Idea & Product Definition
We worked shoulder to shoulder with founder Simon Gauchet to carve out Byzans' place between Amino and Goodreads, landing on the concept that makes it stick: every book comes with a conversation attached.
Case study · LANARS × Byzans
Social ReadingFlutterMobile & Web
Byzans turns reading into a global conversation between book lovers
Byzans matches every book you catalog with real people already talking about it — search by ISBN, author, or title, drop it on a shelf, and land straight in a chatroom with readers at the same page as you. LANARS built the whole thing end to end: product definition, design, and a full-stack app now live on iOS, Android, and the web.
Project at a glance
- Mobile + WebEverywhere readers already are
- 6Features readers open daily
- 5Search problems solved for good
- 4Reasons users keep coming back
- iOS & AndroidOne tap away, on both stores
Project overview
Byzans — a tool for passionate readers
Byzans set out to beat two giants at their own game: Amino's sprawling topic communities and Goodreads' book-cataloging habit. Its founder, Simon Gauchet — a passionate reader and LANARS' client — spotted the gap between them: cataloging with no conversation, and communities with no shelf. Byzans became the first app to close it, matching every saved book with a live discussion.
Search a book by ISBN, author, or title, save it to a list, and Byzans does the rest — surfacing fellow bookworms at the same reading stage, ready to talk about exactly what you're reading right now.
LANARS partnered with Simon Gauchet's team on every layer of that experience — validating the idea, architecting the search engine, designing the UI, and shipping a full-stack product that's live today on iOS, Android, and the web.
Approach
How we built Byzans end-to-end
LANARS partnered with Byzans' founder from the first sketch to the App Store listing — defining the product, designing an experience readers want to open daily, and building a platform that runs across mobile, web, and backend.
Design
We designed search, cataloging, chatrooms, and the Top 50 leaderboard as one smooth flow — so switching from finding a book to talking about it never feels like leaving the app.
Development
We built the Flutter mobile client, the ReactJS web front-end, and the Django backend, then engineered the search, deduplication, and caching layer that makes Byzans' book database feel instant.
Solution
Closer look at the product
Byzans turns cataloging into conversation: real-time chatrooms grouped by reading stage, a relaxed community forum for everyone else, and an ISBN camera scanner that gets a book onto your shelf in seconds.
Smooth design, an interface that gets out of the way, and a social layer people actually use — Byzans makes reading feel like something you do together, not alone.
- ISBN codePoint your camera at a barcode and Byzans finds the exact book in seconds — no typing, no guessing which edition. QR scanning works too.
- News FeedSee the moment a friend picks up a new book or finishes one you've been meaning to read — the News Feed keeps every shelf update where you'll actually see it.
- ChatroomsLand in the right conversation automatically — Want to Read, Currently Reading, or Read each have their own real-time chatroom, plus an open forum for anyone who wants to talk books and authors.
- Top 50 SectionA live leaderboard of the clubs everyone's talking about right now, sorted by read, want-to-read, and currently-reading status — the fastest way to find your next book.
App showcase
Key features & screens
Search, shelf, and chatroom — Byzans keeps them one tap apart, so readers open it once and stay for the conversation.
- Book Search
- ISBN Scanner
- News Feed
- My Books
- My Clubs
- Top 50
Challenges & solutions
The hard problems behind an easy search bar
Relevant search
ChallengeThere are several large open-resource sites where you can find a book's name, author, publisher, and cover — Amazon Books and the Google Books API among them. The problem is they have request restrictions, can duplicate results, and are virtually impossible to keep in sync.
SolutionWe standardized how we receive and pre-process data from third-party servers and built an algorithm that automatically grows Byzans' own internal database — so search stays fast and reliable no matter which source it draws from.
No search-result duplication
ChallengeA book search may return no results at all, or the same book several times — because most books have been reprinted, and the same book can be published in different languages with different translated titles.
SolutionWe built an algorithm that compares titles against each other and strips out unnecessary duplicates — so one search returns one book, not five copies of it.
Representative book-cover performance
ChallengeTo compile a user's book list, we needed visual material reflecting the saved books on their screens — which meant a database of high-quality images with book covers presented in a consistent style.
SolutionWe set quality standards for every cover sourced online, so every shelf looks as good as the books on it.
High-speed book search
ChallengeTo find a book by title, ISBN, or author, Byzans has to query many library servers, bookselling sites, and electronic registers. In the test version, a single search could take from 20 seconds to several minutes.
SolutionWe kicked off background development of our own book database on Redis caching — turning a multi-minute search into an instant one.
Independent book database
ChallengeThe product needed its own database of books — but manually adding information about the millions of books ever written wasn't realistic.
SolutionEvery result our search engine returns gets compared against our existing database; the moment Byzans spots a new book, it adds itself automatically — no manual entry required.
"They were able to break down every feature of the project"
Simon Gauchet, Founder
Tech & tools
- Flutter
- Dart
- ReactJS
- Django
- Python
- AWS EC2
- PostgreSQL (RDS)
- Redis (ElastiCache)
Building something ambitious in mobile?
We've taken products from a first sketch to the App Store — ISBN scanners, real-time chat, and everything in between. Let's talk about yours.
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