Readnauts
We wanted reading to
become a daily family
habit.
Readnauts didn’t start as a product. It started at our kitchen table, with three kids at three different reading stages and one question: how do you get everyone reading a little, every day?
It was never about finding books.
We’re a reading family, with three kids at very different stages: a twelve-year-old who devours graphic novels, a seven-year-old hitting his stride, and a five-year-old sounding out her first phonics readers. (And a dad who gets most of his own reading done on audiobooks.)
The hard part was never finding something to read. It was consistency. Reading would happen in bursts and then quietly fade. What we actually wanted was simple: to build a steady reading habit across the whole family, a little, every day.
Then a read-a-thon form came home.
One day my seven-year-old brought home a read-a-thon form from his class, the kind where you log your reading and collect pledges. And it clicked: what if there were a way to track all the reading we were already doing, and make it genuinely fun and quest-based, so it actually motivated the kids to read more, and more consistently?
We wanted something that felt less like a worksheet and more like a game, where a daily page count became real progress on an adventure that the whole family could follow.
Log it once, at home.
Share it anywhere.
Reading gets logged once, privately, within the family, and the stats are yours to share anywhere: a school read-a-thon, a library program, a proud end-of-year poster. The record belongs to the reader, not to any single challenge, so one logged book can count toward all of them.
Then we turned it into a shared quest, and that’s the part that surprised us. Seeing the whole family’s progress in one place, kids and grown-ups together, motivated them more than any sticker chart ever had. Fair scoring meant a five-year-old and a twelve-year-old could both feel proud reading right alongside Dad, without anyone feeling small.
“One family record: private to log, fair to score, and yours to share anywhere reading counts.”
Four decisions, in order.
We designed around the family’s habit loop, not a feature list. Each piece exists to keep the next book getting logged.
A reader-first record
We started with the library, not the leaderboard. Every book logs once to a reader’s permanent shelf. Challenges are just time-windowed views over it.
Smart Add to kill the friction
The hardest part of any reading app is logging. So we built a resolver: plain words in, a polished book card out, reread check included.
Fair scoring so everyone keeps up
Age and format aware points let a five-year-old, a twelve-year-old and a parent all make real progress on the same map, without anyone feeling small.
Quests to make it daily
Maps, milestones and a shared family goal turn a private record into momentum everyone wants to keep going, one book at a time.
The promises we won’t break.
Reading counts wherever it happens
Library, school, Kindle, audiobook, comic, bedtime story. The book belongs to the reader, not to any one app, list, or challenge.
Every reader deserves a fair win
A five-year-old’s picture book and a parent’s audiobook should both feel like real progress. Scoring adjusts for age and format so no one is demoralised.
Logging should take seconds
Type a messy note like “read Dog Man again at bedtime,” and we fill in the cover, author, pages and points. If logging is a chore, the habit dies.
Private and ad-free, always
No feeds, no strangers, no selling kids’ attention. Readnauts is a quiet space for your family’s reading life, and your data is always yours to export.
Make your family’s reading visible.
It began with our three kids. It’s built for yours too: private, ad-free, and a little bit magical.