"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"

"Goodreads was founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler.[3][4] In December 2007, the site had 650,000 members[5] and 10,000,000 books had been added.[6] By July 2012, the site reported 10 million members, 20 million monthly visits, and thirty employees."

"By July 2019, the site had 90 million members."

"Goodreads addressed what publishers call the ""discoverability problem"" by guiding consumers in the digital age to find books they might want to read."

"During its first year of business, the company was run without any formal funding. In December 2007, the site received funding estimated at $750,000 from angel investors.[6] This funding lasted Goodreads until 2009, when Goodreads received two million dollars from True Ventures."

"After a user has rated 20 books on its five-star scale, the site will begin making recommendations. Otis Chandler believed this rating system would be superior to Amazon's, as Amazon's includes books a user has browsed or purchased as gifts when determining its recommendations."

"The website facilitates reader interactions with authors through the interviews, giveaways, authors' blogs, and profile information. There is also a special section for authors with suggestions for promoting their works on Goodreads.com, aimed at helping them reach their target audience.[40] By 2011, ""seventeen thousand authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood"" used Goodreads to advertise."

"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."

"Reading across different sources gives us different perspectives and improves our diversity of thought, which is vitally important. However, paywalls and filter bubbles are limiting too many of us to reading the same set of too few publications."

"We read what editors of publications we visit or subscribe to curate for us. But what we don’t do is be intentional. We don’t ask ourselves “What do I really need to know about or learn more about today in order to achieve my goals”?"

"Overall trust in US media hit an all time low in 2021, bottoming out at 27%, which ranks last among 46 nations in a recent Reuters survey. So Truth has become a social agreement — eg I agree with what my community, or my preferred media brands, think, regardless of objectivity or expert opinion."

"One afternoon while I was scanning a friend's bookshelf for ideas, it struck me: when I want to know what books to read, I'd rather turn to a friend than any random person or bestseller list."

"Knowledge is power, and power is best shared among readers."

"The value I get out of Goodreads is that it helps me read more. What gets a person excited to read a book is when they have a strong recommendation."

"Recommendations from friends are the best, but we don't always have the luxury of having those, so we've built a community of book readers and a top-notch algorithmic recommendation engine to help people find their next favorite read"

"And Goodreads, before it got any outside funding, it was him, just building this thing up. Got up to 600, let me see if I got the number right, 650,000 members."

"most people get a lot of value out of, from keeping track of what they’ve read."

"one of the first things I do when I go into any body’s house is I look at their bookshelves and see what’s on there."

"our mission is really just to get people excited about reading. Which we’re very passionate about."

"I was talking to Lea, why can’t I think of her last name, the founder of Pounce, who told me it that it just feels like a superpower, you don’t rely on anyone else you can just build it yourself, from start to finish."

"Tickle was a personality testing company among other things. It actually started as EMO.com which is when I joined it in 2,000 and I thought it was pretty dumb when I joined it actually to be honest but luckily it was started by some really smart people who knew what they were doing, and that was lesson number 1: People who are smart and determined to succeed, WILL succeed, even with what seems like a dumb idea, and you know, the Tickle guys were smart and determined and that’s what they did, so they took an idea to do a testing company online from an idea to a funded startup to selling it to Monster.com in 2004 for 100,000,000 bucks."

"Tickle was one of those companies that had the perfect combination of advertising revenue and subscription revenue."

"if you took a 40 question test about your personality we’d give you one page about what it meant for free and then we’d give you 15 pages about deep psychological analysis coming from our PhD psychologist about what exactly it means for your personality and how you can improve your life, and we would actually sale those for between $4.99 to $9.99 depending on the test so there was a little bit of direct consumer revenue there."

"Tickle was viral because when you took a test it would say compare your result with your friends and it was kind of like an early social network in that there were friends except the only thing we did with them was when you took a test was show you Okay you’re a Saint Bernard, and here’s your friend Andrew who’s a Golden Retriever, and here’s your other friend Olivia who’s a Pug or something like that."

"So this is fun, you’re like wow, I’ve got three friends and I can see their results I want to see the rest of my friend’s results let me go send them an email."

"to make something viral you have to create something that is able to go viral right?"

"the second step of viral is let people send it to their friends and so we worked as hard as we could on that."

"I remember one thing that was an innovation for us, a real breakthrough, was storing the email addresses of our users’ friends – if they allowed us to – and that meant that the next time they picked a greeting card on our site, we can say, hey ‘these are the five people who you messaged the last time, can we send it to them too?’, and in addition, can you type in a few other people and we’ll send it to them."

"The easier you make things for users, the better"

"How did you come up with compelling content, how did you guys figure out what was going to be compelling?"

"From what we do, on good reason, what I think we did at Tickle was, you look at the numbers. It’s all about stats, right."

"And then what wins goes first, and then you try another one. It’s all about (muffled) testing."

"He had a number of good things about him. Number one was he actually would stand up in front of the company and say ‘We don’t hire assholes here’, which is kind of, like well… “Did our CEO just use the word ‘asshole’?”"

"Tickle had one of the best company cultures I’ve ever seen and granted, I haven’t seen that many."

"I got a nice check which allowed me–basically allowed me to take six months off of my job and build Goodreads"

"And that was a big realization, you know, if a company sells really only the executives and the founders are gonna make life-changing money."

"First, I’ve always been a reader."

"And in thinking that way, I realized “wow, books are kinda broken on the internet”."

"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”."

"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."

"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."

"You know, James had another bit of wisdom for me which was a good domain will give you a 30% extra chance of success."

"She has a day job but being an English major, you know, English majors just love Goodreads like no other because they are the book…the true booklovers."

"So 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."

"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."

"people who had this desire to share their thoughts about books, they had all been using blogs."

"And they had little rings of blogs where I’ve got my ten blog roll, front book blogs on the side and every time they read a book they’d write a blog post. And these guys just picked us up like crazy because it was essentially what they wanted to do only better."

"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.”"

"That they should see that the place doesn’t feel as good, doesn’t feel as comfortable without as many friends on it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Like about 10% of our users went kind of nuts and would add everything they’ve ever read."

"But, 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."

"are groups also good for bringing in your users friends"

"Definitely. You’ll notice that if you create a group on Goodreads the next page is invite your friends to your group on Goodreads and I wouldn’t say those are insanely viral like that because you’re not going to invite everybody, but it definitely helps."

"I talked to Dennis Crowley about that issue with Foursquare, you know it’s 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."

"So 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."

"Because one thing we noticed early on was that we’d be browsing around and some guy’s profile would say ‘Hey, I’m so-and-so the author of this’ and we’d be like ‘Whoa, there’s really cool authors hanging on our site’."

"I said we’ve got to make these guys special."

"We’ve got I think over 8,000 published authors who’ve signed up and said ‘I am this person’."

"‘How am I going to market my book to people?’ And this is the biggest problem that authors are facing right now."

"a lot of these authors are realizing ‘Hey, I’ve got to be out there on the internet collecting fans and gaining readership.’"

"They’re so let down by how people aren’t paying attention to their book in the world. What can they do as authors?"

"And it’s become more on the author to market themselves. That’s actually one thing publishers look for in an author, is do they have a way to market it?"

"You know, maybe in their job they’re a professor of something or a TV personality so that they know they’ll be able to market it on their own."

"But if you wrote a book about a certain topic you should go to people who…find communities around that topic and market to them."

"But actively working at it, getting into doing speaking events around the book, doing readings and absolutely social media, I think, is big."

"Some authors don’t get into it but go look at Paul Coelho who’s a bestselling, international bestselling author and that guy in on Goodreads every day."

"But I think, you know, my sense is from talking to authors that that’s kind of becoming more of what they have to do."

"So one other thing we’ve done is we’ve figured out, ‘Hey, let’s not just give these authors a platform to connect to their fans but let’s 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 our difference is clearly that, because we know what books people like, we target on book genres not on keywords. So it’s not keyword based like the other ones; it’s book genre based."

"So we’ve essentially built a really good way for our users to talk to us everyday and half of what I do is I listen to what our users are saying about various features we’ve built, about various ideas for things we could build, about things that we have built that might be buggy, and then I go react to it."

"I say “Okay there’s a lot of users here that are really, really wanting this or that,” and then I can prioritize what we’re going to build."

"I think that’s the trick and I don’t know if there’s 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?"

"Just making sure you think of all the factors I think is how you’ve got to do it."

"2.7 million registered users I said in the beginning you got up to 650,000 on your own, no outside funding."

"I think the trick is going back to what you said in the beginning, it’s having the rock star engineers."

"If it’s not you focus on the part of the business that you know and get a rock star engineer."

"Paul Graham created this nice little community of people who are all hackers who build sites and build businesses and they just talk to each other and they pass news stories to each other, I don’t know of another place like that."

"it’s a big new feature for us, it’s the ability for members to list their books swappable and then swap with other members."

"You’ll hear how working for Tickle.com’s founder, James Currier, was better than going to business school."