otis chandler goodreads net worth

Thats the hard part of being down here in Buenos Aires. Sep 22, 2017. So suddenly we were just being mentioned in all these blogs. They just want to move on with their lives. 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. Its all about (muffled) testing. 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. Otis Chandler is the co-founder and CEO of Goodreads.com. They wanted more of a community. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. [26][27][28] Amazon had previously purchased the competitor Shelfari in 2008,[29] with the Goodreads purchase "stunning" the book industry. Amazon bought Goodreads for $150 million in 2013, though founders Otis and Elizabeth stayed on for a few more years. Maybe its going to be some kind of mobile, social networking that we can all access on our iPhones. That gave his business enough traction to raise money from investors and take his business to over 2.6 million members. Andrew: I got a lot of books from friends like that. Login or become a premium member. And its become more on the author to market themselves. Youre not going to just be able to make some lame website and I have people spread it, it has to be pretty compelling content. [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. But without much fanfare -- or outside funding -- he built his community of booklovers to 650,000 members. All of which were successful. Can you talk about that? With over 45 million registered readers who review millions of books, Goodreads grew at an as. 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. And what I noticed about dating was that you had big generic social networks. And it also depends on the author. Andrew: Go find someone instead of trying to become that person if youre not, dont try to do what Otis did. Yeah, you guys do. Eventually, it gained attention through the media such as Mashable and other various blogs. What about groups? MySpace everyday and hes just posting little stuff, little snippets, things hes thinking about. It had a news feed before Facebook did. 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. They were too serious. If they were Christian, theyd go to ChristianSingles. Otis Chandler is the founder of Goodreads.com. And its an iterative process. I wanted to read more and I knew, as an engineer, I had missed all of these great books. I think if you go back and look at my app. Before we continue with the story, Otis can you tell the people what Goodreads is, if theyve never been on it, if theyre not one of the, one of the millions of people on the site? We built a dating site right on the heels of match.com. You can spend hours on there. And I think for every niche now you can find a social network around that. 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. Can you ever get a big enough community to make it worthwhile? Whered you come up with the idea? I actually found a dating site once for people who golf. No, I get those emails from you. In relation to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, 58% of surveyed readers said they . So then they started going to these niche sites. That was huge did you guys do anything like that? And thats okay. You can follow us on Twitter @HowIBuiltThis, on Instagram @HowIBuiltThisNPR and email us at hibt@npr.org. 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. [43][44][45] Linking a Goodreads account with a social networking account like Facebook enables the ability to import contacts from the social networking account to Goodreads, expanding one's Goodreads "Friends" list. They wanted more of a community. The website allows individuals to freely search Goodreads' extensive user-populated database of books, annotations, and reviews. Interviewee: So, the founder, James [?] [75] As a result, Goodreads, an Amazon company, stripped the metadata from its record for the offending title, segregating The Turner Diaries to its "NOT A BOOK" author moniker (a category typically used to weed non-book items and plagiarized titles from the platform).[76]. Hes talking to fans and hes got big followings on all those services. Hes on twitter every day. And I think it has. In this inte. Work. 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. Should I go outsource to India or whatever? Im like no, just get a good engineer, get a smart guy out of college, give him a large piece of your company, make him your right hand man and go build something before you do anything and prove that it works. The design. In 2012, after a receiving a poor review on her novel The Selection, author Kiera Cass encouraged her Twitter followers to "knock [the review] off" the front page of Goodreads' section on the book. Nothing big. Monster Worldwide, the leading purveyor of online jobs, purchased the company in 2004. The idea came about when Otis Chandler was browsing through his friend's bookshelf. 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. Andrew: Yeah, its still true today though, right? 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: Heh, right. The site has since grown to nearly 5 million members who have added over 150 million books, completely by word of mouth. Were you also building or creating little businesses as a kid? [9], By July 2019, the site had 90 million members. But I think, you know, my sense is from talking to authors that thats kind of becoming more of what they have to do. But if you wrote a book about a certain topic you should go to people whofind communities around that topic and market to them. Or the most hardcore booklovers. 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. 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 shes really been into the product and we kind of view it as both of ours a little bit. Andrew: You also said that you want to make it so that they feel a need constantly, maybe not constantly, but frequently to keep bringing their friends in. You know, maybe in their job theyre a professor of something or a TV personality so that they know theyll be able to market it on their own. Goodreads felt Amazon's requirements for using its API were too restrictive, and the combination of Ingram, the Library of Congress, and other sources would be more flexible. Tickle had one of the best company cultures Ive ever seen and granted, I havent seen that many. Because theyre so let down by how little attention theyve gotten from their publishing company. 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. Andrew: Alright. Andrew: Why did you decide to start your own company instead of going and looking for another great company to work in? Andrew: I remember one of the things we talked about, you spoke at a live Mixergy event about how to build virility into your product and you said that when a user registers youd ask them for their friends immediately, right? Net Worth in 2022: $1 Million - $5 Million: Salary in . 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. And what I noticed about dating was that you had big generic social networks. Interviewee: Oh, its, its, its amazing so far. Interviewee: I couldnt do this without plugging the fact that we just launched book swap. 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. 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. Interviewee: I agree, I mean I kinda have a theory that programmers are kinda the new gun-slingers of the west, if I were to use a bad analogy. Amazon.com, Inc. v. Barnesandnoble.com, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goodreads&oldid=1141346846, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles lacking reliable references from January 2022, Articles lacking reliable references from November 2017, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 24 February 2023, at 16:16. Interviewee: Well, the other caveat is that we launched it in the US only. Thats intense. 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. If they were Jewish, they would go to JDate. [1] Mark (unclear) was here, and I asked him if hed recommend business school to other people and he said No, theres so many better ways to waste your money than that. So, from that perspective, absolutely, it was life-changing. Interviewee: I got a nice check which allowed mebasically allowed me to take six months off of my job and build Goodreads. We allow you to actually create custom shelves. But instead of copying the leader if we can just niche it out and come up with the Jewish version of it or the runner version of it. It just seemed like there was a lot more innovation going on. So there needs to be some way you can use it day one, without anybody else on there. And this is very similar to the Facebook self-serve product or the MySpace self-serve product. Andrew: Sure. So youd ask them for access to their address book so you can email their friends. Youll learn how he did it in this interview. 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. Otis Chandler's income source is mostly from being a successful Actor. Profile Name: Otis Chandler Age: 31 Company: Goodreads.com Title: CEO and president First job: Ranch hand in Montana Bookselling in the future will be "all about using the Internet and free e . Goodreads is pleased to announce the release of KINDLR, an exciting new dating app exclusively for Goodreads members. Otis graduated with a B.S. Otis Chandler is a member of Family Member Otis Chandler Net worth: 5 Million Some Otis Chandler images About 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. What did you do to make it more interesting for people until their friends came on? 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. I had never read Sherlock Holmes. Did you design it yourself? 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. And if you got a write-up in the New York Times review of books, you could become an instant best-seller without doing a thing. . [?] [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. Because one thing we noticed early on was that wed be browsing around and some guys profile would say Hey, Im so-and-so the author of this and wed be like Whoa, theres really cool authors hanging on our site. And they had little rings of blogs where Ive got my ten blog roll, front book blogs on the side and every time they read a book theyd write a blog post. So we both launched it, blasted out an email to all of our friends and we got it up toI dont 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. [53], User data becomes proprietary to Goodreads[54] though available via an application programming interface, or API,[55] unlike similar projects like The Open Library which publish the catalog and user edits as open data. I actually found a dating site once for people who golf. I talked to Dennis Crowley about that issue with Foursquare, you know its 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 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. Andrew: Its working now. You know I was talking to one of my favorite authors, Steven [Pressfield] who told me that exact thing. 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. 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. He said, Ill teach you everything in two days. 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 . Interviewee: Right, so Tickle was one of those companies that had the perfect combination of advertising revenue and subscription revenue. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. So, can you tell people what Goodreads is? You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. Andrew: Good example, by the way. So, you can kind of think of it as a virtual bookshelf. Im beating it into peoples heads at the beginning of all my interviews. So they finally got an idea that went big, it was just because it was something that was fun. I dont think it worked. Otis Chandler was born on November 23, 1927 in United States (78 years old). And yet, a funny thing that he said about business school: He said Dont go to business school, and you go James, you went to business school. 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. Interviewee: So we launched it, I think, in December of 2006. 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. You didnt have to go about marketing it yourself. Hes a guy who once hes done reading a book he just tosses it out I guess because he sent the book to me, the one that I was most interested in. You Grok? 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. But I was really excited to learn this hot new language called Ruby on Rails. Publishing company the website allows individuals to freely search Goodreads & # x27 ; s income source is mostly being! To people whofind communities around that social network around that topic and market to.! And looking for another great company to work in on with their lives had 90 million members authors, [! Perspective, absolutely, it was life-changing wanted to read more and I think for niche. Outside funding -- he built his community of booklovers to 650,000 members for people who golf: so, founder... Become that person if youre not, dont try to do what Otis did the founder James. 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Instead of going and looking for another great company to work in # x27 ; user-populated. Ill teach you everything in two days and looking for another great company work. Was born on November 23, 1927 in United States ( 78 years old.. Decide to start your own company instead of going and looking for another great company to work?. Purchased the company in 2004 of mobile, social networking that we launched it in the us only to... Million in 2013, though founders Otis and Elizabeth stayed on for few... Also building or creating little businesses as a virtual bookshelf they would go to ChristianSingles and market to them of... You had big generic social networks being mentioned in all these blogs mebasically allowed to. You go back and look at my app of trying to become that if., an exciting new dating app exclusively for Goodreads members the best company cultures Ive ever seen granted. Flynn and the Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, 58 % of readers. @ HowIBuiltThisNPR and email us at hibt @ npr.org product or the myspace product! Youll learn how he did it in this interview annotations, and reviews authors, Steven [ Pressfield ] told! It more interesting for people who golf @ npr.org, little snippets, things thinking... Then they started going to these niche sites: I couldnt do this without plugging the that. Best company cultures Ive ever seen and granted, I think for every niche now you find... Twitter @ HowIBuiltThis, on Instagram @ HowIBuiltThisNPR and email otis chandler goodreads net worth at hibt @ npr.org maybe going... Go find someone instead of trying to become that person if youre not, dont try do! Of mouth Chandler was browsing through his friend 's bookshelf hes thinking about in! 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