How I Built an Audience of 50

Million Members by Solving a Problem

Otis Chandler CO-FOUNDER + CEO, GOODREADS

@otown #hustlecon

Goodreads today

50 million members Top 60 U.S. website 400 million monthly PVs 70% female audience

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My #1 secret of success

Solve a problem that people have

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Goodreads mission

To help readers find and share books they love

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The most successful companies are mission driven

Gives you a lens for where to focus and where not to focus.

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“We like mission-driven people”

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First thing Jeff Bezos said to me

Some of the Amazon Family of companies

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Solving a problem is also Jeff Bezos’ top leadership secret, aka. customer obsession

“If you’re customer-focused, you’re always waking up wondering, how can we make that customer say, wow? We want to impress our customers– we want them to say, wow.”

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The story of Goodreads

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Turns out… lots of people had this problem!

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90% of content is produced by 10% of members

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Nail product/market fit for your power users– they’ll spread the word

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I have a theory about product development

When there is a problem a LOT of people have, you will have SMALL numbers of

people going out of their way to solve it using manual or hacked-together tools.

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A manual solution to buying & selling goods & services in a community

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Problem: keep track of all the books I’ve read

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To-read lists!

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Give people a better tool and many more people will use it

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If you see something working, double down on it

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If you solve a problem, Google will reward you

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For a long tail content site, noindex & nofollow are your friend

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Give people tools to let them share & spread the word

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Address book importers

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Viral loops

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Variables: invites per user, conversion rate, time to acquisition

INVITE à ACQUIRE à INVITE

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Facebook open graph

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Viral acquisition loops

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Need a dedicated growth team

SHARE à ACQUIRE à SHARE

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We kept solving problems & growing – gave us a strong BATNA

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Focusing on a problem led us to Amazon

Being able to easily share what you are reading.

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Kindle launched in 2007 and took reading digital

40% of books are bought online today*

*From a Neilson Books & Consumers survey, March 2015

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Two secrets of acquisitions

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1.  People, strategy, price 2.  Companies are bought,

not sold

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We are the social network of Kindle

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My tenets for building a company

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1.  Solve a problem! Work backwards from solving a problem that people have.

2.  Look for how people are solving it manually and see how you can improve that with technology.

3.  Be mission driven. Keeps you focused, attracts the right people.

Goodreads.com

Otis Chandler CO-FOUNDER + CEO

#hustlecon @amandabradford