whenever anybody asked me you know how did you do this what was the number one thing that led to your success my answer is always solve a problem

Start backwards from just obsessing over what how can I solve a problem for someone

our mission is help people find books very simply and share what they thought of those books

I love this quote from Warren Buffett the difference between successful people and really successful people is really successful people say no to almost everything

I met Jeff Bezos and the very first thing he said to me first literally first words out of his mouth where we like mission driven people

if your customer focused you're always waking up wondering how can we make that customer say wow

one of the first places we actually got a lot of traction where it turned out a lot of people did have that problem was in the early blogosphere

blogosphere of 2007 there was live journal and bloggers and what we found was there was this whole community of 70% women who were blogging their book reviews

we helped them connect you share their thoughts about books and connect to like-minded readers

when you're just starting their companies you got to nail the product market fit for your power users

one of the first features we launched was groups and the very first group I created was Goodreads feedback and this is a group we just talked to our users about what's going on with the product

if you nail the product market fit for your power users those are the people are going to say this product is awesome and spread the word

my theory is when there's a problem that a lot of people have you will find small numbers of people going out of their way to solve that problem using kind of manual or hack together tools and in the trick of course is can you productize what they're trying to do make it easy for them to do with technology to really amplify and then you can grow really fast

before Craigslist was around you know people the way to buy and sell goods in a neighborhood was literally through a community bulletin board or maybe a garage sale that you advertised around the neighborhood it was very inefficient and only a few people did that and then Craigslist came

we found that there were a lot of in our early research there are a lot of people who are literally creating spreadsheets on their computers of all the books they'd read and when they'd read them and what they thought and then in corollary to that is the to read list

if you see something working working double down on it

we've always kind of focused 80% on making a great product 20% on tuning our growth channels

we didn't go around thinking oh we'll get a lot of traffic from SEO like it happened quite by accident and then once we learned it we did it we kind of learned how to tune the levers and the main inputs for for tuning SEO or really you know work on your inbound links so give people easy tools to share your product because then they'll do that and that'll put links out there

we built some widgets for those guys to kind of just share show off the books that they had been reading on the side of their blogs and we still have these

the other smart thing we did was you know if you do if you build one of these it's basically just a line of JavaScript or flash it doesn't help you with SEO at all so we added in like a little logo at the bottom that was just static HTML to get a link right to our homepage so everybody who copied this link this widget to their blog gave us some SEO

address book importers back in 2007 210 these things man these were the secret sauce they really worked

join my reading network 3x better

we found another viral channel which was the Facebook Open Graph

you got to start with solving a problem a hundred percent of the successful companies I've seen and you saw a bunch of them today where the founders said we were just passionate about solving some problem

if you're really soon solving a problem look for how people are going out of their way to solve that and see if you can productize it

be mission driven keeps you focused keeps you makes it easy to say no to stuff and and helps you track the right people and build the right culture

the best way to then do it is find like-minded readers so you know just building the community where people can find like-minded people to them and see what they're reading that really works

pattern matching and behavioral data tends to work really well