Interview with Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia/Wikia) on getting traction | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia/Wikia) on getting traction

gabrielweinberg.com

16 pointsepi0Bauqu6 comments

I'm trying to get a bunch more traction interviews done, i.e. focused on the subject of getting traction. I've gotten a lot of good interviewee suggestions, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092630

If anyone could introduce me to some of these people (or others you think would make good interviewees on this subject), I would greatly appreciate it.

The problem with traction interviews is that they rarely explain what really put them over the top.

i.e. This is how Reddit gained traction:

"Reddit seeded the initial content on Reddit almost exclusively through the efforts of the Reddit team in the early days. For the first few months of Reddit’s life, Reddit co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman scoured the web to find interesting articles to post to Reddit. They were able to create the illusion of more contributors by submitting articles under different user names. As Reddit developed a loyal readership (due to the content hand-selected by the team) other users began to submit links, although the Reddit team was still responsible for 80% of the submitted links for many months. "

http://www.startup-review.com/blog/reddit-case-study-how-per...

So for months, 80% of the content on Reddit came from just two people using several fake accounts. It wasn't SEO, it wasn't design or a specific feature, it was misrepresenting themselves and their product to the public.

Now, clearly that worked and they went on to do some neato stuff. The ends seem to have justified the means in the hearts of Redditors.

But when you read an interview like this with Jimmy Wales where he says he doesn't know how or why his site took off, that's pretty hard to believe. Perhaps he just doesn't want to be forthcoming with some of the things he was doing. Understandable, it just means you won't get much out of the interview.

So if you can get folks to speak about what they REALLY did to gain traction, that'd be great. I read very few interviews that get into the real stuff though.

My main goal is to get to that real stuff in effort to demystify the process of getting traction. It's the only reason I'm doing this interview series.

To that end, I'm constantly asking about analytics, metrics and inflection points. I think you'll find the first four interviews I did fall more into the category you seem to be looking for, i.e. contain explanations of particular tactics used.

However, I take Jimmy at his word that they didn't have analytics up and he doesn't know exactly what happened. I'm learning that there are a class of ideas that just take off. It's rare, but it happens--sort of the right place at the right time matched with execution (read not screwing it up). I put reddit in that category as well. I think Hot or Not is another.

Frankly, I don't know what I'm going to get when I do one of these interviews. I'm going for variety, but it's hard to know what category a particular interview will fall into a prori. Personally, I find this category of just taking off fascinating. I think it shows some ideas are very valuable.

Finally I welcome any interviewing advice. I want to make the series as good as possible.

Good to hear.

My point though was that Reddit was NOT just a "good idea that took off." The secret sauce was 2 dudes posting 80% of the stories for several months. Without that, no Reddit.

So, my take aways from this interview: He doesn't know how he got the attention of the press. He doesn't know why exactly his product succeeded. He has no tips on any secrets of what got Wikipedia going.

The one thing i got out of this interview: Reporters will not understand you and will not understand your product.

Interview is informative if you're interested in wikipedia history, such as how it got started. I like the idea of the series though, Gaining "Traction" can be a black art, would be interested in more material.

I think that's a bit harsh. I agree with the general point that Wikipedia was a right idea at the right time success. However, Wikia was another story entirely. There were tons of wiki startups out there, and they are the ones that got traction. More specifically:

> He doesn't know how he got the attention of the press.

I think Jimmy would say (by inferring from the end of the interview) that his simple vision attracted the attention of the press, i.e. "a free encyclopedia for anyone." He says at the beginning as well that nupedia had a decent amount of press on that vision alone, even though that project wasn't successful.

> He doesn't know why exactly his product succeeded.

I think it's pretty clear from this interview (reading between the lines) that it is a combination of community building and SEO. He says 60-70% of traffic comes from search engines. Maybe it was even higher early on. He built a community interested in his core vision (that would create the articles) and then capitalized on SEO. He mentions how on 9/11 his pages were sought after for their unique content. It's basically a Demand Media strategy before Demand Media.

> He has no tips on any secrets of what got Wikipedia going.

I think he gave actionable advice to wiki creators that they have to focus on getting editors. He thinks you do that by reaching out to people who share your core vision. His case was easier because it was so general, but it has worked for specific subjects a few hundred times on Wikia. I hope to interview Angela from Wikia (who he mentioned) to get more specifics on that.

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