Andrew: Do you think you couldve learned it if you didnt have an engineering background? Interviewee: Probably not. And wed already built it so every book has an author profile that lists the titles by that person. Interviewee: Right, thats actually a big focus of ours right now, and has been for the last two years, I think. Otis Chandler's income source is mostly from being a successful Actor. One of the sites we built, that photo-sharing site I mentioned, was called ringo.com. The easier you make things for users, the better; so if you tell them: Youve got to do a bunch of work to find your friends and send these test results to you, theyre not going to do as much. 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. Better even than many of the business classes that I took at NYU. Otis Chandler (November 23, 1927 - February 27, 2006) was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. [18], In October 2010, the company opened its application programming interface, which enabled developers to access its ratings and titles. Was it just watch me and youll learn, or was it more formal than that? He wanted to integrate this scanning experience and to create a space where people could write reviews regarding the books that they read. You know, today we have Goodreads for books and we have Flickster for movies and we have Netflix and we have LastFM for music. So I realized that a niche social network around reading, much like a social network around photos, would probably work. Its position was see your friends photos. 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. Interviewee: I think so. Then I read your review of it and you said, This guy can write. Youre a great reviewer by the way. You know, James had another bit of wisdom for me which was a good domain will give you a 30% extra chance of success. Did you have shares of Tickle.com? Doing that process helps you think, okay well heres a feature that would be really cool and maybe its going to really increase user retention but its not going to help us at all with revenue or getting new traffic, so maybe its not as important as this other idea which is going to really make us money and increase retention, or this other idea which is going to get us new traffic and increase retention. Otis Chandler has made 2 investments. I emailed Kareem and I said I love your reviewer, I love the book that you talked about. He talked about a book that talked about Ryanair, I forget the name of the book, and he said, Dude, Ill send it to you.. Goodreads is a "social cataloging" website founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler, a software engineer, and entrepreneur, and Elizabeth Khuri. And plus its more fun for me because I get to discover books, etc. 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. I probably said I wanted to be a mechanical engineer and build cars someday. If a user has written a work, the work can be linked on the author's profile page, which also includes an author's blog. Ask the Internet", "Goodreads Raises Angel Round To Help You Find That Perfect Book", "Goodreads' Otis Chandler reviews growth", "Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads, Which Gives The Company A Social Advantage Over Apple", "Goodreads: number of registered members 2019", "How A Quiet Developer Built Goodreads.com Into Book Community Of 2.6+ Million Members - with Otis Chandler", "Goodreads Co-Founder Builds a Literary Community", "Goodreads.com Is Growing as a Popular Book Site", "Millions of People Reading Alone, Together: The Rise of Goodreads", "What Goodreads will do with its new millions", "Goodreads Buys Recommendation Service Discovereads", "For ebook devotees, reading is a whole new experience", "These are Top 25 Book Reviewers on Goodreads", "Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler on the Future of Discoverability and Social Reading", "Amazon purchase of Goodreads stuns book industry", "Is Goodreads' new policy really censorship? I was running a dating website [before Goodreads]. [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. 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. Alright, lets continue. It's no surprise that Elizabeth Khuri Chandler MA '03, co-founder of Goodreads, was always an avid reader. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. So am I coming up with these ideas, kind of, but really its our users who are coming up with it and saying Gee it would be really great if you did this, and I go Yeah, youre right, so its not that hard actually, you just have to listen. Scroll below and check more details information about Current Net worth as well as Monthly/Year Salary, Expense, Income Reports! Andrew: We might need to start something like that. 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. And not work. Thank you. [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. Interviewee: Well sure, like I said, every time you had you made a friend on Tickle. Interviewee: No, we have a lot of book geeks but. Maybe we can afford a down payment on a house, in East Bay. Login or become a premium member. Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher. You can get real time feedback about something you write. Did you design it yourself? 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. Andrew: Before we get started, I want to introduce you to Haystack. His books ten years ago they would just become best sellers by getting in the New York Times. Andrew: 2.7 million registered users I said in the beginning you got up to 650,000 on your own, no outside funding. Its only about a week and a half old, but its pretty exciting for us. If you haven't heard of Otis Chandler it's because he spends more time coding his site, Goodreads.com, than promoting himself. MySpace everyday and hes just posting little stuff, little snippets, things hes thinking about. 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. So, how much is Otis Chandler worth at the age of 79 years old? Talk to them a couple months later after the books been on the shelves for a while, they are so depressed they dont even want to talk about the book anymore. But thats the top two percent of authors that publishers are going to be helping them. 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. If they were Jewish, they would go to JDate. Otis Chandler - San Francisco, CA (1,354 books) 585 ratings (4.19 avg) 385 reviews Goodreads Founder more photos (7) #32 most followed #3 top librarians Otis Chandler Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Otis. Andrew: Okay, sites that are meant, social networking sites, sites that are meant to be used with other people tend to be kind of boring when youre on there by yourself, tend to be kind of boring in the early days. Andrew: Okay, great. They dont want the interview; they dont want to be on anywhere. 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. 68 SS427 Chevelle 5.3 LS 84mm Billet Turbo Fortunately the book straightens out into a well-researched and well-written history of LA, the LAT and the Chandler/Otis families. But actively working at it, getting into doing speaking events around the book, doing readings and absolutely social media, I think, is big. But even talking about the people whove moved on, it was a really special culture. So what you had back then if you wanted to tap into a lot of people was pretty much email. [33] As of April 2020, the site's guidelines still state that "reviews that are predominantly about an author's behavior and not about the book will be deleted. Dont go. So Im glad I didnt do it. Or even the Google AdWords self-serve product in that its cost-per-click based. Otis Chandler Founder and CEO in San Francisco Visit my company website. Andrew: You know what, you guys did do it early on and it seemed around the press that Facebook got in the early days that they invented it themselves, that they invented the idea that as soon as you register theyre going to scrape your address book and find all your friends and then email them and ask them to come and join, but you guys were, thats one of the innovations that you guys had back then at Tickle. That gave his business enough traction to raise money from investors and take his business to over 2.6 million members. And one of the requests that I keep getting from people who watch interviews with me talking to venture backed entrepreneurs or to venture capitalists, is, they want to hear from people who built a business from nothing. Otis Chandler. But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. So we allowed the authors to kind of take over their author profile. I actually found a dating site once for people who golf. What else did you do that was different and that helped spur on virility? So, from that perspective, absolutely, it was life-changing. He essentially mentored me into becoming more than an engineer, becoming a product manager, and by the end of Tickle, I was not just a coder, I was managing a team of ten people including marketing, design, business development and engineering, and et cetera. I cant imagine what the next thing is going to be. And both my grandfathers own their own companies and are successful. It just seemed like there was a lot more innovation going on. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Thats actually one thing publishers look for in an author, is do they have a way to market it? So suddenly we were just being mentioned in all these blogs. Otis Chandler is the founder of Goodreads.com. I was trading basketball cards. 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. Andrew: I got a lot of books from friends like that. Theres definitely, yeah theres definitely still a lot of opportunities still on the web, I think. So that was the big lesson, serious is good but fun is viral. And I think for every niche now you can find a social network around that. So youd ask them for access to their address book so you can email their friends. 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