Their latest investment was Series A - BookClub on Jun 15, 2021, when BookClub raised $20M. So, if the product is going to be viral it has to be useful, more useful if there are friends then if there are not. Interviewee: Ah, right. Andrew: Sure. Andrew: What else worked well? Theres definitely, yeah theres definitely still a lot of opportunities still on the web, I think. 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, it kind of seemed like it was the wild west where you could actually create real things from nothing. How can they get their books out there? Andrew: Did you 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 well send it to them. Thank you everyone for watching, Im looking forward to your comments and Im looking forward to talking to, actually Im looking forward to your comments lets leave it there. You had match.com, you had americansingles.com, and eHarmony, and those are great. And it actually launched under Goodreadz.com with a z. Interviewee: And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. Thanks. I know the first time that we tried this interview it didnt work out so well. 478 comments. In 2007, Otis Chandler developed a social network for bookworms because, rather than relying on media reviews and bestseller lists, he wanted to get reading recommendations from friends. If your name is Chris Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell theyre going to help you. And these guys just picked us up like crazy because it was essentially what they wanted to do only better. Interviewee: Well sure, like I said, every time you had you made a friend on Tickle. Him on everywhere else? Like about 10% of our users went kind of nuts and would add everything theyve ever read. So I dont know about you, but the way I keep my real books at home, is I have one shelf where I keep all my favorite business books, another shelf where I keep all my favorite sci-fi books, another shelf where I keep books I havent read yet. Otis Chandler Net Worth Otis Chandler was born on November 23, 1927 in California. The book misses some opportunities to delve deeper into . [14], Goodreads was founded in 2006. Maybe its going to be some kind of mobile, social networking that we can all access on our iPhones. Of course, if there is someone we like we can click over, we can either save them to favorites or we can scroll to the bottom, get their email address, and contact them directly. Interviewee: Groups work really well. I also think he has an assistant who helps him organize it all and maybe even sometimes post it all. 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. Goodreads features a rating system of one to five stars, with the option of accompanying the rating with a written review. Find out Otis Chandlernet worth 2020, salary 2020 detail bellow. Tweet. And theres a lot ofpretty much everybodys building a social network these days. 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. Interviewee: I mean thats the challenge. [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. So if you took a 40 question test about your personality wed give you one page about what it meant for free and then wed 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. Andrew: Now onto Dave [Yaniks] question. Alright so it seems to me like where you really learned the business side of things was working at Tickle.com the company that you were with for about six years. "[22], As of 2012, membership was required to use but free. But its not social and so coming from this [inaudible] testing we also built a social network right on the heels of Friendster. View Otis Chandler's professional profile on LinkedIn. Weve got I think over 8,000 published authors whove signed up and said I am this person. [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. "Reading may be a solitary activity, but what you're reading and what you think of what you're reading are . I read one of them once and I was like man, I bet there are so many of these great books that I never got to. 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. Sep 22, 2017. 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? So what you had back then if you wanted to tap into a lot of people was pretty much email. They can see the books that youve read and can read these great reviews. No car is worth that money but I guess it is rich mans way to fill a void in their life. I cant believe I struggled over it because now its a no-brainer. [15], Goodreads addressed what publishers call the "discoverability problem" by guiding consumers in the digital age to find books they might want to read. Which were very passionate about. Number of Investments 2. Reply Quote. But thats the top two percent of authors that publishers are going to be helping them. The site has since grown to nearly 5 million members who have added over 150 million books, completely by word of mouth. One of the sites we built, that photo-sharing site I mentioned, was called ringo.com. 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. 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. Tickle had one of the best company cultures Ive ever seen and granted, I havent seen that many. It has also been criticized that Goodreads allows both users and authors to post quotes attributed to an author without verification of any sort; removal of such quotes is left largely in the hands of volunteer "librarians", as authors have little to no individual control over quotes posted to their own profiles. I had never read Pride and Prejudice. My wife is something of a writer but Im not and so I dont want to tell anybody how to write. I got that book for my Kindle, I love it. His books ten years ago they would just become best sellers by getting in the New York Times. Andrew: Okay, great. Andrew: Good example, by the way. If they were Jewish, they would go to JDate. [42] By 2011, "seventeen thousand authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood" used Goodreads to advertise.[4]. Interviewee: Sure. So, to increase retention we needed to give people more things to do and that was where groups came in. But, after you go through this process of adding all the books you want to add at that time theres not much left for you to do. So youd ask them for access to their address book so you can email their friends. Andrew: Alright. Interviewee: Thousands of dollars. Andrew: You know where they grow those kinds of engineers/entrepreneurs is Hacker News. So weve got that for authors. Scroll below and check more details information about Current Net worth as well as Monthly/Year Salary, Expense, Income Reports! I was a Saint Bernard because Im loyal. What was the plan? Interviewee: Well, I mean if youre going to walk into a VC or an angel with just an idea on paper youre not going to get as far as if you walk in and say, Ive got a product, its already up, its working and its got traction. Youre in a better bargaining position. But I think, you know, my sense is from talking to authors that thats kind of becoming more of what they have to do. Goodreads is pleased to announce the release of KINDLR, an exciting new dating app exclusively for Goodreads members. Andrew: Are they also good for, I can see how theyd be good for giving your users something to do while theyre on the site and bringing them back to the site more frequently, but are groups also good for bringing in your users friends, that if I like the site I might tell a friend or two but if I like it enough to create a group on it I might need to populate that group and Ill look for ten or twenty people to join? Andrew: I mean you personally. Thats intense. And you just track as much as you can and then better it. Interviewee: I couldnt do this without plugging the fact that we just launched book swap. Got up to 600, let me see if I got the number right, 650,000 members. Interviewee: Yeah, I think so. Andrew: And hes a huge author with a huge following and a great track record and hes still out there hustling, selling, connecting, building his audience every day. Or much faster feedback about something you write. [74], In early 2021, Amazon removed all new and used copies of William Luther Pierce's white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries from sales on its platform and subsidiary platforms, citing concerns with the QAnon movement as the cause. So suddenly we were just being mentioned in all these blogs. You allow them to connect with their readers. Thats actually a big asset which is kind of sad because it means that first time writer whos got an amazing idea or an amazing story to tell is not going to get the same chance that, you know, I dont know, Sarah Palin is going to get. So much depends on being able to get stuff done, and engineers are the only guys who can get stuff done, so yeah, they have a lot of power in todays internet company. [63] After Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads, this policy was modified to include deletion of any review containing "an ad hominem attack or an off-topic comment". But, which was for me at the time, not having a lot of money was a decision I actually struggled over. Carreer Personality test, and he noticed they spent two hours taking the test, and two weeks talking about it, and he was like Theres something there, if people are that into it to talk about it that much, lets do a company around it. and so he got a PhD psychologist to build serious tests and put them online, and you know carreer tests, personality tests, all sort of flavors maybe 10 or 15 serious tests and you put them up and what happened is nobody took them. [?] I'm an entrepreneur, a product person, a book lover, a surfer, and a geek. And this is kind of like what MySpace does for bands. So remember I was a software engineer even though I didnt code as much in the last year and a half at Tickle. ", "Goodreads Announces New Content Policy Now Deletes Reviews Which Mention Author Behavior", "Goodreads Reaches New Milestone: Fifty Million Reviews", "Reading Is Alive And Well At Social Reading Site Goodreads, Which Just Hit 10M Members", Amazon's next Kindle Paperwhite outed ahead of its official launch via Amazon's own leak, "Goodreads Librarians Group New Ingram Import", "Goodreads Librarians Group Adding New Books: Large Book Data Import (showing 1-50 of 472)", "Goodreads Librarians Group discussion Announcement: Goodreads to Import WorldCat & Library of Congress Data Tonight", "Goodreads Librarians Group Amazon is going away as a data source (showing 1-50 of 1,601)", "Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys", "Goodreads shutters all APIs, breaking my open source app", "Importing your Goodreads & Accessing them with Open Library's APIs", "As Goodreads Ends Sourcing From Amazon, Users Fear Lost Books", "The Announcement You've All Been Waiting For", "How Amazon and Goodreads could lose their best readers", "Review Guidelines & Updated Author Guidelines", "Goodreads Modifies User Terms to Prevent Author Bullying, Reviewers Outraged", "Almost Everything About Goodreads Is Broken", "Goodreads Librarians Group - Issues with Quotes: Editing & Deleting My Quotes Showing 1-50 of 53", "Goodreads' growing pains: Attempt to curtail author bullying angers many users", "How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned Goodreads Into Many Authors' Worst Nightmare", "Amazon pulls white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries alongside QAnon purge", List of mergers and acquisitions by Amazon. And its an iterative process. So weve 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 weve 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. Interviewee: Yeah, its looking good. And I did major in mechanical engineering and I liked it a lot. Andrew: I see. Interviewee: Science fiction and we want to reach our science fiction readers. Am to admitting some kind of ignorance here? They dont want the interview; they dont want to be on anywhere. Find out a little more about them. Otis Chandler built Goodreads in 2006 because he believed in social networking and wanted to see what his friends were reading. Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. Little bit of Goodreads trivia. 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. 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. All of which were successful. Thankfully the Kindle is allowing me to buy books remotely though. Did you code it all up yourself in the beginning? Elizabeth Chandler @Elizabethkhuri 25 Apr 2019 After 13 years of growing Goodreads from an idea to a community with more than 90 million members, Otis and I are moving on our next chapter. It was all about learning how you build the product. [inaudible] Id always kinda been a reader as a kid and I wanted to get back to that. 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, it turns out I graduated in 2000 and there was this whole dot com bubble going on. So I spent the summer learning HTML, and mySQL and plugging in a lot of boring mathematical formulas and chemical property charts into a website. Fortunately the book straightens out into a well-researched and well-written history of LA, the LAT and the Chandler/Otis families. [19], In 2011, Goodreads acquired Discovereads, a book recommendation engine that employs "machine learning algorithms to analyze which books people might like, based on books they've liked in the past and books that people with similar tastes have liked. We can also go to top, we can hit save to favorites, save it for later, and then keep clicking around. My mom knew to give me a broken VCR rather than throw it out. 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