Otis graduated with a B.S. Other victims of review bombing have pointed out that once a record for a book is created on Goodreads, even if the book has never been released to the public, is not in fact a "book" by Goodreads's definition, or will never be released to the public due to errors or delays in publishing, one-star ratings can still appear from accounts with no access to the title. Youll hear how working for Tickle.coms founder, James Currier, was better than going to business school. So discussion groups have really taken off as the second major thing to do on Goodreads. It was all about learning how you build the product. I probably said I wanted to be a mechanical engineer and build cars someday. You know, for pretty much every ethnicity, every race, every sports activity, anything you can figure that you can create a community around there was a dating site for that. Linked in, I think. Am to admitting some kind of ignorance here? Interviewee: Well, the other caveat is that we launched it in the US only. [42] By 2011, "seventeen thousand authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood" used Goodreads to advertise.[4]. I guess, is it enough to go on Goodreads and create a community and create a community on Facebook? [40] Goodreads organizes offline opportunities as well, such as in-person book exchanges and "literary pub crawls". I dont think it worked. 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. And what I noticed about dating was that you had big generic social networks. 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. Without much fanfare or outside funding he built his community of booklovers to 650,000 members. And we can even narrow it by budget. So it just always seemed like something I wanted to do. How do you like it? 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. If you havent heard of Otis Chandler its because he spends more time coding his site, Goodreads.com, than promoting himself. So, everywhere on the site you go we dont show you like book reviews about Harry Potter, we show you heres what your friends thought of Harry Potter, and we show you heres what everybody else thought of Harry Potter. I had a drawer, not a drawer, several cabinets full of disassembled stuff. The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. [31] The rest of us get a nice check. We have estimated Otis Chandler's net worth, money, salary, income, and assets. Otis and Elizabeth Chandler are founders of Goodreads. And in thinking that way, I realized wow, books are kinda broken on the internet. 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. I dont know. [17] During its first year of business, the company was run without any formal funding. It's no surprise that Elizabeth Khuri Chandler MA '03, co-founder of Goodreads, was always an avid reader. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Andrew you might be a golden retriever because youre kind of outgoing. But it got me to learn HTML and SQL which were important, cause it got me into the web. Interviewee: I think so. And what I noticed about dating was that you had big generic social networks. Andrew: What about the business behind it, or how do you, alright so I can understand its fun, but if theres not as much substance to it wheres the money coming from is I guess what Im asking. Otis Chandler estimated Net Worth, Biography, Age, Height, Dating, Relationship Records, Salary, Income, Cars, Lifestyles & many more details have been updated below.Let's check, How Rich is Otis Chandler in 2019-2020? Interviewee: I had an absolutely horrible design at first and then I had one of the Tickle designers, friend of mine, do the design and he was really good. And its become more on the author to market themselves. Goodreads often refuses to remove quotes with "likes" from an author's profile, even if the quotes are false or invalid. Otis Chandler has made 2 investments. Otis Chandler is the most interesting person in the book, a driven, hollow man. Otis Chandler's income source is mostly from being a successful Actor. Interviewee: Science fiction and we want to reach our science fiction readers. He is a software engineer at heart and loves tinkering on the site to make it the best product possible. You can spend hours on there. So realitys about making things really dead simple for the user. What can they do as authors? But the remainder of his collection, some 50 cars and 40 . And I see Dave Yank, whos watching the slide has got a question. 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. And this is very similar to the Facebook self-serve product or the MySpace self-serve product. But thats the top two percent of authors that publishers are going to be helping them. I was trading basketball cards. Users can add each other as "Friends", enabling them to share reviews, posts, book recommendations, and messages. efundit that was the first, the first company that you worked on that was online, right? They were too serious. But without much fanfare -- or outside funding -- he built his community of booklovers to 650,000 members. Yea, that was what got me into the web. Edit Personal Investments Section. 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.". I dont know that I can point anything else out. Number two, well give you a way to connect with him on Twitter. . Andrew: Do you think you couldve learned it if you didnt have an engineering background? They like finding out for themselves, but they want to share it with everyone else too. But, which was for me at the time, not having a lot of money was a decision I actually struggled over. Big Space, I see your note. They just want to move on with their lives. Thankfully the Kindle is allowing me to buy books remotely though. 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. Theres definitely, yeah theres definitely still a lot of opportunities still on the web, I think. Thanks Otis. 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: Well, I guess all of it, but I cant take credit for all of it because the way we develop is we built something that we thought people would like and we listen to them. And it turns out that most problems in mechanical engineering are pretty solved. You know, today we have Goodreads for books and we have Flickster for movies and we have Netflix and we have LastFM for music. Interviewee: Did he use Goodreads books blog? And then what wins goes first, and then you try another one. But actively working at it, getting into doing speaking events around the book, doing readings and absolutely social media, I think, is big. Youll learn some of the viral techniques that Otis used to encourage his users to get their friends to join the site. Please enter your email address to continue, Create products people want (By building in increments), LeadPages founder on why you should be embarrassed by your first launch, How a list nerd grew Ranker.com to 27,000,000 monthly visitors. Number of Investments 2. 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. [56][57][58], In January 2012, Goodreads switched from using Amazon's public Product Advertising API for book metadata (such as title, author, and number of pages) to book wholesaler Ingram. I cant remember who I was thinking of but guys with serious cred. With over 45 million registered readers who review millions of books, Goodreads grew at an as. Andrew: Funny how many people who went to business school would say the same thing. You know the Sci-Fi and Fantasy group on Goodreads is one of my favorites, those guys are just amazing, and theres so much discussion going on, and theres so much excitement going around all the books that people are reading. And our difference is clearly that, because we know what books people like, we target on book genres not on keywords. Eventually, it gained attention through the media such as Mashable and other various blogs. [73] A form of extortion scam known as "review bombing", in which trolls post numerous 1-star ratings and poor reviews on an author's new book from different sock-puppet accounts to make the book look bad (sometimes demanding money or that the author quit Goodreads usage to stop the bad reviews from coming in), has also been widely reported as a growing form of bullying on Goodreads, targeting both traditional and self-published authors. Or much faster feedback about something you write. [59], In May 2013, as a result of Goodreads' acquisition by Amazon, Goodreads began using Amazon's data again.[60]. Research help from Claire Murashima. Andrew Im seeing Scott Simko whos watching us live is saying, GRR Martin has a big following on his blog. I dont know GRR Martin. Theyre so let down by how people arent paying attention to their book in the world. Scroll below and check more details information about Current Net worth as well as Monthly/Year Salary, Expense, Income Reports! Login or become a premium member. And theres a lot ofpretty much everybodys building a social network these days. But if the authors not into it, its not going to work. [6] By July 2012, the site reported 10 million members, 20 million monthly visits, and thirty employees. I should have gone for Mix Energy or Mix Synergy. The other person who gets me a lot of books, I guess over time, Kareem Mayan, a friend of mine has recommended a bunch of interesting books. [13] Chandler and Khuri both grew up in California. Like about 10% of our users went kind of nuts and would add everything theyve ever read. Andrew: Definitely, alright, well end it there. In December 2020, Goodreads deactivated API keys more than 30 days old and said it would no longer be issuing new API keys. And two, I think Ive always kinda had the idea that I would start a company some day. We can click over here and we can say three to ten thousand dollars is our budget and find it, companies that can do the work at that price. Interviewee: Well sure, like I said, every time you had you made a friend on Tickle. I actually found a dating site once for people who golf. [3][4] In December 2007, the site had 650,000 members[5] and 10,000,000 books had been added. 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. Interviewee: For one, I didnt feel like getting another job. So suddenly we were just being mentioned in all these blogs. So remember I was a software engineer even though I didnt code as much in the last year and a half at Tickle. 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. 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. Interviewee: He was. Interviewee: Groups work really well. Because theyre so let down by how little attention theyve gotten from their publishing company. So I kind of already had it segregated that way at home. And thats when we went from five users a day to 100 users a day and then kept going up from there. Interviewee: First, Ive always been a reader. Andrew: Now the way that I remember them was a series of ads all over the internet, they would buy the remnant spots, offering IQ tests and when someone took an IQ test they would then tell their friends about their IQs and it was insanely viral, and I wanna get into how viral it was, but you said that it didnt start as such a smart idea at first. Interviewee: Right, sure. 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. Fortunately the book straightens out into a well-researched and well-written history of LA, the LAT and the Chandler/Otis families. 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. And, if youre on the site and you have no friends, then everywhere you go its saying you have no friends whove read this book, add some friends. Its good. Sep 22, 2017. Then plus wed have advertising on the test throughout it and that ended up working because the fun tests would go viral and draw people into taking more fun tests and then some of them would take a serious test and all of it was designed to be fun and to learn about yourself. Ning has built like what? If you haven't heard of Otis Chandler it's because he spends more time coding his site, Goodreads.com, than promoting himself. You know, theres still challenges. 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. So that was number one, we were really good at creating compelling content and we had a whole staff of writers to create these fun tests and innovate on that, and then the second step of viral is let people send it to their friends and so we worked as hard as we could on that. Do you have some advice that you can give to other scrappy entrepreneurs who say, I like the way Otis did it, he didnt go out and look for funding first, he built his product first, I want to duplicate that approach.. hide caption. Are you a designer? So now people, I mean our groups are amazing now, we have book clubs that have thousands of people in them that read two books a month. Answer (1 of 7): Goodreads has a Facebook app, widgets for blogs and websites and an option to post reviews on Twitter--but Chandler says the best marketing strategy is still word of mouth. I should say that. 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. That was huge did you guys do anything like that? So thats important to understand, but its easier said then done. Interviewee: What else did we do? Last week, O'Reilly GM and publisher Joe Wikert reviewed Goodreads' CEO Otis Chandler's TOC session, in which Chandler presented the results of a recent Goodreads readers survey.One of the interesting pieces from the survey covered the effectiveness of Goodreads reviews. Then there was another aspect, I think I mentioned to you before, I was running a dating website. 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. 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. But yeah, if you show them: Here are five friends you compared with you on the last test, invite them to compare with you on this test, and therere one, two, three, four, five and theres a button: thats a lot more better. Chandler continued running Goodreads until 2019. (from Wikipedia) .more Combine Editions Otis Chandler's books View Otis Chandler's professional profile on LinkedIn. 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. [69] According to Goodreads, transgender authors who published under a different name before coming out can contact the website directly to request exceptions, although there are no known or notable cases where trans authors have been given such choices. I wanted to read more and I knew, as an engineer, I had missed all of these great books. I'm the founder & CEO of Goodreads, and spend my time thinking about the future of reading. But most of them are guys who published a book or self-published a book and theyre trying to figure out How am I going to market my book to people? And this is the biggest problem that authors are facing right now. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. But yes, I have seen the bloggers, I have seen the podcasters built up a big enough audience to then parley that into book sales. They can go to Goodreads.com, they can add you over there right? They can see the books that youve read and can read these great reviews. Some users worried that their reading records would be lost, but Goodreads had a number of plans in place to ease the transition and ensure that no data was lost, even for titles that might be in danger of deletion because they were available only through Amazon, such as Kindle editions and self-published works on Amazon. So if you have a new book about science fiction. Now its really easy to put down a hundred bucks and see, hey do I get any traction, and Go ahead. 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. 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. It's been a labor of love. And this is the way you build any product, right? You can get real time feedback about something you write. 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. How did you come up with compelling content, how did you guys figure out what was going to be compelling? I want to get into Goodreads and how you came up with the idea and how you built it up but lets go a little bit more back story. You know you basically take fifteen questions and you learn about yourself a little bit and at the end you get typed into one type. 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. Andrew: Did he use it? See each portfolio image, in big. 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. I had never read all these classics that I knew were really good. Little bit of Goodreads trivia. Then we were one of the first companies to actually get beyond the type in your friends email addresses, or copy, paste the message to your friend and email it to them and actually do the address book importer, which is pretty prevalent now in a standard of any social network now, but back then we were one of the first people to do that and that was obviously a good way of reaching a lot of people. [?] So weve got that for authors. Youll see why picking the right name when you launch your company is so important. But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. I think if you go back and look at my app. Andrew: What else worked well? "[22], As of 2012, membership was required to use but free. [Break in audio] So what a lot of these authors are realizing Hey, Ive got to be out there on the internet collecting fans and gaining readership.. And then theres Ning. Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher. Interviewee: Right. Goodreads has tried to address this, implementing rules such as only allowing reviewers to criticize a book itself, not author behaviour or political affiliations. Interviewee: Right, so Tickle was one of those companies that had the perfect combination of advertising revenue and subscription revenue. Since the second I found the Hardy Boys all the way through when I got to high school. One of the sites we built, that photo-sharing site I mentioned, was called ringo.com. Alright, lets continue. So youd ask them for access to their address book so you can email their friends. 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. [30] Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. If were interested in them, in them even more we can click over and see their page. You know, there were guys creating things and then six months later a big company would come and buy it and that guy used to live down the hall from me and holy cow. There were mixed reactions from Goodreads users, at the time totaling 16 million members. That gave his business enough traction to raise money from investors and grow it to over 2.6 million members. Even if you get published by Harper Collins or Manninghouse, great theyre going to put your book in the Barnes & Noble store but, theyre not going to market beyond that. Andrew: And how did he pass on what he learnt at Tickle to you? Andrew: Alright. "[4][20] After a user has rated 20 books on its five-star scale, the site will begin making recommendations. Its still very young. 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. But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. And if you think about it, from an authors perspective now is more exciting than ever because now you can actually interact with your fans in a way you never could before. 68 SS427 Chevelle 5.3 LS 84mm Billet Turbo So shes really been into the product and we kind of view it as both of ours a little bit. 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