Thank you everyone. 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. 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. Work. 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. 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. Interviewee: Thousands of dollars. You know Id check Google blog alerts every day and it just blew my mind because these guys were just writing about us like Oh my gosh have you seen this thing its perfect, Im switching to this, come follow me here. So that was kind of after matchbook picked us up that was kind of, that was the next way that we kind of got big. [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. But yeah, I think you need to be doing everything and anything you can. Their latest investment was Series A - BookClub on Jun 15, 2021, when BookClub raised $20M. Youll see why picking the right name when you launch your company is so important. Its good. You can spend hours on there. 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. I dont know. Thank you Otis. Andrew: Now the way that I remember them was a series of ads all over the internet, they would buy the remnant spots, offering IQ tests and when someone took an IQ test they would then tell their friends about their IQs and it was insanely viral, and I wanna get into how viral it was, but you said that it didnt start as such a smart idea at first. Interviewee: Sure. The other person who gets me a lot of books, I guess over time, Kareem Mayan, a friend of mine has recommended a bunch of interesting books. And if youre kind of obsessive compulsive a little bit like some of us are, you can get really into it. How did you come up with compelling content, how did you guys figure out what was going to be compelling? X. . I learned C, so I had a little bit of exposure to it, but not a lot. Interviewee: I couldnt do this without plugging the fact that we just launched book swap. 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. [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. Goodreads often refuses to remove quotes with "likes" from an author's profile, even if the quotes are false or invalid. Andrew: Now onto Dave [Yaniks] question. And maybe every couple months Id empty my Amazon shopping cart. Andrew: Good example, by the way. 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. I never give up my books after I fall in love with them. I know the first time that we tried this interview it didnt work out so well. 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? So, you can kind of think of it as a virtual bookshelf. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. Goodreads raised a Series A round of funding from True Ventures in the summer of 2009. 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. Interviewee: I think so. [52] Goodreads librarians coordinate on the Goodreads Librarian Group. [23] In October 2012, Goodreads announced it had grown to 11 million members with 395 million books cataloged and over 20,000 book clubs created by its users. There were mixed reactions from Goodreads users, at the time totaling 16 million members. Of course, if there is someone we like we can click over, we can either save them to favorites or we can scroll to the bottom, get their email address, and contact them directly. So realitys about making things really dead simple for the user. [24] A month later, in November 2012, Goodreads had surpassed 12 million members, with the member base having doubled in one year. And my wife and I, I kind of view my wife as my co-founder. Andrew: Can I find people locally to swap books with? Maybe its going to be some kind of mobile, social networking that we can all access on our iPhones. Andrew: Thats kind of interesting that the next big trend to come out I wonder if instead of trying to copy the big company, we can niche it out and focus on a specific area that we might have a morea bigger chance of succeeding. 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. 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. [25], In March 2013, Amazon made an agreement to acquire Goodreads in the second quarter of 2013 for an undisclosed sum. Goodreads features a rating system of one to five stars, with the option of accompanying the rating with a written review. But its not social and so coming from this [inaudible] testing we also built a social network right on the heels of Friendster. Otis graduated with a B.S. But actively working at it, getting into doing speaking events around the book, doing readings and absolutely social media, I think, is big. So then they started going to these niche sites. 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. [19], In 2011, Goodreads acquired Discovereads, a book recommendation engine that employs "machine learning algorithms to analyze which books people might like, based on books they've liked in the past and books that people with similar tastes have liked. Did you have shares of Tickle.com? 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. We allow you to actually create custom shelves. And if we want to follow up with them theres their email address and their website right on the bottom so we can connect directly. Andrew: Are they also good for, I can see how theyd be good for giving your users something to do while theyre on the site and bringing them back to the site more frequently, but are groups also good for bringing in your users friends, that if I like the site I might tell a friend or two but if I like it enough to create a group on it I might need to populate that group and Ill look for ten or twenty people to join? [70] Youll hear how working for Tickle.coms founder, James Currier, was better than going to business school. And by helping them I mean actively getting them into the press and spending money, marketing money, to promote the book. Howd you come up with the idea? LinkedIn is the world's largest business network, helping professionals like Otis Chandler discover inside connections to recommended job . If they were Christian, theyd go to ChristianSingles. Without much fanfare or outside funding he built his community of booklovers to 650,000 members. [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. Maybe theres the business model. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. Research help from Claire Murashima. If we scroll through it we can find lots of different portfolios. But I was really excited to learn this hot new language called Ruby on Rails. And I think it has. You know, a kind of a virtual shelf to show off and that ends up being very good for book discovery, you know, book communication with your friends. Otis Chandler was born on November 23, 1927 in United States (78 years old). Andrew: What else worked well? Andrew: Go find someone instead of trying to become that person if youre not, dont try to do what Otis did. So I kind of already had it segregated that way at home. Andrew: Definitely, alright, well end it there. 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. I dont think it worked. Not Mixergy. [30] Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. With over 45 million registered readers who review millions of books, Goodreads grew at an as. Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon[1] that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. [17] During its first year of business, the company was run without any formal funding. 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? Was it just watch me and youll learn, or was it more formal than that? 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. 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. 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. Were you also building or creating little businesses as a kid? So its not keyword based like the other ones; its book genre based. 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. Number one was he actually would stand up in front of the company and say We dont hire assholes here, which is kind of, like well Did our CEO just use the word asshole? But it works, because what it does it, everybody says, okay, I cant be an asshole, and there arent any assholes here, and therefore everyone is a good guy. Interviewee: So we launched it, I think, in December of 2006. Then I read your review of it and you said, This guy can write. Youre a great reviewer by the way. The first few pages are written in a glitzy, sophomoric style that is grating. 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. [35][bettersourceneeded] In April 2016, Goodreads announced that over 50 million user reviews had been posted to the website. Ning has built like what? Or even the Google AdWords self-serve product in that its cost-per-click based. In 2012, after a receiving a poor review on her novel The Selection, author Kiera Cass encouraged her Twitter followers to "knock [the review] off" the front page of Goodreads' section on the book. Otis Chandler is the most interesting person in the book, a driven, hollow man. 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. Users were offered the ability to export data and migrate accounts. Do you have a group on Goodreads thats like that? Some users worried that their reading records would be lost, but Goodreads had a number of plans in place to ease the transition and ensure that no data was lost, even for titles that might be in danger of deletion because they were available only through Amazon, such as Kindle editions and self-published works on Amazon. Hey everyone, its Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambition upstart. 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.". But, you guys also did certain things to make it even more viral. [16], Before gaining much traction, Otis and Elizabeth Chandler grew the platform through their friends of friends where it reached 800 users. So I wanted to provide that experience around reading. Andrew: Its all about research online. Im beating it into peoples heads at the beginning of all my interviews. You dont have to be a published author to do this. 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.. Sign In http://www.twitter.com/otown https://www.goodreads.com/otis Otis's favorite books More Otis's Bookshelves read (577) One thing I will be continuing is my podcast Books of Your Life with Elizabeth 1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes Interviewee: Heh, right. How can I get myself to be more excited about doing that? All of which were successful. Interviewee: Thank you Andrew. How much of that is coming from you? And then theres Ning. On his own, and then he went out an got funding. 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. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. 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. GoodReads didirikan pada Desember 2006, resmi dirilis pada 30 Januari 2007 oleh Otis Chandler dan Elizabeth Khuri. 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. Hundreds of dollars? 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. If you haven't heard of Otis Chandler it's because he spends more time coding his site, Goodreads.com, than promoting himself. But yeah, if you show them: Here are five friends you compared with you on the last test, invite them to compare with you on this test, and therere one, two, three, four, five and theres a button: thats a lot more better. Haystack is where you are going to find the right web designer for your next project. Got up to 600, let me see if I got the number right, 650,000 members. I was talking to Lea, why cant I think of her last name, the founder of Pounce, who told me it that it just feels like a superpower, you dont rely on anyone else you can just build it yourself, from start to finish. His soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth joined the project, and they slowly built a followingwithout an office, a business model, or a single employee. Profile Name: Otis Chandler Age: 31 Company: Goodreads.com Title: CEO and president First job: Ranch hand in Montana Bookselling in the future will be "all about using the Internet and free e . So that was my realization. And I see Dave Yank, whos watching the slide has got a question. How do you know what to pick? What to give them and what not to? Shes loving that line that you said, Ill teach you everything about business school in two days. I love it too Big Space. Interviewee: Right, sure. 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. . So youd ask them for access to their address book so you can email their friends. 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. Andrew: Was it about the, the Was it about the businesses that were being built out of nothing that excited you? Andrew: We might need to start something like that. I got that book for my Kindle, I love it. Goodreads members can apply to become volunteer librarians after they have 50 books on their profile. [66], Critics of the Goodreads platform feel that Goodreads' dominant position, coupled with limited development by Amazon, has prevented better tools emerging for personalized book recommendations. I think the trick is going back to what you said in the beginning, its having the rock star engineers. Number of Investments 2. So giving users the ability to do that means you can use it without your friends being on there. [42] By 2011, "seventeen thousand authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood" used Goodreads to advertise.[4]. Scott Everett for NPR Otis Chandler was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. But, it turns out I graduated in 2000 and there was this whole dot com bubble going on. So they finally got an idea that went big, it was just because it was something that was fun. I wanted that on the site. A person whos an engineer who wants to develop, who wants to think about engineering problems, and not financial problems. In this inte. [3][4] In December 2007, the site had 650,000 members[5] and 10,000,000 books had been added. You know, today we have Goodreads for books and we have Flickster for movies and we have Netflix and we have LastFM for music. 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. No, I get those emails from you. 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. What about groups? Fortunately the book straightens out into a well-researched and well-written history of LA, the LAT and the Chandler/Otis families. [46], The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (version 2) and Kindle Voyage feature integration with Goodreads' social network via a user interface button. They finally have written a book, its going to be out there, people are going to know their name. Some authors have criticized Goodreads's stance on functioning like a public library rather than giving authors any control over how their information is displayed, noting that for most authors, Goodreads is the first page people see when they search on a web browser. 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. But the remainder of his collection, some 50 cars and 40 . 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 . Beyond that, publishers do not have budgets to help market their titles. So, everywhere on the site you go we dont show you like book reviews about Harry Potter, we show you heres what your friends thought of Harry Potter, and we show you heres what everybody else thought of Harry Potter. Did you design it yourself? Or the most hardcore booklovers. He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. 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. Otis adalah pemilik perusahaan penerbitan di Amerika Serikat yang juga menerbitkan Los Angeles Times. Andrew: Alright. Goodreads is basically a social network for book lovers. [14], Goodreads was founded in 2006. But thats the top two percent of authors that publishers are going to be helping them. His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. They were too serious. Its position was see your friends photos. 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. 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. Is that him on twitter? Even if you get published by Harper Collins or Manninghouse, great theyre going to put your book in the Barnes & Noble store but, theyre not going to market beyond that. Andrew: I see. It was all about learning how you build the product. 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. It depends on, again, on the book. 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? 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.. And Im no author. 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. Or much faster feedback about something you write. Andrew: I got a lot of books from friends like that. And in thinking that way, I realized wow, books are kinda broken on the internet. I cant remember who I was thinking of but guys with serious cred. We built a photo-sharing site right on the heels of Flickr. Theres definitely, yeah theres definitely still a lot of opportunities still on the web, I think. The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. [31] Its all about (muffled) testing. Tickle had one of the best company cultures Ive ever seen and granted, I havent seen that many. My mom knew to give me a broken VCR rather than throw it out. But So, the large degree most of the jobs I found were, you know, building printers for HP or just stuff that wasnt getting as exciting as hearing about all the stuff going on it the dot com world. Additional support from Jeff Rogers, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Elaine Coates, Farrah Safari, Liz Metzger, Harrison Vijay Tsui and Katherine Sypher, and Margaret Cirino. In December 2007, the site received funding estimated at $750,000 from angel investors. [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. Announced Date Interviewee: Oh, its, its, its amazing so far. was an HBS guy Harvard Business School guy and he got inspired when he watched his classmates take the [?] Thank you for that recommendation. Users can add each other as "Friends", enabling them to share reviews, posts, book recommendations, and messages. Interviewee: And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. Interviewee: What else did we do? Little bit of Goodreads trivia. I mean I was totally the kid that disassembled every mechanical piece in our house when I was young. So we kind of, I actually have a spreadsheet where Ive got a product and then I give a rating on each of those three criteria and then I come up with a total priority. 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". And thats okay. Critics of Goodreads have considered this decision to be a form of censorship. Andrew: Alright, Ive got to tell you too I looked at one of your latest reads, the book by Tessla, and I said well, Tessla wrote a book, how interesting could it be. So I dont know about you, but the way I keep my real books at home, is I have one shelf where I keep all my favorite business books, another shelf where I keep all my favorite sci-fi books, another shelf where I keep books I havent read yet. 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? Andrew: 2.7 million registered users I said in the beginning you got up to 650,000 on your own, no outside funding. [37] Once users have added friends to their profile, they will see their friends' shelves and reviews and can comment on friends' pages. So pretty much its up to the author. Hes a guy who once hes done reading a book he just tosses it out I guess because he sent the book to me, the one that I was most interested in. This episode of How I Built This was produced by Casey Herman and edited by Neva Grant. That gave his business enough traction to raise money from investors and grow it to over 2.6 million members. If its not you focus on the part of the business that you know and get a rock star engineer. I cant believe I struggled over it because now its a no-brainer. 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. Otis Chandler is the co-founder and CEO of Goodreads.com. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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