Go buy a yacht? 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. So, can you tell people what Goodreads is? Interviewee: Definitely. 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. Are you a designer? But yeah, I think you need to be doing everything and anything you can. Thats intense. [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. 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. So, from that perspective, absolutely, it was life-changing. 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. I actually interview authors all the time, and I can see day one, when I talk to them, before their book launches they are so freakin enthusiastic. Andrew: How can you decide which ideas you listen to? 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. Can you talk about that? Any good social network does that well. Goodreads members can apply to become volunteer librarians after they have 50 books on their profile. 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. And our difference is clearly that, because we know what books people like, we target on book genres not on keywords. Alright, how many members do you have now? The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. [31] 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. Net income in mil. Andrew: You know where they grow those kinds of engineers/entrepreneurs is Hacker News. 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. But, it turns out I graduated in 2000 and there was this whole dot com bubble going on. Reply Quote. You know theyd spend half a work day going down memory lane, all the books I read in junior high, all the books I read in high school, and its a kind of fun process to go through actually. 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. So much depends on being able to get stuff done, and engineers are the only guys who can get stuff done, so yeah, they have a lot of power in todays internet company. You know, one of the first things I do when I go into any bodys house is I look at their bookshelves and see whats on there. Thats huge. I actually found a dating site once for people who golf. And maybe every couple months Id empty my Amazon shopping cart. How much of that is coming from you? You know, it kind of seemed like it was the wild west where you could actually create real things from nothing. Its only about a week and a half old, but its pretty exciting for us. were creating profiles, and I said weve got to make these guys special. They just want to move on with their lives. Is it going to increase our user retention? 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. You dont have to be a published author to do this. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. In December 2020, Goodreads deactivated API keys more than 30 days old and said it would no longer be issuing new API keys. 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. 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. 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. [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. That they should see that the place doesnt feel as good, doesnt feel as comfortable without as many friends on it. [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. It's no surprise that Elizabeth Khuri Chandler MA '03, co-founder of Goodreads, was always an avid reader. So pretty much its up to the author. I know the first time that we tried this interview it didnt work out so well. 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. On his own, and then he went out an got funding. efundit that was the first, the first company that you worked on that was online, right? The scion of the wealthy Chandler family who took over the Los Angeles Times and transformed it into a nationally respected publication. 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 have shares of Tickle.com? Number of Investments 2. Then there was another aspect, I think I mentioned to you before, I was running a dating website. Amazon & Goodreads; Education. Its still very young. And it turns out that most problems in mechanical engineering are pretty solved. Hes talking to fans and hes got big followings on all those services. My mom knew to give me a broken VCR rather than throw it out. 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. 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. Maybe its going to be some kind of mobile, social networking that we can all access on our iPhones. You know they had all different types and this thing went viral and this was right before I joined. Otis graduated with a B.S. In December 2007, the site received funding estimated at $750,000 from angel investors. Andrew: I got a lot of books from friends like that. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. You didnt have to go about marketing it yourself. Andrew: Its all about research online. Otis Chandler was born on November 23, 1927 in United States (78 years old). Andrew: Funny how many people who went to business school would say the same thing. 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. 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. Otis Chandler is the co-founder and CEO of Goodreads.com. 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. In relation to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, 58% of surveyed readers said they . Alright how can people connect with you Otis? Is the audio coming in? 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. Now its really easy to put down a hundred bucks and see, hey do I get any traction, and Go ahead. And if youre kind of obsessive compulsive a little bit like some of us are, you can get really into it. And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. Tweet. 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. Andrew: Its working now. Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. Ive done several interviews here with entrepreneurs whose companies have failed and what they say often is I just gave everybody what they wanted, I was told I was supposed to go into the community, listen to the feature request, the product request that they had, and give them what they want, but then I ended up doing everything and my business lost its focus and I was too distracted. The site has since grown to nearly 5 million members who have added over 150 million books, completely by word of mouth. And this is the way you build any product, right? So he came up with the current look and feel of most of it. So we can really decide if this is the right company for us. And then we kind of got into this blog phenomenon. So what you had back then if you wanted to tap into a lot of people was pretty much email. [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. Andrew: Now onto Dave [Yaniks] question. Youll notice that if you create a group on Goodreads the next page is invite your friends to your group on Goodreads and I wouldnt say those are insanely viral like that because youre not going to invite everybody, but it definitely helps. 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. And not work. Guys who are really in there, who were scrappy entrepreneurs. 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. 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 still true today though, right? 160,000 social networks or something like that? [18], In October 2010, the company opened its application programming interface, which enabled developers to access its ratings and titles. If we scroll through it we can find lots of different portfolios. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. Whatd you want to do when you graduated? They can go to Goodreads.com, they can add you over there right? 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? 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. ", "Goodreads Announces New Content Policy Now Deletes Reviews Which Mention Author Behavior", "Goodreads Reaches New Milestone: Fifty Million Reviews", "Reading Is Alive And Well At Social Reading Site Goodreads, Which Just Hit 10M Members", Amazon's next Kindle Paperwhite outed ahead of its official launch via Amazon's own leak, "Goodreads Librarians Group New Ingram Import", "Goodreads Librarians Group Adding New Books: Large Book Data Import (showing 1-50 of 472)", "Goodreads Librarians Group discussion Announcement: Goodreads to Import WorldCat & Library of Congress Data Tonight", "Goodreads Librarians Group Amazon is going away as a data source (showing 1-50 of 1,601)", "Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys", "Goodreads shutters all APIs, breaking my open source app", "Importing your Goodreads & Accessing them with Open Library's APIs", "As Goodreads Ends Sourcing From Amazon, Users Fear Lost Books", "The Announcement You've All Been Waiting For", "How Amazon and Goodreads could lose their best readers", "Review Guidelines & Updated Author Guidelines", "Goodreads Modifies User Terms to Prevent Author Bullying, Reviewers Outraged", "Almost Everything About Goodreads Is Broken", "Goodreads Librarians Group - Issues with Quotes: Editing & Deleting My Quotes Showing 1-50 of 53", "Goodreads' growing pains: Attempt to curtail author bullying angers many users", "How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned Goodreads Into Many Authors' Worst Nightmare", "Amazon pulls white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries alongside QAnon purge", List of mergers and acquisitions by Amazon. Otis Chandler was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. Since the second I found the Hardy Boys all the way through when I got to high school. Otis Chandler Founder and CEO in San Francisco Visit my company website. And you just track as much as you can and then better it. How can they get their books out there? 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. Weve got I think over 8,000 published authors whove signed up and said I am this person. Thanks Otis. If you havent heard of Otis Chandler its because he spends more time coding his site, Goodreads.com, than promoting himself. 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