Monthly Minis
A $5-a-month, 30-page mini photo book made for small hands — built from scratch to get Chatbooks into the subscription business, and designed, tested, and shipped by me alone.
Get into the subscription game, fast.
Chatbooks had never run a subscription product. Monthly Minis was our way to get our feet wet: a new mini-book every month for $5, made for small hands — your kids' books, not the parents' — and just 30 pages of your best photos. Simple to understand, low commitment, and a real test of whether recurring revenue could work for us at all.
Before any screens got drawn, the question on the wall was the one that shaped everything downstream: what problem are we actually trying to solve, and for whom?
Sole designer, start to finish.
I was the only designer on Monthly Minis, which meant I saw the entire arc — from the first sketch to the shipped product to its first million dollars in sales. Being that close to it end to end let me learn directly from users on where they got confused, stuck, or frustrated, and fold that straight back into the next round of design rather than hand it off.
Showing everything at once was the problem.
Our first iterations displayed every available month at once. It was overwhelming, and in testing no one knew where to start. We shifted to showing only the most recent month — the one book actually available to fill in right now — and added suggestions for where to go next once someone finished it. Each month, a new book simply became available, and the whole design pushed people toward that one first, obvious next step.
12 prototypes to get it right.
We ran multiple rounds of user studies, at least five interviews per round, testing a new iteration of prototypes each time. In total we designed and tested 12 prototypes before landing on the version we shipped. That rigor paid off directly: once launched, Monthly Minis had the lowest volume of support tickets of any product we'd built.
Making the charge make sense.
A recurring charge is a different mental model than a one-time purchase, and our early language didn't make that distinction clear. We changed how we navigated people through the flow and rewrote the specific words we used to describe it — landing on phrasing that summarized the charge plainly, so it read unmistakably as a subscription rather than a surprise.
One month, front and center.
The version that shipped: the current month's book, a clear photo count, and a straight line to preview and finish — no grid of months competing for attention, no ambiguity about what happens next.
$1M in year one — and a bigger product born from it.
We went from concept to launch in about three months, and Monthly Minis brought in $1M in sales in its first year — proof that the subscription model worked for Chatbooks. The lessons we learned running it — on pacing, clarity, and getting people to their one clear next step — became the foundation for Monthbooks, which went on to become an even more successful product.
Being close to every part of it made the product better.
Owning Monthly Minis alone, end to end, meant nothing about how real users experienced it got lost between teams. Every point of confusion I saw in testing went straight back into the next prototype, twelve times over, until the product was simple enough to need almost no support. That same instinct — solve the smallest, clearest problem first — is what carried straight into Monthbooks.