

Make Something People Love: Lessons From a Startup Guy - kn0thing
http://www.hyperink.com/Make-Something-People-Love-Lessons-From-A-Startup-Guy-b1478

======
kaizenfury7
How much does the book go into the first few weeks and months of Reddit? I've
always been curious about how community sites get started and I was wondering
how much in depth the book goes into how you guys bootstrapped Reddit. For
instance, does the book go over how you and Steve create dummy accounts and
content to seed Reddit? (I'm not saying this is a bad thing, in fact I think
it's a legitimate technique) Was the process automated? And how did you guys
get the first real users after you tapped out family and friends? I'm hoping
the book goes into detail about the nitty gritty stuff like this when it comes
to getting users for a community site.

~~~
kn0thing
Not much at all.

There wasn't a lot to it, just grunt work.

Steve and I submitted under different usernames (no comments back then) but it
was entirely manual. Most of the submissions were from "kn0thing" and "spez"
but from time to time we'd submit as a different username, to give the
appearance of a 'live' site (nothing sadder than an empty reddit).

The first real users after friends and family came after PG linked to us in an
essay, fortunately a number of them stuck around and (1% rule) some even
started submitting.

I exhausted bloggers pretty equally and back in 2005 there weren't any options
beyond that for getting the word out -- just facebook.

What a difference 5 years made. It made launching hipmunk _so_ much easier.

~~~
pstuart
As one of the 1% who followed PG's link (6 year club member), I still consider
reddit to be one of the more valuable destinations on teh webz due to the
community structure.

Like HN, I often don't even bother with the linked article because the
comments usually have so much more value. I think there's even more value to
be extracted there if one can find a way to bump back up the S/N ratio....

~~~
kn0thing
Whoa! Congrats. And thank you! You'll be 7year any day now (sneakpeek in my
trophy case) <http://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing>

I'm a big fan of HN, though I do wish /r/startups would grow into a similar
community.

------
mekarpeles
Alexis also had a great AMA on reddit a few days ago!

"IAmAlexis Ohanian, startup founder, internet activist, and cat owner - AMA"

[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...</a>

~~~
kn0thing
Thanks. I'm still responding to questions.... slowly but surely I'll do them
all!

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_pius
I bought this book last week and it's easily worth $2.99. :)

~~~
kn0thing
Nice try, Alexis Ohanian....

~~~
aptwebapps
Hey, this isn't Reddit! Don't try to start some sort of karma train here.

~~~
staunch
Yeah, we wouldn't want derail the thread.

------
ecubed
Awesome read. Easy enough to pick up and go through in 30-45 minutes and get
some solid advice. I'm glad to have my thoughts on promo tshirts confirmed. A
few years back I got a "Blue Mountain State" tshirt for free from some
promoters. Ive seen a grand total of two episodes of the show, but i wear the
shirt all the time because its so comfortable. Low cost promoting for them
(people comment on the shirt all the time, especially fans), awesome shirt for
me. All other promo tshirts (uncomfortable material) pretty much get the
sleeve monster tretment and become workout attire until i throw it out a month
or so later.

Some of the hipmunk writing felt a little self promoting, but i guess thats a
consequence of writing about your own experiences, which in this case happens
to be an active business. But the cute chipmonk logo makes it all okay. If you
sent me a comfortable shirt with that little guy on it, I'd wear it all the
time.

~~~
kn0thing
Oh really? Email me! alexis AT hipmunk.com

And thanks for the testimonial.

~~~
gauravk92
Any chance you could reply saying how many requests you got for a free tshirt,
for science!

~~~
kn0thing
Haha. I guess there'll be three. I'll tell you by end of day.

~~~
kn0thing
Looks like we had 5.

------
jonmb
I've got an honest question. It seems Reddit owes a lot of its success to
Digg. Reddit was popular, but it didn't really take off until Digg screwed up
and users had an exodus.

At least, that's how it appeared to me, a Digg user at the time who also left
for Reddit. I've wondered if Reddit would have ever been so popular if not for
Digg's mishap.

Am I totally off base? Anyway, I'm a fan of Reddit and it looks like a good
book.

~~~
kn0thing
reddit has never had 'explosive' growth, always steady month-over-month. The
monday before digg v4 we had about 700K uniques and the monday after we had
about 900K. In the grand scheme of things, digg v4 helped, since our chief
competitor self-destructed, but the site has since far, far outgrown digg's
highest numbers.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company that triumphed over a rival
without some help from said rival's poor decision-making.

The useful bit of advice I took from the whole thing was how important it was
to be aware of competitors, but not actually give a damn about what they were
doing.

Thanks for redditing :) all is forgiven about that earlier digging business.

Oh! And a question for you - what kept you from redditing those years before?
Were you even aware of it?

edit: One more thing, we also owe a ton to digg for educating the market on
'social news' as a concept. Sadly, they also taught them awful practices, like
that it was OK to game the system, so that we're now cleaning up the mess and
explaining to publishers that it's not OK to try and game reddit:
[http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-ban-the-atlantic-
phsyorg...](http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-ban-the-atlantic-phsyorg-
businessweek/)

~~~
jonmb
Interesting. Thanks for clearing that up for me. A 200k visitor boost is
hefty, but not as much as I guessed it was.

I was aware of Reddit, and checked it out briefly. Amusingly, the
interface/design is what turned me off. It's amusing to me because nowadays I
highly prefer it over Digg's design, and even back then I generally preferred
minimal interfaces. So I don't know why I didn't like Reddit from day one. I
guess I was just used to Digg.

~~~
kn0thing
It was the Verdana wasn't it? My fault.

~~~
Killswitch
12px Verdana was the shit back in '05 when I was building sites then.. Now
days I cringe.

------
markkat
I never read advice books, but I think I'll make an exception here.

If you have a moment, I'm curious, at what point did you feel that Reddit was
starting to run on its own steam, and did it happen before or after you
expected it to?

~~~
kn0thing
Well, when Steve and I got about a month into the site, neither one of us had
to vote or submit links one day and we knew, "holy shit, this might work." But
it wasn't until much later, maybe a year or so into user-create subreddits,
that we really saw it chugging along. Maybe around the time /r/IAMA was
created, because early subreddits like proggit and /r/gaming were made by me
and Steve (as well as HEAVILY promoted on site with house ads, esp in the case
of the latter, before it got enough momentum as its own community).

When something like /r/IAMA spawned, we knew that all the work we'd done to
curate our own Ask Me Anything interviews with celebs (we took the top 10
questions and asked them on camera -- here's one of the early ones we shot w
Adam Savage: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8jqea8R-bE>) was no longer
necessary. The community at IAMA could do it themselves.

Subreddits have always been the 'secret' reddits continued growth and I hope
that as a platform, we can keep expanding in to all kinds of online
communities.

e.g., my gf just turned me on to /r/blackgirls

~~~
markkat
Thanks for the response. I've always been impressed by the way you've busted
ass for these sites and didn't let doing so turn you into a goof.

I think as interested I am in what you did, I'd be just as interested in what
you decided not to do.

Also, I wonder if the secret sauce to subreddits is the user 'buy in'. Once
you've got a Reddit, you want people to visit it.

~~~
kn0thing
Anecdotally, I've always asked subreddit owners/mods I've met about this.
Turns out many of them obsess over stats just like Steve and I used to (and
shortly thereafter, Chris, who built our first real-time stat engine that was
both blessing and curse because of how we obsessed at times). The more we
could do to make redditors give a damn, just like we did, the better things
got.

Steve is one of the most reluctant feature guys I've met and while it's
frustrating at time for a guy with too many ideas like me, it's _so_ important
to know what not to build into a product -- it makes him such a great
programmer. So creating a subreddit was dead-simple. No bullshit. The hard
part was going to come (actually growing it) and we could still do more to
encourage new subreddit owners and give them tools to help get the word out
(we've long promoted user created subreddits using house-ads that I'd design,
but that doesn't scale). There are even subreddits like /r/newreddit that
redditors made to promote, you guessed it, new subreddits.

So - 'buy in' for subreddits was in part by setting the tone well with the
ones we created, like /r/programming, before it was open to users -- this
created an unintended air of importance the day we launched it. "Subreddits:
now not just for co-founders to create!"

I've been really impressed by local subreddits of late, esp in surprising
markets like /r/Grandrapids for instance - there's something awesome happening
here: <http://www.reddit.com/r/grandrapids/>

~~~
markkat
Thanks. That's definitely some good advice, and stuff to think on. As a user I
remember being initially taken aback by subreddits, but it was a brilliant
move for those reasons.

I'm already following r/michigan, but I'll check r/grandrapids out. So many
people say good things about GR. I'm in Ann Arbor, yet I never get over there.

~~~
kn0thing
Rad. This is a bit dated, but the to-do/-eat/-drink list was all sourced from
/r/grandrapids redditors:
<http://www.hipmunk.com/guides/usa/michigan/grand_rapids>

Researching it made me want to go!

------
wcchandler
Have you thought about doing something similar to Zed Shaw and offer a free
HTML version of the book? I know $2.99 isn't asking for much... but I
personally like trying things out before buying. Writing styles are something
I'm really finicky about. I need to be in tune with it to not only enjoy it
but to also absorb the content.

~~~
kn0thing
I hear you! One of the things I loved about the hyperink proposition (FD:
they're a YC company) is that it's a 100% moneyback guarantee. Or if you'd
rather not, email me and I'll send you a copy of the PDF and you can buy it
later if you like it enough :)

edit: actually, don't even bother buying it if you like it, just donate it to
<http://fightforthefuture.org> :) 10% of book proceeds go there anyway.

~~~
Killswitch
This weekend I will be donating to Fight For The Future, and also buying your
book. Big fan of yours and love what you do. Well worth it to me.

Thanks.

------
stevejohnson
Warning: when you check out, the web site emails you your password in plain
text and it's difficult to change it.

Here's the reset link that I hunted down from their Twitter response to
someone with similar concerns: <http://www.hyperink.com/reset>

------
AznHisoka
Reddit is a success, but not sure how much of Alexis' advice can be
extrapolated and used in other startups. Reddit took a long time before the
advertising business was vastly profitable, and depended on an acquisition to
make the investment worth it.

~~~
kn0thing
FWIW, reddit raised $82,000. Total. So I think 'depended on an acquisition' is
a bit extreme. Hopefully lessons from breadpig and hipmunk are also useful!
Though it's still too early to tell. Ultimately, all advice is only going to
be so useful -- there's no recipe or guidebook for success. So much of it just
going to be luck, but that'd be a really short e-book.

~~~
AlwaysBeClosing
$82,000 was the acquisition price or the seed funding? If not, how much was
Reddit bought for by Conde Nast, if you don't mind me asking?

Has Reddit been truely profitable? It gets massive traffic... but does not
look like it is monetized very well. And it must get some of the worst
demographics for mass consumer advertisers to sell to.

~~~
raldi
I thought 18-to-34-year-old males were advertisers' _favorite_ demographic.

~~~
bira
FYI from the PBS video watchable on Alexis's new book sales page:

"According to Google Double click ad Planner'a estimate THE MEDIAN U.S. REDDIT
USER IS MALE (72%), 25-34 YEARS OF AGE, HAS SOME COLLEGE EDUCATION, AND IS IN
THE LOWEST INCOME BRACKET OF US$0-$24,999"

So...

------
wasd
Tried purchasing it about 3 times. Get the same error everytime:

We were unable to finalize your account and log you in.

Extremely uninformative and unhelpful.

Anyone know where else I can purchase this?

~~~
peter_l_downs
Hey, capsule_toy is totally right — that error shows up if you use an email
associated with an existing account but claim that you're a new user. Shoot me
an email and I'd be happy to give you a copy of the book for free!

------
aidenn0
Any chance to get an epub version? If I have to I can get the Kindle version
and convert it, but I figured I can always ask :)

~~~
ecubed
There is one? I bought it about an hour ago got an option for epub, pdf, or
kindle. Read the whole thing on my ipad in about 30-45 minutes.

~~~
Axsuul
You can use calibre to convert from pdf to epub

------
mittermayr
just bought it. you've been a great inspiration alexis, keep on going and
sharing pieces.

~~~
kn0thing
Why thank you! I'll do my best.

------
stratos2
alexis whats the best way to get in touch with you by email?

~~~
kn0thing
contact@alexisohanian but I'm pretty heads down atm trying to get my real book
done - <http://withoutyourpermission.com>

