using the screen of my phone as a soft light for reading paper books (opening a bright image and activating the screen whenever it went on standby). Just then I realised this might be a good idea for a mobile application. The next morning I started coding.

The first customer

After a day of coding the prototype was ready. The entire application was a simple golden view (I liked the idea of emitting a golden light) that never went on standby. That's all. Believe it or not, I used it every day. Since I found it very useful, I thought other users might find it useful as well and I decided to upload it to the Play store. I named it Booklight, because that's how it was born - it was a soft light for reading books.

Simple ideas go viral

What happened next is just amazing. Without any cent spent in advertising, Booklight started to be downloaded by dozens of people, day after day. Some of them left positive reviews with ideas on how to improve it and this gave me so much motivation to continue the development and add new features. Month after month I continued to evolve the idea by adding what users from different parts of the world requested... and the application kept growing.

A request for improvement I still remember arrived by email. A mother from Tanzania wrote to me saying she uses Booklight as a night light for her child. However, leaving the phone screen on all night leads to battery drain. It would be nice to have a timer able to disable the screen after it ends. This way, she could set the timer for a couple of hours so when the child goes to sleep the screen turns itself off.

To tell the truth, I had never thought about it in that way and only then I started to realise how many use cases this simple application could have. People were starting to use it everywhere! As you can imagine, I have implemented the timer feature and still today people keep downloading Booklight because it has a timer.

From people to people

I love when an idea is useful and helps people. That's why I started taking care of every single email received. Thanks to different users suggestions I implemented:

• A bar for adjusting the light brightness. Booklight users can change the intensity of the light making it perfect for a variety of conditions.
• Themes to change the colour of the screen light.
• A bookmark section where users can save a page number in order to start reading the book from where they left off.
• A floating button to add a quick note to save thoughts, book quotes or anything else on the user's mind. All notes can be accessed from the main menu and they can be edited with a click.

Every time I add a new feature, the application keeps getting more and more downloads. Today it is used practically in every part of the globe (as you can notice from this chart) with an average engagement time of 2 hours. It's mind blowing how many use cases it has today.

No invasive Ads

I never wanted to spam Booklight with advertising; this is probably a fundamental element of its success. Monetization is present but it is creatively hidden behind a type of advertising that is opened only when the user decides to display it. It never appears automatically, so it is therefore a user's choice to open it.

Why did I decide to tell you this story?

Well, when you present your idea to someone, many times they will tell you that it doesn't make sense. It happened many times to me with Booklight. However, I really believed in it and I found it useful from the first day. Then, checking the analytics, I understood that the phone screen can be used as a lamp in various ways and I was sure that different people found the idea useful, just like me. That's why, when you find an idea makes sense to you, keep supporting it because it means it probably makes sense to others too. You just have to find the right way to share it and make it helpful.

Thanks for reading,
Kamil Molendys