Better even than many of the business classes that I took at NYU. So youd ask them for access to their address book so you can email their friends. Interviewee: Yeah, I had basic stock options. Got up to 600, let me see if I got the number right, 650,000 members. Please enter your email address to continue, Create products people want (By building in increments), LeadPages founder on why you should be embarrassed by your first launch, How a list nerd grew Ranker.com to 27,000,000 monthly visitors. So having seen all this social networking going on I was like wow, reading would be so much more fun if it was a social network and I could see what my friends were reading and I could browse their bookshelves online. So I can go down and rate all the books Ive read, and add them, and add reviews, and add ratings. He said, Ill teach you everything in two days. Their latest investment was Series A - BookClub on Jun 15, 2021, when BookClub raised $20M. Big Space, I see your note. [70] You can spend hours on there. [inaudible] Id always kinda been a reader as a kid and I wanted to get back to that. Andrew: Alright, and you talked about compelling content. If you haven't heard of Otis Chandler it's because he spends more time coding his site, Goodreads.com, than promoting himself. 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. Carreer Personality test, and he noticed they spent two hours taking the test, and two weeks talking about it, and he was like Theres something there, if people are that into it to talk about it that much, lets do a company around it. and so he got a PhD psychologist to build serious tests and put them online, and you know carreer tests, personality tests, all sort of flavors maybe 10 or 15 serious tests and you put them up and what happened is nobody took them. Alright how can people connect with you Otis? Talk to them a couple months later after the books been on the shelves for a while, they are so depressed they dont even want to talk about the book anymore. Interviewee: Its a very smart point, because if something is boring, if you sign up for a service and theres nothing for you to do until someone signs up, youre just going to leave, right? And thats okay. So now you can create a custom shelf and put all the books you want into it. Dorothy Buffum Chandler died last summer and her son Otis Chandler, who at one time ran both Times Mirror Co. and the flagship Los Angeles Times newspaper, stepped down from the board after 36 years. You can get real time feedback about something you write. Beyond that, publishers do not have budgets to help market their titles. Reply Quote. Should I go outsource to India or whatever? Im like no, just get a good engineer, get a smart guy out of college, give him a large piece of your company, make him your right hand man and go build something before you do anything and prove that it works. Andrew: Do you think you couldve learned it if you didnt have an engineering background? [16], Before gaining much traction, Otis and Elizabeth Chandler grew the platform through their friends of friends where it reached 800 users. Thanks for liking this post. And I had moved to LAI had followed a girl to LA and so I didnt know a lot of people down there even though I grew up down there and I didnt want to get a job, like I said. Maybe its going to be some kind of mobile, social networking that we can all access on our iPhones. So am I coming up with these ideas, kind of, but really its our users who are coming up with it and saying Gee it would be really great if you did this, and I go Yeah, youre right, so its not that hard actually, you just have to listen. Login or become a premium member. So for some perspective, it used to be, say maybe 20 years ago, all you had to do as an author was write a book, hand it to your publisher, they would take it do their thing, youd get a check, youd go back to writing the next one. Interviewee: Ah, right. And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. If your name is Chris Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell theyre going to help you. Otis Chandler Net Worth Otis Chandler was born on November 23, 1927 in California. [6] This funding lasted Goodreads until 2009, when Goodreads received two million dollars from True Ventures. So that was my realization. [38], Goodreads users can read or listen to a preview of a book on the website using Kindle Cloud Reader and Audible. Andrew: How are they doing that? Social book cataloging website owned by Amazon, Learn how and when to remove this template message, published under a different name before coming out, "Amazon to Buy Social Site Dedicated to Sharing Books", "Book lovers seething over Amazon acquisition of Goodreads", "Elizabeth Khuri Chandler Tells the Origin Story of Goodreads", "Need Advice on What to Read? [1] So, if the product is going to be viral it has to be useful, more useful if there are friends then if there are not. And by helping them I mean actively getting them into the press and spending money, marketing money, to promote the book. His books ten years ago they would just become best sellers by getting in the New York Times. But it got me to learn HTML and SQL which were important, cause it got me into the web. Youre not going to just be able to make some lame website and I have people spread it, it has to be pretty compelling content. 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. Net Worth in 2022: $1 Million - $5 Million: Salary in . Like about 10% of our users went kind of nuts and would add everything theyve ever read. And you just track as much as you can and then better it. But the remainder of his collection, some 50 cars and 40 . Goodreads is basically a social network for book lovers. Otis graduated with a B.S. If a user has written a work, the work can be linked on the author's profile page, which also includes an author's blog. Mark (unclear) was here, and I asked him if hed recommend business school to other people and he said No, theres so many better ways to waste your money than that. I learned C, so I had a little bit of exposure to it, but not a lot. . Doing that process helps you think, okay well heres a feature that would be really cool and maybe its going to really increase user retention but its not going to help us at all with revenue or getting new traffic, so maybe its not as important as this other idea which is going to really make us money and increase retention, or this other idea which is going to get us new traffic and increase retention. I got that book for my Kindle, I love it. Alright, lets continue. Little bit of Goodreads trivia. I cant remember who I was thinking of but guys with serious cred. He says he loves Good Reads, he loves the community on there, and he wonders what youre going to do to get authors more engaged. You'll learn how he did it in this interview. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. MySpace everyday and hes just posting little stuff, little snippets, things hes thinking about. What was it like at first? Andrew: CS of course Computer Science. And this is the way you build any product, right? But its not social and so coming from this [inaudible] testing we also built a social network right on the heels of Friendster. And what I noticed about dating was that you had big generic social networks. Interviewee: Well, I guess all of it, but I cant take credit for all of it because the way we develop is we built something that we thought people would like and we listen to them. You didnt have to go about marketing it yourself. Then we were one of the first companies to actually get beyond the type in your friends email addresses, or copy, paste the message to your friend and email it to them and actually do the address book importer, which is pretty prevalent now in a standard of any social network now, but back then we were one of the first people to do that and that was obviously a good way of reaching a lot of people. If I know what my friend is reading, or has read, that gives me a basis for conversation around that. Andrew: Its working now. Thats actually one thing publishers look for in an author, is do they have a way to market it? Interviewee: Well, the other caveat is that we launched it in the US only. Members can receive the regular newsletter featuring new books, suggestions, author interviews, and poetry. Whatd you want to do when you graduated? Haystack is where you are going to find the right web designer for your next project. If the product is going to be viral it has to be more useful if there are friends then if there are not. [30] Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. Thank you Otis. 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. So realitys about making things really dead simple for the user. [3][4] In December 2007, the site had 650,000 members[5] and 10,000,000 books had been added. Goodreads has a presence on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and other social networking sites. My mom knew to give me a broken VCR rather than throw it out. And I think a lot of companies dont realize that when you look at all the dumb domains out there. No, I get those emails from you. I wanted that on the site. Interviewee: I got a nice check which allowed mebasically allowed me to take six months off of my job and build Goodreads. [14], Goodreads was founded in 2006. But yeah, I think you need to be doing everything and anything you can. Interviewee: Tickle had a very open policy. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Is it going to increase our user retention? I emailed Kareem and I said I love your reviewer, I love the book that you talked about. He talked about a book that talked about Ryanair, I forget the name of the book, and he said, Dude, Ill send it to you.. [?] He is from USA. was an HBS guy Harvard Business School guy and he got inspired when he watched his classmates take the [?] If they were Jewish, they would go to JDate. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. Im in Argentina can I find people who are here instead of having to get the book shipped from the US? So, how much is Otis Chandler worth at the age of 79 years old? So if you took a 40 question test about your personality wed give you one page about what it meant for free and then wed give you 15 pages about deep psychological analysis coming from our PhD psychologist about what exactly it means for your personality and how you can improve your life, and we would actually sale those for between $4.99 to $9.99 depending on the test so there was a little bit of direct consumer revenue there. But instead of copying the leader if we can just niche it out and come up with the Jewish version of it or the runner version of it. Andrew: Good example, by the way. Youll learn some of the viral techniques that Otis used to encourage his users to get their friends to join the site. I dont know that I can point anything else out. Thanks. So then they started going to these niche sites. Otis and Elizabeth Chandler are founders of Goodreads. Work. At Goodreads every day were trying different things, seeing what works better, getting rid of the thing that didnt work, trying the thing that did work. Weve got I think over 8,000 published authors whove signed up and said I am this person. It depends on, again, on the book. 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. What else did you do that was different and that helped spur on virility? 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. [68], Authors who are aware of the site have noted problematic qualities of Goodreads affecting discoverability and search engine results, particularly the platform's inability to sort pseudonyms, and its refusal to allow authors to choose the primary author name that appears on book records. Andrew: Did you I remember one thing that was an innovation for us, a real breakthrough, was storing the email addresses of our users friends if they allowed us to and that meant that the next time they picked a greeting card on our site, we can say, hey these are the five people who you messaged the last time, can we send it to them too?, and in addition, can you type in a few other people and well send it to them. 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. Andrew: Okay, and howd you figure out that Goodreads was going to be the vehicle? Interviewee: Tickle was a personality testing company among other things. 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. I mean it was all about creating content so I mean to make something viral you have to create something that is able to go viral right? [24] A month later, in November 2012, Goodreads had surpassed 12 million members, with the member base having doubled in one year. Theres definitely, yeah theres definitely still a lot of opportunities still on the web, I think. 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? Theres still people doing interesting things like Tesla, etc. In relation to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, 58% of surveyed readers said they . [52] Goodreads librarians coordinate on the Goodreads Librarian Group. I say Okay theres a lot of users here that are really, really wanting this or that, and then I can prioritize what were going to build. 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. Goodreads features a rating system of one to five stars, with the option of accompanying the rating with a written review. And Goodreads, before it got any outside funding, it was him, just building this thing up. That has that kind of community? He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. Interviewee: Heh, right. Linked in, I think. So he came up with the current look and feel of most of it. They can go to Goodreads.com, they can add you over there right? Popular fantasy novelist Rin Chupeco has noted that authors from marginalized groups are often a target, and she also criticized the minimalist approach Goodreads takes to moderation, saying, "Goodreads only removes reviews that specifically target the author, but they do not do that for every book, eitherjust for the authors with big enough marketing and publicity teams to demand these removals." You know, it kind of seemed like it was the wild west where you could actually create real things from nothing. 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. [6] By July 2012, the site reported 10 million members, 20 million monthly visits, and thirty employees. So that was the big lesson, serious is good but fun is viral. A person whos an engineer who wants to develop, who wants to think about engineering problems, and not financial problems. The rest of us get a nice check. So it turns out what had been going on, people who had this desire to share their thoughts about books, they had all been using blogs. How can they get people to read them? Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. 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. I had never read Sherlock Holmes. 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. That gave his business enough traction to raise money from investors and grow it to over 2.6 million members. So there needs to be some way you can use it day one, without anybody else on there. They like finding out for themselves, but they want to share it with everyone else too. Critics of Goodreads have considered this decision to be a form of censorship. So its not keyword based like the other ones; its book genre based. [71] Having false or invalid quotes removed can be a difficult process; problematically the quotes can be picked up by third-party websites like Pinterest and Instagram in the meantime, spreading invalid quotes attributed to the author even further, as Goodreads quotes bring a high amount of web traffic. It did not give me much more than that. So we allowed the authors to kind of take over their author profile. Goodreads raised a Series A round of funding from True Ventures in the summer of 2009. Dave Yenk, again, Im reading everyones twitter names here, hes saying, Youd think that Goodreads would allow authors an easy way to get in front of their target niche, Im guessing is what he means. 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. Andrew: [Andrew Laughs] that actually I think is a good prep for a business. hide caption. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. There are settings available, as well, to allow Goodreads to post straight to a social networking account, which informs, e.g., Facebook friends, what one is reading or how one rated a book. I had never read Pride and Prejudice. 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. I had never read all these classics that I knew were really good. Andrew: And I know from looking at Goodreads, from looking at your profile on Goodreads, youre reading Think and Grow Rich an inspiration for me. If its not you focus on the part of the business that you know and get a rock star engineer. Thats actually a big asset which is kind of sad because it means that first time writer whos got an amazing idea or an amazing story to tell is not going to get the same chance that, you know, I dont know, Sarah Palin is going to get. How much of that is coming from you? One thing I will be continuing is my podcast Books of Your Life with Elizabeth 1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes I cant believe I struggled over it because now its a no-brainer. Interviewee: Groups work really well. 68 SS427 Chevelle 5.3 LS 84mm Billet Turbo Dont go. So Im glad I didnt do it. 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. You know I was talking to one of my favorite authors, Steven [Pressfield] who told me that exact thing. Goodreads felt Amazon's requirements for using its API were too restrictive, and the combination of Ingram, the Library of Congress, and other sources would be more flexible. Interviewee: Definitely. Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. Andrew: Alright, but, so you were taking things apart even as a kid. Andrew: 2.7 million registered users I said in the beginning you got up to 650,000 on your own, no outside funding. They were very open with all number and stats and where the business was going, and they really believe in being a teaching company, which I also believe in, from them. And, if youre on the site and you have no friends, then everywhere you go its saying you have no friends whove read this book, add some friends. Andrew: Yeah. Its all about stats, right. That was huge did you guys do anything like that? Hundreds of dollars? Cause I was you know, Mechanical Engineer major, and these were two mechanical engineers that wanted to build a website for mechanical engineers, and it was basically gonna be an online resource for engineers to look up metallic chart properties or various formulas that you would normally find in your textbooks, but this was just gonna be easier. Whered you come up with the idea? 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