
How A Quiet Developer Grew Goodreads To 2.6 Million Members - kareemm
http://mixergy.com/goodreads-otis-chander/
======
AndrewWarner
My hosting company is having trouble so my site may be down. If it is, you can
see the video here: <http://blip.tv/file/2855708>

And the transcript here: <http://mixergy.etherpad.com/12>

~~~
iamwil
Seeing the timeline of the transcript was interesting. He (Andrew) segmented
the entire transcript into five minute segments, and then they start filling
in. At first, I thought he was doing it all himself, but it seems like the
whole point of segmenting it is so a lot of different people can do the
transcription in parallel. So either he farmed it out to Amazon Turk, or he's
got lots of college student friends.

~~~
AndrewWarner
I use Mechanical Turk.

------
dstorrs
I'm seeing these video interviews more and more; I really wish people would
start posting transcripts alongside them. I don't want to devote 30-, 45-,
60-, however-many minutes to watching a video that may or may not be useful.

~~~
AndrewWarner
I post them below my videos. I need to find a way to make it clearer.

~~~
mahmud
Andrew, fwiw, you have the highest ratio of useful-content / whiny-feedback
out of any site that makes it to HN. It must be viscous preparing interesting
interviews when you know you will catch the most flack for some tangential
thing you "did".

P.S. This is in no way meant to slight the grandparent; I just keep seeing
complaints in mixergy threads, even though I find the content most interesting
(yes, the transcripts have been there for a while too :-)

~~~
AndrewWarner
I'm trying to use the feedback to improve my work. Before reading HN feedback,
I didn't realize how important transcripts are to people. Now I try to add
them to every interview.

Thanks to a few private message that I got from HN'ers, I even figured out how
to use Mechanical Turk to get transcripts that are faster and cheaper than I
can get anywhere else (though, admittedly it's not a perfect system).

------
tokenadult
I have been asking Google to remove Goodreads landing pages from search
results on searches I run, as I find out that those pages are simply fakes for
SEO. That has completely turned me off to actually using Goodreads, which was
originally recommended to me by a good friend. A company has to be pretty
nasty to get me to disregard a word-of-mouth recommendation by a friend.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Can you explain more? I ran a few searches where goodreads results show up and
I have a hard time seeing how it's different from Amazon results. The page has
useful information about the book, people's ratings and reviews, where I can
buy it, etc. How are these "fakes"?

~~~
tokenadult
In my case, I run Google searches on people's names, and there is a link shown
to a [person's name] review of [book] on Goodreads, only the person in
question has never posted a review of that book! There is no such content by
that person on Goodreads. I definitely know that in the case of my own name,
which I check by ego-surfing once in a while to see what people are putting up
on the Internet about me. I've seen some other spammers over the years that
have been removed from the Google directory, and it looks like Goodreads will
have to be the next site to get that treatment.

------
akamaka
I was just beginning to warm up to Mixergy. I liked the Noah Kagan interview,
which was also popular here. Gambit seemed like a really great company, and
they both kept mentioned how much they liked the food at Chipotle.

Only a week later, Michael Arrington broke the story on how Gambit is one of
the companies that got banned by Facebook for running scam offers.

Then, just this evening, I went to the new Chipotle restaurant that just
opened in my town, and it sucks! Cold and dry meat, slopped together with some
sauce and barely any fresh veggies.

I'm pretty disappointed in Andrew Warner, and I'm going back to staying away
from his interviews. (Yes, I take my food pretty seriously)

~~~
AndrewWarner
Your comment is making me think that maybe I should find a way to get more
community input before doing my interviews so I can improve my research.

Having said that, on the day I did my interview, I don't think the ads that
Gambit/Zynga/others ran were considered scams. Facebook itself didn't have a
problem with them and respected investors like Fred Wilson didn't object
either.

Even the HN community (which is quick to point out what I miss) didn't call
the business a scam when I ran my interview. Perception in this industry
changed after the TC article. Industry standards changed after that.

What's considered right in an industry often changes. If you listen to my
interview with Matt Mullenweg, you'll hear him say that the way he promoted
Wordpress in the early days might be considered spam today.

Industry standards change.

Give my work another try akamaka. I keep improving it based on feedback like
yours.

And give Chipotle another try. It's really good.

~~~
akamaka
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I guess it's a bit unfair for me to
expect you to get at the personal motivations and philosophy of a startup
founder, while at the same time grilling them on the ethics behind their
business. I have to say I did enjoy the interview at the time, and watched the
entire thing, and only afterwards did I question its value.

As for Chipotle, I am living pretty far from where it originated. Maybe the
quality control is lower here. I'll give it another try when I'm in
California.

------
flooha
His story out of college sounds just like mine. Mechanical engineer,
disillusioned with the M.E. environment and excited about computers and the
internet. Same time frame too. Glad to see he is successful with his current
startup.

------
coderdude
I can't get to it right now, must be getting hit hard.
[http://74.125.155.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%...](http://74.125.155.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fmixergy.com%2Fgoodreads-
otis-chander%2F&aq=f&oq=&aqi=&strip=1)

------
ludwig
I'd heard of Goodreads before, but was already using LibraryThing.com by then.
Now I'll have to take a second look at goodreads and see what's new.

Incidentally, does anybody know if there's an easy way to transfer books
between those two sites?

------
thomasfl
This looks like a ruby on rails application. The restful url's, the nginx as a
webserver frontend and use of prototype javascript library is all very common
for RoR.

