Nadia has a couple of people working with her as well - Rob does some stuff, and Abby is their Head Librarian (or whatever similar title, she's effectively an all-around assistant that runs their Librarian Corps in addition to doing a few other things).
Hardcover is similarly a 3 person team - one primary Dev (Adam, Founder and Lead Dev), one primary UI/ UX guy (Ste, Lead Designer), and one primary data guy (myself, Head Librarian, also runs our Librarian Corps).
Nadia is awesome, don't get me wrong. What they've done over there is truly impressive and you'll never hear me say otherwise. Hell, I'm a paying supporter and librarian over there, I think they do such great work.
But I do think that what we've got going on at Hardcover is even better, and I'll stand by that too. :)
I don't think it is Amazon so much as sheer number of users.
When you have 20K (like Hardcover), it is much easier to be focused on each of them (or at least small groups of them) than when you have 20 million - much less a few multiples of that number.
As we grow, even Hardcover will have to evolve. This noted, I know this team (including myself, to be clear). Adam is truly focused on innovation and dev excellence. Ste, our lead designer, always has his eye on UI/ UX improvements and listening to what our users want/ how our users are using the site. As for myself, I'm the data/ social media guy - always looking to make our data as solid as possible and looking to use social media as effectively as possible. :)
To be clear, Hardcover also does server-side rendering.
GR ditching their API was one of the primary motivations for Adam Fortuna (Hardcover's founder and Lead Dev) to even think about trying to create a competitor, so when he did create one, having an API available to others was a primary focus.
Note: Hardcover is also working towards open sourcing at some level, hopefully in 2025.
Nadia has a couple of people working with her as well - Rob does some stuff, and Abby is their Head Librarian (or whatever similar title, she's effectively an all-around assistant that runs their Librarian Corps in addition to doing a few other things).
Hardcover is similarly a 3 person team - one primary Dev (Adam, Founder and Lead Dev), one primary UI/ UX guy (Ste, Lead Designer), and one primary data guy (myself, Head Librarian, also runs our Librarian Corps).
Nadia is awesome, don't get me wrong. What they've done over there is truly impressive and you'll never hear me say otherwise. Hell, I'm a paying supporter and librarian over there, I think they do such great work.
But I do think that what we've got going on at Hardcover is even better, and I'll stand by that too. :)