Andrew: Yeah. Whered you come up with the idea? But the remainder of his collection, some 50 cars and 40 . Before we continue with the story, Otis can you tell the people what Goodreads is, if theyve never been on it, if theyre not one of the, one of the millions of people on the site? 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. I dont know. 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. [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. You know, maybe in their job theyre a professor of something or a TV personality so that they know theyll be able to market it on their own. But yes, I have seen the bloggers, I have seen the podcasters built up a big enough audience to then parley that into book sales. Find out Otis Chandlernet worth 2020, salary 2020 detail bellow. Andrew: How much are the business side of things? Did you code it all up yourself in the beginning? 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. His books ten years ago they would just become best sellers by getting in the New York Times. So it just always seemed like something I wanted to do. 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. 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 . 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. 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. One of the sites we built, that photo-sharing site I mentioned, was called ringo.com. Amazon & Goodreads; Education. 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. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Maybe theres the business model. So now you have the opportunity to become a better writer by putting yourself out there more and more often and seeing what people like and dont like. Shes loving that line that you said, Ill teach you everything about business school in two days. I love it too Big Space. But if the authors not into it, its not going to work. 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. 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. So what we had is we animated on this fun, plus serious model and I think at the end we had maybe 600 fun tests and maybe 150 serious tests, and the serious tests we eventually figured out we could sell a result to these. Andrew: The book Think and grow rich, I think one of its points there is to work with good people, because their systems, their was of working is going to rub off on you. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. 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. You know for us we had a problem where Goodreads was about cataloging your books so you come in and youd add a bunch of books and youd say what you thought of them, and maybe youd go kind of nuts. So shes really been into the product and we kind of view it as both of ours a little bit. Goodreads has tried to address this, implementing rules such as only allowing reviewers to criticize a book itself, not author behaviour or political affiliations. So I just sat in my living room and I decided to learn Ruby on Rails and code this idea. 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. You allow them to connect with their readers. 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." 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. If they were Christian, theyd go to ChristianSingles. 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. The book misses some opportunities to delve deeper into . Find out a little more about them. For a lot of people, this is when things started to go downhill, and it's hard to argue against that. And this is the way you build any product, right? 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. He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. The website's offices are located in San Francisco. [24] A month later, in November 2012, Goodreads had surpassed 12 million members, with the member base having doubled in one year. were creating profiles, and I said weve got to make these guys special. 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. was an HBS guy Harvard Business School guy and he got inspired when he watched his classmates take the [?] Did you design it yourself? 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. I was a Saint Bernard because Im loyal. 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. But I was really excited to learn this hot new language called Ruby on Rails. Sign In http://www.twitter.com/otown https://www.goodreads.com/otis Otis's favorite books More Otis's Bookshelves read (577) No, I get those emails from you. [72], Both authors and readers have noted an increase in political banter, trolling, cancel culture and cyberbullying afflicting the website. Thats actually one thing publishers look for in an author, is do they have a way to market it? Otis Chandler was born on November 23, 1927 in United States (78 years old). Did you have shares of Tickle.com? Their latest investment was Series A - BookClub on Jun 15, 2021, when BookClub raised $20M. Thanks for liking this post. Andrew: You know where they grow those kinds of engineers/entrepreneurs is Hacker News. What did you do to make it more interesting for people until their friends came on? And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. 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? He wanted to integrate this scanning experience and to create a space where people could write reviews regarding the books that they read. Andrew: Can I find people locally to swap books with? 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. Interviewee: Probably not. And you just track as much as you can and then better it. So, I mean, first of all it depends on the content of the book. Am to admitting some kind of ignorance here? They just want to move on with their lives. Beyond that, publishers do not have budgets to help market their titles. 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. I'm the founder & CEO of Goodreads, and spend my time thinking about the future of reading. 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. After university Chandler initially worked as a programmer in on-line businesses,[11] including dating sites,[12] and Khuri Chandler as a journalist. And it turns out that most problems in mechanical engineering are pretty solved. But Ive always been an engineering minded kid. A person whos an engineer who wants to develop, who wants to think about engineering problems, and not financial problems. hide caption. Andrew: Okay, and howd you figure out that Goodreads was going to be the vehicle? Hes on Facebook every day. Login or become a premium member. [40] Goodreads organizes offline opportunities as well, such as in-person book exchanges and "literary pub crawls". Otis Chandler has made 2 investments. Its all about (muffled) testing. Hey everyone, its Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambition upstart. Otis Chandler is the founder of Goodreads. Now its really easy to put down a hundred bucks and see, hey do I get any traction, and Go ahead. 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 . But, you guys also did certain things to make it even more viral. 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. The first few pages are written in a glitzy, sophomoric style that is grating. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. If your name is Stephanie [Myer] or Dan Brown, then theyre going to help you. So we allowed the authors to kind of take over their author profile. 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? We built a photo-sharing site right on the heels of Flickr. And I think for every niche now you can find a social network around that. 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. Im in Argentina can I find people who are here instead of having to get the book shipped from the US? Its only about a week and a half old, but its pretty exciting for us. 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. And it also depends on the author. Interviewee: Right. So, can you tell people what Goodreads is? You know, there were guys creating things and then six months later a big company would come and buy it and that guy used to live down the hall from me and holy cow. I should have gone for Mix Energy or Mix Synergy. [46], The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (version 2) and Kindle Voyage feature integration with Goodreads' social network via a user interface button. 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. Little bit of Goodreads trivia. [36], On the Goodreads website, users can add books to their personal bookshelves, rate and review books, see what their friends and authors are reading, participate in discussion boards and groups on a variety of topics, and get suggestions for future reading choices based on their reviews of previously read books. Ning has built like what? 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. And Goodreads, before it got any outside funding, it was him, just building this thing up. So its not keyword based like the other ones; its book genre based. But thats the top two percent of authors that publishers are going to be helping them. Andrew: How can you decide which ideas you listen to? 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.. I guess, is it enough to go on Goodreads and create a community and create a community on Facebook? Users can add each other as "Friends", enabling them to share reviews, posts, book recommendations, and messages. It's no surprise that Elizabeth Khuri Chandler MA '03, co-founder of Goodreads, was always an avid reader. And thats okay. Its all about stats, right. Andrew: 2.7 million registered users I said in the beginning you got up to 650,000 on your own, no outside funding. 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. Interviewee: Yeah, I think so. And then we kind of got into this blog phenomenon. Interviewee: No, we have a lot of book geeks but. Interviewee: I did. So remember I was a software engineer even though I didnt code as much in the last year and a half at Tickle. He is a software engineer at heart and loves tinkering on the site to make it the best product possible. Do you think you couldve learned it so quickly? You'll learn how he did it in this interview. And theres a lot ofpretty much everybodys building a social network these days. His soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth joined the project, and. 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. But if you wrote a book about a certain topic you should go to people whofind communities around that topic and market to them. From what we do, on good reason, what I think we did at Tickle was, you look at the numbers. Members can receive the regular newsletter featuring new books, suggestions, author interviews, and poetry. 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? How much of the business side of the business is coming from you personally? And I see Dave Yank, whos watching the slide has got a question. [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. [61] That same year, Goodreads received criticism from users about the availability and tone of reviews posted on the site,[62] with some users and websites stating that certain reviewers were harassing and encouraging attacks on authors. Andrew: How expensive was it? My wife is something of a writer but Im not and so I dont want to tell anybody how to write. Several members of the Goodreads team are single and dating in . If you're a premium member, you can save your likes. Do you have a group on Goodreads thats like that? And this is kind of like what MySpace does for bands. Because Goodreads allows reviews for any book record as soon as it first appears on Goodreads, and cannot verify that any account-holder in fact owns the book they claim to have read, there is no clear way to police this. [25], In March 2013, Amazon made an agreement to acquire Goodreads in the second quarter of 2013 for an undisclosed sum. Thank you everyone. Well, Ive got a guy whos done it. Alright, lets go back to when you were at Stanford. There were mixed reactions from Goodreads users, at the time totaling 16 million members. 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. 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. 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. MySpace everyday and hes just posting little stuff, little snippets, things hes thinking about. [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. Net Worth in 2022: $1 Million - $5 Million: Salary in . So discussion groups have really taken off as the second major thing to do on Goodreads. 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. You know, theres still challenges. Can you ever get a big enough community to make it worthwhile? You had match.com, you had americansingles.com, and eHarmony, and those are great. 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. [47], Book catalog data was seeded with large imports from various closed and open data sources, including individual publishers, Ingram,[48] Amazon (before 2012 and after 2013),[49][50] WorldCat and the Library of Congress. 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. Yea, that was what got me into the web. Can you talk about some of the things that you did over at, and for the transcribers its tickle.com T-I-C-K-L-E.com, can you talk about some of the viral techniques that you used there? And my wife and I, I kind of view my wife as my co-founder. So thats important to understand, but its easier said then done. And then I think in mid-January Mashable picked us up. And I did major in mechanical engineering and I liked it a lot. [6] By July 2012, the site reported 10 million members, 20 million monthly visits, and thirty employees. The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. 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. 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. [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. Interviewee: Sure. And both my grandfathers own their own companies and are successful. I should say that. . Youll hear how working for Tickle.coms founder, James Currier, was better than going to business school. Which means a lot of things, but most people get a lot of value out of, from keeping track of what theyve read. Him on everywhere else? You can follow us on Twitter @HowIBuiltThis, on Instagram @HowIBuiltThisNPR and email us at hibt@npr.org. 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.". And maybe every couple months Id empty my Amazon shopping cart. Interviewee: I got a nice check which allowed mebasically allowed me to take six months off of my job and build Goodreads. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. But it got me to learn HTML and SQL which were important, cause it got me into the web. How do you like it? I'm an entrepreneur, a product person, a book lover, a surfer, and a geek. They dont want the interview; they dont want to be on anywhere. Interviewee: Well, the other caveat is that we launched it in the US only. You know, it kind of seemed like it was the wild west where you could actually create real things from nothing. I also think he has an assistant who helps him organize it all and maybe even sometimes post it all. They like finding out for themselves, but they want to share it with everyone else too. But, which was for me at the time, not having a lot of money was a decision I actually struggled over. [30] Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. 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. Otis Chandler built Goodreads in 2006 because he believed in social networking and wanted to see what his friends were reading. Couldve learned it so quickly, the site to make it even more viral said weve got make... 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