Richard Reis on building book discovery beyond Google
Richard Reis is the founder and software engineer behind Most Recommended Books, which helps readers discover books recommended by influential people. The conversation explores how source-linked recommendations set the site apart, how it found early users and why Reis is now prioritising retention over growth.
A traffic source can bring people in without giving them a reason to return. Reis’s experience suggests building for repeat use and working with people who share a real problem before chasing growth or the latest trend.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I started Most Recommended Books (https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/) in 2019. It helps readers discover books recommended by influential people.
What makes it different is the sourcing. We show the exact quotes people gave about the books they’re reading, with links to the original posts. Readers can see what was actually said and check the source themselves.
I spent six months gathering that material *by hand* (crazy, I know, but I had to do what I had to do) then years polishing and perfecting it.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
My first users came from Product Hunt launches. We never ever made the top three (maybe not even top 5), but those launches got the first people using the site.
Today, most of our new business comes from SEO. As of November 2026, Most Recommended Books gets about 16,000 visits a day.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision was to put retention before growth. Most Recommended Books used to get about 25,000 visitors a day, and one Google update brought that down to about 3,000.
My mistake was building a business that depended on Google continuing to send us new people. We hadn’t given those people enough reasons to come back on their own, so one change to our growth channel could take away most of the traffic (and therefore revenue).
That’s why we launched the Most Recommended Books app (https://apps.apple.com/in/app/most-recommended-books/id6759255513). We’re trying to build something people return to FIRST, then we’ll focus on growing it.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
The web is flooded with text now, and SEO is much more crowded than when I started Most Recommended Books. I think video is becoming more trusted because it’s harder to fake doing the work on camera.
That’s why I started the Retention Series (https://www.youtube.com/@richardreeze). I’m making 52 lectures, one every Tuesday, where I teach what I’m learning and apply it to my own product (and I show the real numbers, even when they’re tiny).
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
First, build something you actually use, then find a handful of other people with the same problem and work with them until they keep coming back.
I’d ignore the pressure to chase whatever is hot. In 2024, I built a resume tailor even though I’d never had a resume myself (yes, really). It didn’t survive.
Thank you to Richard Reis and the team at Most Recommended Books for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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