Novels GG

About

A web-novel publishing and reading platform in the mould of Wattpad and Royal Road, which I co-founded and built end to end — reader experience, author tooling, and the infrastructure under both.

I own all of the engineering; my partner funded it and drove traffic.

What I built

• Built the reader-facing application in Laravel with Blade and Alpine.js, backed by APIs for comments, reviews, likes, notifications, library management and real-time search.
• Built the admin surface in Filament — my first serious Livewire work, and the thing that made me a convert.
• Started the content pipeline on Markdown, patching the Laravel markdown formatter with a custom CommonMark extension that stripped links and images and held authors to safe basic formatting.
• Replaced it, on author request, with a Notion-style Plate.js block editor. That meant building an AST on the backend to parse block nodes and hierarchy, count words, reconcile rendering between editor and reader, and migrate every existing Markdown chapter into the new block format.
• Rebuilt the author dashboard in React with Inertia.js.
• Added image optimisation, view and activity tracking, text censorship, a customisable reader (font size and family, line and paragraph spacing), profiles and bookmarks.
• Ran the infrastructure: Dockerised FPM and CLI images, Horizon for queues, automated MySQL backups, zero-downtime rollouts on Hetzner via docker-rollout and GitHub Actions, Cloudflare R2 for assets and Honeybadger for error tracking.

Outcome

Live since October 2023. Paid promotion brought roughly 50,000 users within days, but retention was poor — the audience wanted paid-quality writing on a free platform, and there was no organic or SEO strategy behind the spend.

It runs today on a small footprint with a modest active community. I have started a ground-up redesign on the TALL stack — a React SPA dashboard with the main app serving APIs and a Livewire reader — which is around 40% complete.

What I took away

• The engineering was never the constraint. A platform without a distribution engine does not grow, no matter how well it is built.
• Paid acquisition with no retention story buys you a traffic spike and nothing else.
• Building the AST content pipeline taught me more about data modelling than any framework feature — once content is structured rather than stringly-typed, migrations and rendering both become tractable.
• I am watching the redesign carefully as a case of over-building something with no near-term return.