Voluta: A Social Tracker for People Who Live Inside Stories

The problem

I read a lot, and I have tried every app that promises to help me keep track. Goodreads is a museum piece that Amazon stopped loving years ago. StoryGraph is sharper but still felt like a spreadsheet with feelings. None of them captured the part of reading I actually care about: the getting-lost, the wanting to talk about a book the second I finish it, the pull to see my own reading life laid back out in front of me.

The other problem was leaving. Everyone’s library is trapped in the tool they already outgrew, and the fear of re-entering hundreds of books by hand keeps people stuck. Any real alternative had to make switching feel like nothing.

So I built the thing I couldn’t find.

The approach

Voluta’s whole pitch is in the tagline: “Go ahead. Get lost.” It is a social tracker, not a productivity tool and not a feed to perform for. The reading comes first, and the social parts are there for the moment you close a book and need to say something about it. That shaped a few deliberate bets:

• Make switching frictionless. Goodreads and StoryGraph CSV import in about a minute. Your ratings, read dates, and shelves come with you. The clutter stays behind.
• Build the social layer for real, not as a bolt-on. Book clubs, buddy reads, and spoiler-aware discussion are first-class, with their own data models, not a comment box stapled to a book page.
• Respect where readers are in a book. Spoilers are gated by chapter, and you opt in to seeing them. You never get one dropped on you.
• Be honest about the roadmap. A public, votable roadmap where the community decides what comes next, and a clear plan to grow past books into shows, movies, and games.

How it’s built

Voluta is a Next.js 15 app (React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind) on Vercel, backed by Supabase Postgres with row-level security on every user-scoped table and Supabase Auth for email and Google sign-in. Writes are rate-limited and expensive third-party calls are cached and budget-capped through Upstash Redis, so a runaway loop can’t quietly drain an API budget. Book data comes from Google Books with OpenLibrary and the New York Times as supporting sources. Sentry handles error monitoring and GA4 handles analytics behind a consent banner. Background work (import processing, nightly jobs, reading reminders, budget reports) runs on Vercel cron. Input is validated with Zod, and there is a Jest suite covering the parts most likely to break: RLS policies, import matching, club voting, search ranking, and account deletion.

It ships as an installable progressive web app with offline support and full dark mode, and that same app is what is currently in review for iOS distribution.

Where it is now

Voluta is live on the web with 52 readers who have brought over 196 books between them, which is exactly the signal I wanted: people aren’t just signing up, they’re moving in. The founding member cohort opened to early supporters and closed on June 16, 2026, ahead of the public launch. The iOS submission is in App Store review, with the public launch targeting Q3 2026.

What I learned

Six years as a product manager taught me how to write a PRD and run a sprint. It did not teach me how to decide, alone, what not to build, and that turned out to be the entire job. The features I’m proudest of are partly the ones I left out. There are no half-built extras cluttering the schema. Everything that’s in the database is there because it earns its place, and the roadmap is public, so the next thing to build is a decision I get to make with the people using it, not for them.

Voluta is the first thing I have built that is entirely mine, end to end. It is live, people are reading on it, and it is still growing.

Project Deliverables

• Product Strategy
• UX & Visual Design
• Full-Stack Build
• Onboarding Flow
• Founding Member Program
• Design System

Key Features

• Append-only reading sessions: every read and re-read is preserved as its own record, so a book’s history compounds rather than overwrites.
• Library import: readers bring an existing shelf in instead of starting from zero.
• Reading logs & streaks: daily progress tracking and a reading streak that counts the days you show up.
• Rewind: a Spotify-style year-in-review that summarizes what was read, when, and how it felt, and is made to be shared.
• Smart recommendations: suggestions shaped by a reader’s own taste and the readers who line up with them, not the bestseller list.
• Author & book pages: first-class destinations for browsing a writer’s catalog or a single title’s history.
• Custom lists: readers shape their own collections (TBR, comfort reads, lent-out) instead of being forced into pre-set shelves.
• Buddy reads: invite a friend to read alongside you with shared posts and chapter-aware discussion.
• Book clubs: lightweight clubs with discovery, feeds, and member management.
• Spoiler-aware forums: chapter-level spoiler controls so a discussion never ruins what you haven’t read yet.
• Friends, follows & requests: two relationship models so readers choose between mutual friends and asymmetric follows.
• Mentions & rich markdown: posts and notes support @-mentions and formatted text without a heavy editor.
• Notifications: a single dropdown for the things that actually matter, with read-state and counts.
• Moderation & reporting: a report flow on every piece of user content and an admin moderation queue behind it.
• Account export: readers can download everything they’ve put in.
• Account deletion: a real delete, not a soft-hide.
• Founding member tier: a pre-launch program with a dedicated badge, banner, and pricing lock-in for early supporters.
• Premium subscription: checkout, customer portal, webhook-driven status, and a subscription gate for premium surfaces.
• Public roadmap: a live roadmap with admin-side editing so the product’s direction is visible to the people using it.
• Amazon affiliate links: ethical monetization on book pages without dark patterns.
• Feature waitlists: every “coming soon” feature has a real signup, so demand is measured, not guessed.
• Design system: a single source of truth for typography and components across the app, marketing, and admin.
• Dark mode: full theming across about, roadmap, and admin surfaces, not bolted on as an afterthought.
• Dashboard: surfaces current reads, a reading calendar, and streaks at a glance.
• Profile & onboarding: a step-based welcome that gets a reader from sign-up to first book in under a minute.
• Rate limiting & abuse controls: Redis-backed limits on reads and writes to keep the experience fast and the system honest.
• Admin tooling: user management, moderation, roadmap editing, brand kit, and migration runner all in-app.