. So it just always seemed like something I wanted to do. Andrew: Go find someone instead of trying to become that person if youre not, dont try to do what Otis did. So they finally got an idea that went big, it was just because it was something that was fun. You had match.com, you had americansingles.com, and eHarmony, and those are great. And we can even narrow it by budget. His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. Hes on twitter every day. 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. The easier you make things for users, the better; so if you tell them: Youve got to do a bunch of work to find your friends and send these test results to you, theyre not going to do as much. Weve got I think over 8,000 published authors whove signed up and said I am this person. Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. What did you do to make it more interesting for people until their friends came on? Otis and Elizabeth Chandler are founders of Goodreads. Did you have shares of Tickle.com? Ten years after Goodreads was founded by Otis Chandler and his wife, Elizabeth Khuri Chandler, and four years after its acquisition by Amazon, the online social reading . We built a dating site right on the heels of match.com. Youll hear how working for Tickle.coms founder, James Currier, was better than going to business school. I want to get into Goodreads and how you came up with the idea and how you built it up but lets go a little bit more back story. We built a photo-sharing site right on the heels of Flickr. Interviewee: Definitely. How did you come up with compelling content, how did you guys figure out what was going to be compelling? You Grok? 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.". Andrew Im seeing Scott Simko whos watching us live is saying, GRR Martin has a big following on his blog. I dont know GRR Martin. I wanted that on the site. Then I read your review of it and you said, This guy can write. Youre a great reviewer by the way. 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. Interviewee: Well sure, like I said, every time you had you made a friend on Tickle. [16], Before gaining much traction, Otis and Elizabeth Chandler grew the platform through their friends of friends where it reached 800 users. Dont go. So Im glad I didnt do it. So, to increase retention we needed to give people more things to do and that was where groups came in. If you're a premium member, you can save your likes. You know for us we had a problem where Goodreads was about cataloging your books so you come in and youd add a bunch of books and youd say what you thought of them, and maybe youd go kind of nuts. See each portfolio image, in big. He essentially mentored me into becoming more than an engineer, becoming a product manager, and by the end of Tickle, I was not just a coder, I was managing a team of ten people including marketing, design, business development and engineering, and et cetera. And I think for every niche now you can find a social network around that. Goodreads raised a Series A round of funding from True Ventures in the summer of 2009. Andrew: Alright, so one of the reasons that it went viral is because people love talking about their IQs or the results of their tests, what kind of dog they were. We allow you to actually create custom shelves. You can get real time feedback about something you write. Once a week, someone would stand up from one department (unclear) or somebody else would kind of give an inside into the business. [24] A month later, in November 2012, Goodreads had surpassed 12 million members, with the member base having doubled in one year. Interviewee: Tickle had a very open policy. And this is very similar to the Facebook self-serve product or the MySpace self-serve product. So one other thing weve done is weve figured out, Hey, lets not just give these authors a platform to connect to their fans but lets actually let them get in front of the entire Goodreads audience. So we built a self-serve advertising product where you can sign up right now with a credit card and buy advertising for your book on Goodreads. But yes, I have seen the bloggers, I have seen the podcasters built up a big enough audience to then parley that into book sales. A lot of engineers just like thinking about code and I can understand that, so if youre an engineer who likes just thinking about code maybe you need your left hand man who can go think about business, like you and your brother. Regarding the 2013 Amazon acquisition of Goodreads, The New York Times said that: "Goodreads was a rival to Amazon as a place for discovering books" and that this deal "consolidates Amazon's power to determine which authors get exposure for their work". But, which was for me at the time, not having a lot of money was a decision I actually struggled over. A person whos an engineer who wants to develop, who wants to think about engineering problems, and not financial problems. Little bit of Goodreads trivia. Did you run a bunch of different quizzes, and then that ones that did you test a bunch of different quizzes and only run widely those that worked well, or did you have some other system to figure out what was compelling? Interviewee: I did. I know the first time that we tried this interview it didnt work out so well. Interviewee: First, Ive always been a reader. Thank you for that recommendation. He wanted to integrate this scanning experience and to create a space where people could write reviews regarding the books that they read. Its still very young. Luckily the guy who had Goodreads.com with an s sold it to me otherwise Im not sure if it would have taken off like it did. So you can kind of think of it as a book discovery tool, a book communication tool, and really our mission is really just to get people excited about reading. That gave his business enough traction to raise money from investors and take his business to over 2.6 million members. No, I get those emails from you. The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. [31] And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. And if you think about it, from an authors perspective now is more exciting than ever because now you can actually interact with your fans in a way you never could before. [13] Chandler and Khuri both grew up in California. So then they started going to these niche sites. 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. Otis Chandler (November 23, 1927 - February 27, 2006) was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. Blogger or WordPress, whatever. You know, today we have Goodreads for books and we have Flickster for movies and we have Netflix and we have LastFM for music. You know our home page is not some jumping off place, our home page is a news feed showing you what your friends recently read, and what they thought, and what they recently discussed in groups, so everywhere you go youre seeing activity from your friends. So if an author wants to think of himself as an entrepreneur and get a following before he gets published, how do they do it? 478 comments. Interviewee: Right, sure. Chandler continued running Goodreads until 2019. Or do what Ning did and allow people to create small niches. Andrew: The book Think and grow rich, I think one of its points there is to work with good people, because their systems, their was of working is going to rub off on you. He is from USA. So he came up with the current look and feel of most of it. So, from that perspective, absolutely, it was life-changing. So suddenly we were just being mentioned in all these blogs. Or even the Google AdWords self-serve product in that its cost-per-click based. And plus its more fun for me because I get to discover books, etc. [38], Goodreads users can read or listen to a preview of a book on the website using Kindle Cloud Reader and Audible. And its an iterative process. Alright, lets continue. If its not you focus on the part of the business that you know and get a rock star engineer. 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. Well, Ive got a guy whos done it. I think the trick is going back to what you said in the beginning, its having the rock star engineers. X. . And Im no author. Him on everywhere else? Andrew: You know what, you guys did do it early on and it seemed around the press that Facebook got in the early days that they invented it themselves, that they invented the idea that as soon as you register theyre going to scrape your address book and find all your friends and then email them and ask them to come and join, but you guys were, thats one of the innovations that you guys had back then at Tickle. That has that kind of community? They finally have written a book, its going to be out there, people are going to know their name. Eventually, it gained attention through the media such as Mashable and other various blogs. 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. So, how much is Otis Chandler worth at the age of 79 years old? Its kind of like what Tickle provided, you kind of get to look back at yourself and think like, man what was I like in junior high, what did I read? You know I was talking to one of my favorite authors, Steven [Pressfield] who told me that exact thing. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. [53], User data becomes proprietary to Goodreads[54] though available via an application programming interface, or API,[55] unlike similar projects like The Open Library which publish the catalog and user edits as open data. The design. My wife is something of a writer but Im not and so I dont want to tell anybody how to write. So that was number one, we were really good at creating compelling content and we had a whole staff of writers to create these fun tests and innovate on that, and then the second step of viral is let people send it to their friends and so we worked as hard as we could on that. Otis Chandler was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. Can you talk about some of the things that you did over at, and for the transcribers its tickle.com T-I-C-K-L-E.com, can you talk about some of the viral techniques that you used there? 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. So weve got that for authors. Before founding Goodreads, Otis was a Software Engineer and Product Manager at Tickle.com. You know, maybe in their job theyre a professor of something or a TV personality so that they know theyll be able to market it on their own. Thank you everyone. 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 your name is Stephanie [Myer] or Dan Brown, then theyre going to help you. You'll learn how he did it in this interview. His soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth joined the project, and they slowly built a followingwithout an office, a business model, or a single employee. Andrew: I see. Otis Chandler is a Celebrity Family Member, zodiac sign: Sagittarius. Youll learn some of the viral techniques that Otis used to encourage his users to get their friends to join the site. 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. Is the audio coming in? Or if its you but youre not good at thinking about the business side I think engineers like myself, who can think about the business side and the engineering side, are kind of rare, and I dont know why that is. Thank you everyone for watching, Im looking forward to your comments and Im looking forward to talking to, actually Im looking forward to your comments lets leave it there. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [70] Do you think you couldve learned it so quickly? Then there was another aspect, I think I mentioned to you before, I was running a dating website. Number two, well give you a way to connect with him on Twitter. I probably said I wanted to be a mechanical engineer and build cars someday. Thank you. They were too serious. Im in Argentina can I find people who are here instead of having to get the book shipped from the US? Okay, so thats where you came up with the idea. Andrew: Yeah. And in early January I finally switched the name from the z to the s so we looked a little more official and worked out a lot of the initial bugs. Last week, O'Reilly GM and publisher Joe Wikert reviewed Goodreads' CEO Otis Chandler's TOC session, in which Chandler presented the results of a recent Goodreads readers survey.One of the interesting pieces from the survey covered the effectiveness of Goodreads reviews. Some authors have suggested that Goodreads take a stricter approach to public review postings in the same manner that Amazon has done in the past, such as requiring a telephone number, a verified account by email address, and a real name before any account-holder can post public ratings or reviews. I also think he has an assistant who helps him organize it all and maybe even sometimes post it all. Otis Chandler believed this rating system would be superior to Amazon's, as Amazon's includes books a user has browsed or purchased as gifts when determining its recommendations. MySpace everyday and hes just posting little stuff, little snippets, things hes thinking about. So I realized that a niche social network around reading, much like a social network around photos, would probably work. Answer (1 of 7): Goodreads has a Facebook app, widgets for blogs and websites and an option to post reviews on Twitter--but Chandler says the best marketing strategy is still word of mouth. Goodreads has tried to address this, implementing rules such as only allowing reviewers to criticize a book itself, not author behaviour or political affiliations. [41], The website facilitates reader interactions with authors through the interviews, giveaways, authors' blogs, and profile information. They dont want the interview; they dont want to be on anywhere. You know they had all different types and this thing went viral and this was right before I joined. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. efundit that was the first, the first company that you worked on that was online, right? One thing I will be continuing is my podcast Books of Your Life with Elizabeth 1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes [56][57][58], In January 2012, Goodreads switched from using Amazon's public Product Advertising API for book metadata (such as title, author, and number of pages) to book wholesaler Ingram. Andrew: Yeah, its still true today though, right? If the product is going to be viral it has to be more useful if there are friends then if there are not. [64] Several news sources reported the announcement, noting Amazon's business reasons for the move: Where authors were threatening a mass account cancellation to protest the bullying, many of the reader users who commented on the announcement are now threatening the same thing. 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