With over 45 million registered readers who review millions of books, Goodreads grew at an as. Interviewee: Definitely. But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. Interviewee: I think he hired smart people, and like you said, smart people want to work with smart people, and that just kind of grows. And this is the way you build any product, right? But I was really excited to learn this hot new language called Ruby on Rails. But thats the top two percent of authors that publishers are going to be helping them. Him on Goodreads? Did you code it all up yourself in the beginning? So suddenly we were just being mentioned in all these blogs. 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. Maybe after six years of an intense startup I was burned out. So one other thing weve done is weve figured out, Hey, lets not just give these authors a platform to connect to their fans but lets actually let them get in front of the entire Goodreads audience. So we built a self-serve advertising product where you can sign up right now with a credit card and buy advertising for your book on Goodreads. And I think it has. 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. But Ive always been an engineering minded kid. [6] By July 2012, the site reported 10 million members, 20 million monthly visits, and thirty employees. . Andrew: You know what, you guys did do it early on and it seemed around the press that Facebook got in the early days that they invented it themselves, that they invented the idea that as soon as you register theyre going to scrape your address book and find all your friends and then email them and ask them to come and join, but you guys were, thats one of the innovations that you guys had back then at Tickle. 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. If youre an entrepreneur, developer, or even into a Sci-Fi it seems like Otiss picks are the ones to go to, so thats one way. And not work. [70] As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. But it got me to learn HTML and SQL which were important, cause it got me into the web. Mrs. 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 people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. You allow them to connect with their readers. Andrew: Okay, and howd you figure out that Goodreads was going to be the vehicle? 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. 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 . I love that, I love the clever thinking, the clever business thinking, behind Goodreads. I was running a dating website [before Goodreads]. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. [41], The website facilitates reader interactions with authors through the interviews, giveaways, authors' blogs, and profile information. You know they had all different types and this thing went viral and this was right before I joined. Interviewee: I think you can and theres certainly examples of guys whove done that. Maybe its going to be some kind of mobile, social networking that we can all access on our iPhones. 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. Otis graduated with a B.S. Andrew: And how did he pass on what he learnt at Tickle to you? See each portfolio image, in big. It just seemed like there was a lot more innovation going on. Andrew: Do you think you couldve learned it if you didnt have an engineering background? 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. "Reading may be a solitary activity, but what you're reading and what you think of what you're reading are . Interviewee: Its a very smart point, because if something is boring, if you sign up for a service and theres nothing for you to do until someone signs up, youre just going to leave, right? And in thinking that way, I realized wow, books are kinda broken on the internet. [15], Goodreads addressed what publishers call the "discoverability problem" by guiding consumers in the digital age to find books they might want to read. They were too serious. And its an iterative process. He wanted to integrate this scanning experience and to create a space where people could write reviews regarding the books that they read. I cant remember who I was thinking of but guys with serious cred. Goodreads is pleased to announce the release of KINDLR, an exciting new dating app exclusively for Goodreads members. View Otis Chandler's professional profile on LinkedIn. 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. Interviewee: Heh, right. Interviewee: No I didnt have to do that. If you're a premium member, you can save your likes. 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. It depends on, again, on the book. Thankfully the Kindle is allowing me to buy books remotely though. Thanks for liking this post. Alright, lets go back to when you were at Stanford. which is go out and get the book and try to learn it on your own. 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. 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. Andrew: Definitely, alright, well end it there. 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 . 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. Interviewee: He was. So pretty much its up to the author. So now you can create a custom shelf and put all the books you want into it. And what I noticed about dating was that you had big generic social networks. 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. Go buy a yacht? I think the trick is going back to what you said in the beginning, its having the rock star engineers. Andrew: We might need to start something like that. Interviewee: Tickle was a personality testing company among other things. Were you also building or creating little businesses as a kid? There were mixed reactions from Goodreads users, at the time totaling 16 million members. I dont know. In relation to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, 58% of surveyed readers said they . 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. Dorothy Buffum Chandler died last summer and her son Otis Chandler, who at one time ran both Times Mirror Co. and the flagship Los Angeles Times newspaper, stepped down from the board after 36 years. Interviewee: Sure. Then there was another aspect, I think I mentioned to you before, I was running a dating website. [51], Goodreads librarians improve book information on the website, including editing book and author information and adding cover images. 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. How do you like it? 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. Interviewee: Thank you Andrew. Interviewee: Ah, right. And I think for every niche now you can find a social network around that. Linked in, I think. The idea came about when Otis Chandler was browsing through his friend's bookshelf. Interviewee: Oh, its, its, its amazing so far. [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. Goodreads has tried to address this, implementing rules such as only allowing reviewers to criticize a book itself, not author behaviour or political affiliations. 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. 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. 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. [14], Goodreads was founded in 2006. 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. I was trading basketball cards. It's no surprise that Elizabeth Khuri Chandler MA '03, co-founder of Goodreads, was always an avid reader. Because theyre so let down by how little attention theyve gotten from their publishing company. Whered you come up with the idea? Interviewee: I think it is. Am I reading your history properly here? So its not keyword based like the other ones; its book genre based. Otis Chandler is the founder of Goodreads. [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. For a lot of people, this is when things started to go downhill, and it's hard to argue against that. Did you design it yourself? If the product is going to be viral it has to be more useful if there are friends then if there are not. 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. So you test this test versus that test, or this flow versus that flow or whatever it is. But actively working at it, getting into doing speaking events around the book, doing readings and absolutely social media, I think, is big. Otis Chandler's income source is mostly from being a successful Actor. And Good Reads it was obvious. The book misses some opportunities to delve deeper into . [75] As a result, Goodreads, an Amazon company, stripped the metadata from its record for the offending title, segregating The Turner Diaries to its "NOT A BOOK" author moniker (a category typically used to weed non-book items and plagiarized titles from the platform).[76]. [1] US . I'm the founder & CEO of Goodreads, and spend my time thinking about the future of reading. They can go to Goodreads.com, they can add you over there right? What were you able to do? 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. Shes loving that line that you said, Ill teach you everything about business school in two days. I love it too Big Space. 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. 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. In 2013, Goodreads sold to Amazon for an undisclosed sum; and today, it's the world's largest site for readers, with 125 million users. Chandler continued running Goodreads until 2019. 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. And Goodreads, before it got any outside funding, it was him, just building this thing up. Like everything else we do at Goodreads, KINDLR was a passion project from start to finish. 70 ] as a kid was browsing through his friend 's bookshelf black, go. 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