You can follow us on Twitter @HowIBuiltThis, on Instagram @HowIBuiltThisNPR and email us at hibt@npr.org. 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? 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. Users were offered the ability to export data and migrate accounts. So weve essentially built a really good way for our users to talk to us everyday and half of what I do is I listen to what our users are saying about various features weve built, about various ideas for things we could build, about things that we have built that might be buggy, and then I go react to it. Guys who are really in there, who were scrappy entrepreneurs. Its all about stats, right. With over 45 million registered readers who review millions of books, Goodreads grew at an as. You know, theres still challenges. They just want to move on with their lives. I was trading basketball cards. 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. Sign In http://www.twitter.com/otown https://www.goodreads.com/otis Otis's favorite books More Otis's Bookshelves read (577) Along with a passion for building websites, hes also a voracious reader. There were mixed reactions from Goodreads users, at the time totaling 16 million members. [Andrew Laughs] And I took a few CS classes two CS classes at standford. Otis Chandler is the co-founder and CEO of Goodreads.com. Andrew: How can you decide which ideas you listen to? . Im in Argentina can I find people who are here instead of having to get the book shipped from the US? Dont go. So Im glad I didnt do it. GoodReads didirikan pada Desember 2006, resmi dirilis pada 30 Januari 2007 oleh Otis Chandler dan Elizabeth Khuri. The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. And then we kind of got into this blog phenomenon. Andrew: Alright, and you talked about compelling content. 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. And Goodreads allows you to keep all of the books youve ever read. [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. "Reading may be a solitary activity, but what you're reading and what you think of what you're reading are . And you just track as much as you can and then better it. [inaudible] Id always kinda been a reader as a kid and I wanted to get back to that. Eventually, it gained attention through the media such as Mashable and other various blogs. Andrew: How are they doing that? 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. So I spent the summer learning HTML, and mySQL and plugging in a lot of boring mathematical formulas and chemical property charts into a website. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. Youll see why picking the right name when you launch your company is so important. Like about 10% of our users went kind of nuts and would add everything theyve ever read. They wanted more of a community. The site provides default bookshelvesread, currently-reading, to-readand the opportunity to create customized shelves to categorize a user's books. Do you have a group on Goodreads thats like that? 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. Critics of Goodreads have considered this decision to be a form of censorship. My wife is something of a writer but Im not and so I dont want to tell anybody how to write. Do you think you couldve learned it so quickly? Donta lot of authors I think get depressed because their publisher tells them to go do signings around the nation and so they go to some Barnes & Noble store in Ohio somewhere and ten people show up to sign a book and they just get, Oh man, what am I doing in Ohio with ten people? Thats not going to move the needle anymore. Interviewee: Right. But, after you go through this process of adding all the books you want to add at that time theres not much left for you to do. His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. I dont know that I can point anything else out. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. [25], In March 2013, Amazon made an agreement to acquire Goodreads in the second quarter of 2013 for an undisclosed sum. His soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth joined the project, and they slowly built a followingwithout an office, a business model, or a single employee. He wanted to integrate this scanning experience and to create a space where people could write reviews regarding the books that they read. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. 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. Login or become a premium member. And this is the way you build any product, right? Interviewee: Probably not. Which means a lot of things, but most people get a lot of value out of, from keeping track of what theyve read. What about groups? Was it just watch me and youll learn, or was it more formal than that? Andrew: Definitely, alright, well end it there. But I was really excited to learn this hot new language called Ruby on Rails. Alright so it seems to me like where you really learned the business side of things was working at Tickle.com the company that you were with for about six years. And both my grandfathers own their own companies and are successful. Work. Got up to 600, let me see if I got the number right, 650,000 members. Andrew: Okay, great. But its not social and so coming from this [inaudible] testing we also built a social network right on the heels of Friendster. Andrew: Yeah. You had match.com, you had americansingles.com, and eHarmony, and those are great. US . You know, if you wrote a book aboutI cant come up with a good example. If we scroll through it we can find lots of different portfolios. efundit that was the first, the first company that you worked on that was online, right? Interviewee: Thank you Andrew. Andrew: CS of course Computer Science. If they were Christian, theyd go to ChristianSingles. 68 SS427 Chevelle 5.3 LS 84mm Billet Turbo So its not keyword based like the other ones; its book genre based. Interviewee: I cant answer that as well because I cant take credit for doing that part. Personal Investments. Its cataloguing your books. Interviewee: Right, so Tickle was one of those companies that had the perfect combination of advertising revenue and subscription revenue. MySpace everyday and hes just posting little stuff, little snippets, things hes thinking about. I dont know. The collection of former Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler evolved over the years along with the interests of the man, from classics and motorcycles to muscle cars and racing Porsches. I cant imagine what the next thing is going to be. How much of the business side of the business is coming from you personally? We can click over here and we can say three to ten thousand dollars is our budget and find it, companies that can do the work at that price. Thats the hard part of being down here in Buenos Aires. Am to admitting some kind of ignorance here? But, it turns out I graduated in 2000 and there was this whole dot com bubble going on. Interviewee: First, Ive always been a reader. So, I mean, first of all it depends on the content of the book. Can you talk about that? Or much faster feedback about something you write. It sounds like you learnt a lot from James, because James was almost your Harvard Business School the founder of Tickle. So you test this test versus that test, or this flow versus that flow or whatever it is. But without much fanfare -- or outside funding -- he built his community of booklovers to 650,000 members. Interviewee: I couldnt do this without plugging the fact that we just launched book swap. So they finally got an idea that went big, it was just because it was something that was fun. Interviewee: Yeah, I had basic stock options. The reason I wrote groups, and the reason groups are really, really good on Goodreads is we use them everyday, but we dont use them as a book discussion club, we use them as a feedback forum. Then I read your review of it and you said, This guy can write. Youre a great reviewer by the way. Several members of the Goodreads team are single and dating in . And thats okay. 478 comments. You know personally, I cant think of junior high without thinking of Danwich [sp] is when I first read that, or Lord of the Rings, which is when I first read that. Interviewee: Yeah, I think so. Andrew: Okay, and howd you figure out that Goodreads was going to be the vehicle? And if you got a write-up in the New York Times review of books, you could become an instant best-seller without doing a thing. Goodreads raised a Series A round of funding from True Ventures in the summer of 2009. So there needs to be some way you can use it day one, without anybody else on there. Andrew: Good example, by the way. [4][20] Later that year, Goodreads introduced an algorithm to suggest books to registered users and had over five million members. The design. Andrew: Yeah. Interviewee: Well, its a big new feature for us, its the ability for members to list their books swappable and then swap with other members. So I kind of already had it segregated that way at home. You know the Sci-Fi and Fantasy group on Goodreads is one of my favorites, those guys are just amazing, and theres so much discussion going on, and theres so much excitement going around all the books that people are reading. And while much of this might seem like nothing more than petty playground behavior between children who honestly do not have a clear good guy or bad guy, keep in mind that several e-book retailers incorporate the Goodreads' API into their sales pages, effectively posting book reviews that many in the Goodreads community know to be false, and nothing more than an act of revenge against an author; real-world sales decisions have been made by consumers based on these reviews. Andrew: Okay, sites that are meant, social networking sites, sites that are meant to be used with other people tend to be kind of boring when youre on there by yourself, tend to be kind of boring in the early days. I never give up my books after I fall in love with them. Interviewee: No, we have a lot of book geeks but. Hey everyone, its Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambition upstart. Nothing big. The band can have a profile and show off their music and their events. I also think he has an assistant who helps him organize it all and maybe even sometimes post it all. So we allowed the authors to kind of take over their author profile. So we were really shocked when we were trying to do anything that was going on that wasnt working. But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. See each portfolio image, in big. How much of that is coming from you? [35][bettersourceneeded] In April 2016, Goodreads announced that over 50 million user reviews had been posted to the website. Him on everywhere else? Thank you Otis. So it just always seemed like something I wanted to do. Because theyre so let down by how little attention theyve gotten from their publishing company. I love that, I love the clever thinking, the clever business thinking, behind Goodreads. If the product is going to be viral it has to be more useful if there are friends then if there are not. He is from USA. 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? [37] Once users have added friends to their profile, they will see their friends' shelves and reviews and can comment on friends' pages. And this is very similar to the Facebook self-serve product or the MySpace self-serve product. [42] By 2011, "seventeen thousand authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood" used Goodreads to advertise.[4]. You Grok? But most of them are guys who published a book or self-published a book and theyre trying to figure out How am I going to market my book to people? And this is the biggest problem that authors are facing right now. Interviewee: I had an absolutely horrible design at first and then I had one of the Tickle designers, friend of mine, do the design and he was really good. 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. [30] Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. What can they do as authors? Goodreads publicly posted its review guidelines in August 2012 to address these issues. And wed already built it so every book has an author profile that lists the titles by that person. How can I get myself to be more excited about doing that? And Good Reads it was obvious. 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. [13] Chandler and Khuri both grew up in California. 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. And I think it has. Alright how can people connect with you Otis? Weve got I think over 8,000 published authors whove signed up and said I am this person. If you want to narrow your search down a little bit further you can click on the city, and I used to live in Los Angeles, so well experiment by clicking on Los Angeles. It just seemed like there was a lot more innovation going on. You can spend hours on there. How do you like it? No, I get those emails from you. Okay, so thats where you came up with the idea. [2], Goodreads was founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler. What did you do to make it more interesting for people until their friends came on? Otis Chandler Founder and CEO in San Francisco Visit my company website. Goodreads is a "social cataloging" website founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler, a software engineer, and entrepreneur, and Elizabeth Khuri. Interviewee: Heh, right. If theres a company that were interested in we can quickly scroll through a bunch of their work and see whether we like them or not. Chandler continued running Goodreads until 2019. So, you can kind of think of it as a virtual bookshelf. Andrew: Did he use it? The site has since grown to nearly 5 million members who have added over 150 million books, completely by word of mouth. 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. Thats huge. [7] On March 28, 2013, Amazon announced its acquisition of Goodreads,[8] and by July 23, 2013, Goodreads announced their user base had grown to 20 million members. Dave, Im going to ask your question in a little bit when we get deeper into Goodreads, but if anyone else has questions like Dave does, just punch them into twitter with the word mixergy and Ill see them. Without much fanfare or outside funding he built his community of booklovers to 650,000 members. [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. Did you design it yourself? Otis Chandler succeeded his father as the paper's publisher in 1960 and held that post for 20 years, though Norman Chandler remained an executive with the company until his death in 1974. Big Space, I see your note. Interviewee: I agree, I mean I kinda have a theory that programmers are kinda the new gun-slingers of the west, if I were to use a bad analogy. 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