Sarah Ritter prides herself on being able to offer great book recommendations to her friends. Now she’s got a read on what it takes to bring that joy to a wider audience — late nights and some AI.
Ritter, founder of one-time Seattle startup Tribute, recently launched Sarah’s Books, a web app designed to promote book discovery and reading while helping support libraries and local independent bookstores.
The app was built with help from Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant. Ritter took pictures of her physical book collection and used Claude to inventory and index the images. She built a Google doc with curated themes, genres, titles and descriptions. And then she had an epiphany.
During her kids’ winter break, she vibe coded Sarah’s Books, “somewhat obsessively, perhaps only as founders do,” late at night at home in Seattle. She logged more than 350 hours of coding time, 100,000 lines of code and 2,000 “commits” to Git — essentially a timestamped paper trail of every individual brick she laid while building the app’s foundation.
Sarah’s Books relies on a combination of human curation, based on Ritter’s collection, and AI assistance that suggests books outside of her collection for readers of every age. Books are curated by themes such as “emotional truth” or “beach read” and genres, including mystery, fantasy, or historical fiction.
The app does not point to Amazon, but instead each book recommendation includes a Libby link for library users. With purchases made through Bookshop.org links, a portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores. Sarah’s Books also supports Libro.fm, an independent alternative to Audible.
“I have no idea where it will go, but for the time being, I love not knowing and building Sarah’s Books for the love of reading,” Ritter told GeekWire. “There is a purity to it that feels more satisfying than trying to make it be something because a VC threw money at it.”
Book lovers can create a free profile to add their own books, share favorite authors, and get personalized recommendations based on their reading preferences. Ritter is also experimenting with a feature called “Book Mashups” where ideas from different authors “collide, complement, and start talking to each other.”
“The differentiator between a Goodreads and something like Sarah’s Books is the more personal nature of it,” Ritter said. “I trained my algorithm on my particular taste profile of a book.”
When not reading or helping other people figure out what to read, Ritter is currently working at Workato, a platform for connecting apps and automating workflows. Beyond Sarah’s Books, she also vibe coded another web app called Summer Camp Finder to assist Seattle families.
Ritter is a former director of product marketing at Microsoft and she earned her MBA from Seattle University. She still draws on her experience as a startup founder and CEO.
Tribute, a startup built to help foster workplace connections, shut down in 2024 after eight years. Ritter, who previously went by Sarah Haggard, said she felt “a fair bit of failure” because like any founder she wanted to go on the journey of having an idea, raising capital, building a rocket ship and taking off.
“That didn’t happen in my case, and it was kind of like, ‘Who am I now? What do I do?’” she said. “The vibe coding stuff for me and Sarah’s Books in particular, is very full circle, because I’m using a lot of what I learned at Tribute. It suddenly doesn’t feel like it was all for naught, which is kind of nice.”
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