Andrew: Before we get started, I want to introduce you to Haystack. Haystack is where you are going to find the right web designer for your next project. So let’s take a look at it here. If we scroll through it we can find lots of different portfolios. If there’s a company that we’re interested in we can quickly scroll through a bunch of their work and see whether we like them or not. If we’re interested in them, in them even more we can click over and see their page. Find out a little more about them. See each portfolio image, in big. So we can really decide if this is the right company for us. And if we want to follow up with them there’s their email address and their website right on the bottom so we can connect directly. We can also go to top, we can hit “save to favorites”, save it for later, and then keep clicking around. If you want to narrow your search down a little bit further you can click on the city, and I used to live in...
Full program includes
– You’ll hear how working for Tickle.com’s founder, James Currier, was better than going to business school.
– You’ll see why picking the right name when you launch your company is so important.
– You’ll learn some of the viral techniques that Otis used to encourage his users to get their friends to join the site.
Text excerpts
How he came up with the idea for Goodreads
I was running a dating website [before Goodreads]. And what I noticed about dating was that you had big generic social networks. You had match.com, you had americansingles.com, and eHarmony, and those are great. But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. They wanted more of a community.
So then they started going to these niche sites. If they were Jewish, they would go to JDate. If they were Christian, they’d go to ChristianSingles. If they were black, they’d go to a black dating site. 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. I actually found a dating site once for people who golf. I don’t think it worked. 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.
And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. And I think it has. You know, today we have Goodreads for books and we have Flickster for movies and we have Netflix and we have LastFM for music.
How he designed the site to be viral
If the product is going to be viral it has to be more useful if there are friends then if there are not. 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, everywhere on the site you go we don’t show you like book reviews about Harry Potter, we show you here’s what your friends thought of Harry Potter, and we show you here’s what everybody else thought of Harry Potter. 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 you’re seeing activity from your friends.
And, if you’re on the site and you have no friends, then everywhere you go it’s saying you have no friends who’ve read this book, add some friends. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. So you know this idea is kind of built into it, and everywhere you go on the site you’re kind of getting this reminder that there’s 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.