How A Student With $1,100, Launched Whitepages.com, A $57 Mil A Year Business | Hacker News Reader

How A Student With $1,100, Launched Whitepages.com, A $57 Mil A Year Business

mixergy.com

82 pointswebtickle37 comments

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.

Sacha Baron Cohen...learnt how to put their interviewees in a position where truth is revealed

Absolutely false.

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

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.

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.

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.

When I talk about Sacha I am not really referring to his movies (which have all sucked pretty bad) but more his tv show, particularly his original tv show in Britain before he got famous.

Truth is revealed. Whether you are able to see it or not that is an individual reaction. You are right he is going more for comedy than any truly meaningful interview but there is stuff to be learnt there.

excellent interview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P842Tmi6lrc

This is called the "Gunston Technique":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Gunston#Format

(Scroll down a bit ..)

Thanks. My response was so long that I just blogged it: http://mixergy.com/comment-a-hole/

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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...

Drumsticks is a way forward from the usual stuff like mugs, t-shirts and so on.

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

unless you want to read a transcript.

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

In case you didn't see the etherpad link:

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

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.

How to create a mixergy.etherpad account and sign in to it?

Kiruthikha.K

When evaluating the awesomeness of a site, layout is usually not the no. 1 concern, content is.

Content that can be effectively accessed easily and well. Why do I clarify that... here's an example, do you like experts exchange?

In some cases usability can be bad enough to create a situation where you prefer worse content with better presentation. Sure.

But those are edge cases. No matter how bad a theme of a blog is, on the other hand, it is always secondary to content. There is a journalist's site that I frequent where some of his articles display all paragraphs as a single line. I cut ant paste to TextEdit to read them. He rarely writes an article I don't want to read. Still an awesome site.

Hey ohashi & netcan, do you have any suggestions for how I can improve the way I show the transcript?

I'm using a scrolling div after a few readers told me it's ideal for SEO, but I'm open to other options.

Each hour-long interview is about 10,000 words. In comparison, pg's latest essay on Apple is about 2,000. So I'm pumping out a lot of text.

As icey says, text isn't the main attraction on Mixergy, but I'm open to a better way to display it. If you have any suggestions, hit me.

I've sent you an email with some suggestions.

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.

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

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.

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

Mixergy's content is stellar, nothing spammy about it, so what's wrong with a "VOTE FOR ME!" link and headlines that grab your attention... Are we all against marketing quality content?

The fact that the headlines even cause a stir is all the reason to keep'em...

Stop all your crying, go watch some of his interviews, and learn something...

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.

I don't know if you need to change much Andrew -- there is nothing factually incorrect or misleading about your headlines. Perhaps the same "unfunded startup makes it big anyway" formula is overused but its a damn good formula and there's a reason it works so well. And its not like your headlines are like Mashable -- the quality of your content is consistently very high and very thoughtfully done.

Though your interviews are unlike other interviews in traditional media, they are totally helpful and inspiring for those of us slogging away who haven't quite crossed the line yet. I'm a big fan, especially of the fact that you don't let go of questions very easily and that you do nice things like provide transcripts or make your interview videos embeddable.

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).

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!

Great interviews by Andrew all the time. The range of questions Andrew covers are phenomenal. Just finished listening to one of his old interview with founder of Twitpic.

I dont see anything wrong with "vote for me" type links/ icons. Mixergy, which has very good and relevant content to HN readers, has the right to promote its content just like any other site, as long as its done respectfully and unobtrusively. We really need to get over this anti-marketing bias - like it or not, its an integral part of startup success.

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