Goodreads CEO & founder Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler Editor & Chief run a social reading site that offers book reviews and a place to discover new books to read, based in part by. So its kind of fun like that. On his own, and then he went out an got funding. You had match.com, you had americansingles.com, and eHarmony, and those are great. Interviewee: For one, I didnt feel like getting another job. Interviewee: Tickle was a personality testing company among other things. Thank you for that recommendation. And you just track as much as you can and then better it. I had never read Pride and Prejudice. Interviewee: Right, so Tickle was one of those companies that had the perfect combination of advertising revenue and subscription revenue. Interviewee: Oh, its, its, its amazing so far. There is also a special section for authors with suggestions for promoting their works on Goodreads.com, aimed at helping them reach their target audience. Interviewee: Definitely. I dont think it worked. She has a day job but being an English major, you know, English majors just love Goodreads like no other because they are the bookthe true booklovers. Alright, lets continue. [3][4] In December 2007, the site had 650,000 members[5] and 10,000,000 books had been added. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. So we both launched it, blasted out an email to all of our friends and we got it up toI dont know, I think after a month, from December to January, we got it up to about 800 people with our friends and friends of friends, just kind of organically grown. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. To get me to take the mindset of yeah okay, I can take a year off and not go on salary and build something for my living room, that was essentially life-changing. [2], Goodreads was founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler. Andrew: Why did you decide to start your own company instead of going and looking for another great company to work in? So Goodreads was built to do this, our position is not catalog your books, our position is see what your friends are reading, or get excited about reading through your friends. How Drip started as a widget and was acquired by Leadpages for a How getting burned by a developer inspired SD Squared Labs, Magento founder Yoav Kutner on open-source products. Scott Everett for NPR That gave his business enough traction to raise money from investors and grow it to over 2.6 million members. He had a number of good things about him. So realitys about making things really dead simple for the user. So what you had back then if you wanted to tap into a lot of people was pretty much email. And I see Dave Yank, whos watching the slide has got a question. Andrew: Good example, by the way. Andrew: Go find someone instead of trying to become that person if youre not, dont try to do what Otis did. So I realized that a niche social network around reading, much like a social network around photos, would probably work. Andrew you might be a golden retriever because youre kind of outgoing. When he decided to launch his own site just for book lovers, a respected colleague told him there was "probably not a very big market there." Otis figured he might prove him wrong, and in 2007, launched Goodreads, a book catalog and review site that he coded from his LA apartment. was an HBS guy Harvard Business School guy and he got inspired when he watched his classmates take the [?] Sign In http://www.twitter.com/otown https://www.goodreads.com/otis Otis's favorite books More Otis's Bookshelves read (577) Some authors dont get into it but go look at Paul Coelho whos a bestselling, international bestselling author and that guy in on Goodreads every day. [31], Noting that some authors had been "too aggressive in their self-promotion" (as Goodreads admitted in an email) and that some readers had responded with aggression,[32] in September 2013, Goodreads announced it would delete, without warning, reviews that threatened authors or mentioned authors' behavior. "[34], In January 2016, Amazon announced that it would shut down Shelfari in favor of Goodreads, effective March 16, 2016. Interviewee: I think thats the trick and I dont know if theres a right answer, but we try to judge every new feature on kind of three criteria, and they would be: number one is it going to get us more traffic, number two is it going to make us more money, and number three is it going to be stickier? He said, Ill teach you everything in two days. Otis Chandler was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. If youve got a guy on your side that can build youre farther ahead, and luckily I was that for yourself, but every time Im at a Mixergy event and I meet some guy whos like Ive got this great idea, but I need a good engineer and some money, what do you suggest I do? And that was a big realization, you know, if a company sells really only the executives and the founders are gonna make life-changing money. If they were Jewish, they would go to JDate. Goodreads is pleased to announce the release of KINDLR, an exciting new dating app exclusively for Goodreads members. Number of Investments 2. And my wife and I, I kind of view my wife as my co-founder. Do you have some advice that you can give to other scrappy entrepreneurs who say, I like the way Otis did it, he didnt go out and look for funding first, he built his product first, I want to duplicate that approach.. And theres a lot ofpretty much everybodys building a social network these days. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. [69] According to Goodreads, transgender authors who published under a different name before coming out can contact the website directly to request exceptions, although there are no known or notable cases where trans authors have been given such choices. Research help from Claire Murashima. Then plus wed have advertising on the test throughout it and that ended up working because the fun tests would go viral and draw people into taking more fun tests and then some of them would take a serious test and all of it was designed to be fun and to learn about yourself. So this is fun, youre like wow, Ive got three friends and I can see their results I want to see the rest of my friends results let me go send them an email. But the point is, you went from big generic to lots of little niche ones and the niche ones worked because they were tight around a community and the interests that people liked. You know, theres still challenges. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. You didnt have to go about marketing it yourself. So its not keyword based like the other ones; its book genre based. You know, for pretty much every ethnicity, every race, every sports activity, anything you can figure that you can create a community around there was a dating site for that. The website's offices are located in San Francisco. Interviewee: Yeah, I mean if its you, do it. Maybe theres the business model. So it just always seemed like something I wanted to do. Interviewee: I mean thats the challenge. Andrew: Im going to save that for Mixergy.com. I dont know. I got that book for my Kindle, I love it. It just seemed like there was a lot more innovation going on. Interviewee: So, the founder, James [?] Edit Personal Investments Section. It actually started as EMO.com which is when I joined it in 2,000 and I thought it was pretty dumb when I joined it actually to be honest but luckily it was started by some really smart people who knew what they were doing, and that was lesson number 1: People who are smart and determined to succeed, WILL succeed, even with what seems like a dumb idea, and you know, the Tickle guys were smart and determined and thats what they did, so they took an idea to do a testing company online from an idea to a funded startup to selling it to Monster.com in 2004 for 100,000,000 bucks. Mrs. But Ive always been an engineering minded kid. Number three when I finally come back to the US you can come out to a Mixergy event to see him in person. What were you able to do? So what we had is we animated on this fun, plus serious model and I think at the end we had maybe 600 fun tests and maybe 150 serious tests, and the serious tests we eventually figured out we could sell a result to these. Andrew: [Andrew Laughs] that actually I think is a good prep for a business. [59], In May 2013, as a result of Goodreads' acquisition by Amazon, Goodreads began using Amazon's data again.[60]. I cant believe I struggled over it because now its a no-brainer. Are you a designer? But if the authors not into it, its not going to work. Goodreads features a rating system of one to five stars, with the option of accompanying the rating with a written review. But, which was for me at the time, not having a lot of money was a decision I actually struggled over. I learned C, so I had a little bit of exposure to it, but not a lot. So if you have a new book about science fiction. [17] During its first year of business, the company was run without any formal funding. [46], The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (version 2) and Kindle Voyage feature integration with Goodreads' social network via a user interface button. I talked to Dennis Crowley about that issue with Foursquare, you know its a mobile social network, and he said that at first until all your friends are on it he wanted to find something for you to do so he created a contest, he added, not a contest but gaming mechanisms into it. Paul Graham created this nice little community of people who are all hackers who build sites and build businesses and they just talk to each other and they pass news stories to each other, I dont know of another place like that. You can self-publish through any of the self publishing sites like [LuLu] and come on and even if youre just writing a book you can do it do. So, from that perspective, absolutely, it was life-changing. And thats okay. And this is the way you build any product, right? The rest of us get a nice check. Amazon.com, Inc. v. Barnesandnoble.com, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goodreads&oldid=1141346846, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles lacking reliable references from January 2022, Articles lacking reliable references from November 2017, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 24 February 2023, at 16:16. So you know this idea is kind of built into it, and everywhere you go on the site youre kind of getting this reminder that theres stuff happening here and your friends are talking about it, and that just kind of helps get the concept across that hey, I should add friends. You would add photos and there was a news feed that had all your friends photos and our whole company, an 80-person company used this every day and every day there was an email update with everyones photos from the weekend or the day before and it was really amazing because you really got to know everyone in the company much better than you did by just talking to them because you got to see where they were and then you had a basis for a conversation. And two, I think Ive always kinda had the idea that I would start a company some day. I should say that. Is that him on twitter? Amazon bought Goodreads for $150 million in 2013, though founders Otis and Elizabeth stayed on for a few more years. I mean I was totally the kid that disassembled every mechanical piece in our house when I was young. His books ten years ago they would just become best sellers by getting in the New York Times. Yea, that was what got me into the web. So, you can kind of think of it as a virtual bookshelf. Thats intense. All of which were successful. [21] The New Yorker's Macy Halford noted that the algorithm was not perfect, as the number of books needed to create a perfect recommendation system is so large that "by the time I'd got halfway there, my reading preferences would have changed and I'd have to start over again. [73] A form of extortion scam known as "review bombing", in which trolls post numerous 1-star ratings and poor reviews on an author's new book from different sock-puppet accounts to make the book look bad (sometimes demanding money or that the author quit Goodreads usage to stop the bad reviews from coming in), has also been widely reported as a growing form of bullying on Goodreads, targeting both traditional and self-published authors. Because one thing we noticed early on was that wed be browsing around and some guys profile would say Hey, Im so-and-so the author of this and wed be like Whoa, theres really cool authors hanging on our site. [24] A month later, in November 2012, Goodreads had surpassed 12 million members, with the member base having doubled in one year. Interviewee: Well sure, like I said, every time you had you made a friend on Tickle. In 2007, Otis Chandler developed a social network for bookworms because, rather than relying on media reviews and bestseller lists, he wanted to get reading recommendations from friends. MySpace everyday and hes just posting little stuff, little snippets, things hes thinking about. [6] This funding lasted Goodreads until 2009, when Goodreads received two million dollars from True Ventures. And one of the requests that I keep getting from people who watch interviews with me talking to venture backed entrepreneurs or to venture capitalists, is, they want to hear from people who built a business from nothing. If they were Christian, theyd go to ChristianSingles. Interviewee: He was. Beyond that, publishers do not have budgets to help market their titles. Goodreads has tried to address this, implementing rules such as only allowing reviewers to criticize a book itself, not author behaviour or political affiliations. But without much fanfare -- or outside funding -- he built his community of booklovers to 650,000 members. US . Very nice looking car but I like the one that is in the Otis Chandler collection.It is also one of the 1 converts built. And it turns out that most problems in mechanical engineering are pretty solved. One of the sites we built, that photo-sharing site I mentioned, was called ringo.com. Andrew: Its all about research online. Thank you Otis. What was the plan? Dont go. So Im glad I didnt do it. 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