we both launched it, blasted out an email to all of our friends and we got it up to…I don’t know, I think after a month, from December to January, we got it up to about 800 people with our friends and friends of friends, just kind of organically grown.

then I think in mid-January Mashable picked us up. And that’s when we went from five users a day to 100 users a day and then kept going up from there. And then we kind of got into this blog phenomenon. 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.

So suddenly we were just being mentioned in all these blogs. You know I’d 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 it’s perfect, I’m 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.

if the product is going to be viral it has to be useful, 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.

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.

after you go through this process of adding all the books you want to add at that time there’s not much left for you to do. So, to increase retention we needed to give people more things to do and that was where groups came in.

the Sci-Fi and Fantasy group on Goodreads is one of my favorites, those guys are just amazing, and there’s so much discussion going on, and there’s so much excitement going around all the books that people are reading. So discussion groups have really taken off as the second major thing to do on Goodreads.

there needs to be some way you can use it day one, without anybody else on there. And Good Reads it was obvious. It’s cataloguing your books. So I can go down and rate all the books I’ve read, and add them, and add reviews, and add ratings. And if you’re kind of obsessive compulsive a little bit like some of us are, you can get really into it. You can spend hours on there.