
How A Student With $1,100, Launched Whitepages.com, A $57 Mil A Year Business - webtickle
http://mixergy.com/whitepages-alex-algard/
======
dusklight
Hey Andrew I'm glad to see how much work you are putting into becoming a
better interviewer, I haven't watched all of your interviews but from the ones
I have seen, I can see you are really refining your technique and pushing the
boundary between what your interviewees want to reveal and what they actually
reveal.

But you gotta decide once and for all, are you going to be an asshole or not?
Because I can see your frustration when you catch your interviewees in a lie
or manipulation of the truth, and you let them get away with so much because
you want to be nice. Go for the kill!

You don't have to be aggressive or adversarial to get at the truth -- for
example, Sacha Baron Cohen and James Lipton are 2 very different kinds of
interviewers, but they have both learnt how to put their interviewees in a
position where truth is revealed. You do have to be willing to allow some
people to hate you because you made them tell the truth, because some of them
will. Otherwise all you are going to get is the same ol marketing PR spiel
again and again.

~~~
mynameishere
_Sacha Baron Cohen...learnt how to put their interviewees in a position where
truth is revealed_

Absolutely false.

~~~
thinkzig
Care to elaborate? From what I've seen this statement seems to be true.

~~~
mynameishere
Well, I'm not the one making the claim, and so I don't feel like proving a
negative, but his shtick is pretty straightforward (for all the characters,
with some variations):

1\. Set up a fake interview or staged encounter.

2\. Immediately confuse the interlocutor with completely unreal
mannerisms/speech. People watching the movies maybe don't pick up on this
because they're used to the behavior, but if Borat started talking to you,
you'd immediately be thrown off center. A lot of people seem to be overly-
polite and nodding because of this, and that's part of how he manipulates
them. There was a guy who dressed up like Borat at the ocsars (or some award
show) and Cohen was immediately in the same situation.

3\. The character then either does one of two things:

3a. Says/does something extremely impolite. Examples include bringing shit to
a dinner table, stripping in front of a congressman, singing fake anti-
American anthems in front of a "white trash" audience, or singing about
killing Jews at a redneck bar. None of this, as far as I can see, gets at any
kind of "truth". When Ron Paul called him "queer" or whatever, they tried to
make him into a "hater". Well, no. I would have called him worse things, and
I'm pretty sure I don't hate "queers". The "Jew killing" song was set up by an
hour of standup comedy by Cohen, and everyone knew it was a joke. Again, you
know who's the liar in cases like that.

3b. By asking bizarre questions at fake interviews. There _might_ be some
instances where he got someone to admit something genuinely valuable, but I
don't recall. It's clear he's just trying to make people look silly or trip
over their tongues (Pat Buchanan talking about "Mustard gas on the BLTs") or
admitting something ridiculous ("Are being racist against me because I'm
black?"). I haven't seen as many of the interviews because he did that more on
his British TV show, and I sure as hell don't spend my day surfing for them on
youtube.

Anyway, his real purpose is to make the audience feel superior to somebody
famous or somebody who represents a stereotype (whether rednecks or stuck-up
UMC southerners, or Romanians, or whatever) by making those people
metaphorically drop their pants in one way or another. Disagree or disagree
that it's a bad thing, I don't care.

~~~
gruseom
I agree. I've always thought that Baron Cohen's schtick was just a trivial and
mean-spirited application of the fact that whoever edits the film has the
power to make anything look like anything. But this is news to me:

 _The "Jew killing" song was set up by an hour of standup comedy by Cohen, and
everyone knew it was a joke._

I can't say that's surprising, but it's interesting. "Throw The Jew Down The
Well" is by far the funniest thing I've seen him do. (Actually, it might be
the _only_ funny thing I've seen him do, though I guess the nude wrestling
scene in Borat was funny.) I can't get upset at its ghastliness because
everything else about the piece is so comedically perfect. If it was a clip
from a standup show, that explains it. It's funny because it makes something
horrific ridiculous.

~~~
mynameishere
I actually find him pretty funny, but he's a total clown. What annoys me is
that people think he's...important, I guess? No, he's a clown with two
victims: The one on the screen and the one in the audience who doesn't realize
he's a clown.

I'm too drunk right now to research it, but in the article talking about the
"jew down the well" (a title that escaped me) the wife of the bar's owner was
revealed as Jewish and even she got the joke.

------
Mongoose
Whitepages.com always seems to recruit very aggressively at career fairs at my
school (U of WA). They'll be at a booth nestled in between Intel and Google
pitching their hearts out. Commendable, to say the least.

However, they majorly over-played the "rockstar programmer" meme by handing
out branded drumsticks and guitar picks last year. I always laugh upon
noticing my pair of Whitepages.com drumsticks when unpacking my snare drum.

~~~
SwellJoe
And, yet, you still have the drum sticks...and everyone that happens to think
highly of you will let a little of that goodwill rub off on the brand that's
on your sticks. That sounds like an excellent marketing expenditure, to me.

The best you can hope for from schwag is that most of what you give away
doesn't get thrown away, and actually gets used for a few months, or longer.
Sounds like this one worked out well. At conferences, you can always tell what
the worst schwag is by looking in the trash cans on the way out of the expo
hall. The stuff that gets thrown away immediately is utterly wasted; the stuff
that makes it into the suitcase and gets back home with someone is the good
stuff.

~~~
Mongoose
I'm not arguing against the efficacy of the drumsticks. They're vastly more
unique and useful than the heap of lanyards, mints, and stickers that
accumulate after conferences or career fairs. They're one of the few pieces of
schwag that I'll probably have with me 6 months from now. So, in terms of
their goal as marketing tools, they're perfect. My only issue was with the
overuse of the "rockstar" title being applied to developers.

~~~
thesethings
Agreed on the rockstar thing. I started to see a lot of people complain about
this, so I wrote about it here: [http://thesethings.posterous.com/rapping-
grandmas-and-ninja-...](http://thesethings.posterous.com/rapping-grandmas-and-
ninja-rockstar-fatigue)

You're exactly right with the overuse. It didn't have to be innately bad to
say "rockstar," just a couple of things have conspired to make it so...

------
cameronrawson
Impressive interview, very inspiring. Mixergy is an awesome site.

~~~
ohashi
unless you want to read a transcript.

~~~
ohashi
Apparently from all the downvotes I am the only one that hates a small iframe
with a wall of text?

~~~
icey
In case you didn't see the etherpad link:

<http://mixergy.etherpad.com/56>?

~~~
ohashi
I didn't, but still, if I am going to your website and you present me with
content, it should be easy to read, that etherpad site is still an tiny
iframe. I don't know of any other site really using that format for long
articles that is popular.

------
frossie
On the more general topic of whitepages.com:

The thing that frustrates me about whitepages and similar sites is they don't
allow me to build up my own phonebook. Say I want to look up the number of a
restaurant - after I have done that once, I want to add it to a virtual
address book, maybe even something I can sync with my mobile phone (eg. via
Google contacts or something else that nuevasync supports).

Does anyone here know of a site allowing that?

I know, I know, I have asked this before...
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754175>) - hope springs eternal, though.

------
johnl
I liked the interview. Interesting to see how he used other peoples resources
instead of creating then from scratch.

------
korch
It's cool to hear about Whitepages early history. For several years Whitepages
was one of the last "big" all Perl shops in Seattle. Though their recent
recruiting ads are for Rails developers, so perhaps they have since re-
architected.

------
seiji
I thought we convinced mixergy to both stop making crazy headlines and to
remove the "VOTE FOR ME!" link on pages? :-\

~~~
AndrewWarner
I actually didn't realize I used this formula for my headlines until someone
pointed it out here on HN. Now that I notice it, it saves me so much time to
search for an alternative.

~~~
axod
FWIW, the title really puts me off. Similar titles that put me off:

"How I built a startup in N hours"

"How I built a business with just $N"

where N is designed to be small to increase click through.

In society we're all looking for too many short cuts. Too many easy fixes.
Fat? Nah - don't exercise and eat healthily, get a diet pill!

Also the whole rags to riches story is a really tiresome angle to take on
things IMHO. I'd say that most startups are built by people without any money
:/

(Having said that I do really like the interviews you do. Very interesting).

~~~
grosenbush
Agreed but if you listen to Mixergy the #1 message that I hear from the guests
is that they put so much hard work into their businesses.

The titles get people to click the links but the interviews stand for
themselves after that.

Keep up the great work Andrew!

