Make Something People Love: Lessons From a Startup Guy | Hacker News Reader

Make Something People Love: Lessons From a Startup Guy

hyperink.com

109 pointskn0thing51 comments

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.

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.

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....

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.

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&#...

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

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

Nice try, Alexis Ohanian....

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

Yeah, we wouldn't want derail the thread.

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.

Oh really? Email me! alexis AT hipmunk.com

And thanks for the testimonial.

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

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

Looks like we had 5.

A man who really practices what he preaches. Bravo buddy. Email sent

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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/

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

bought the book and donated to fightforthefuture - Hooray Internet!

>but I personally like trying things out before buying.

Scroll to the bottom of the page. You'll find links to sample pages.

C'mon - asking to read a $2.99 book before you pay? Amazing. The response to this request is incredibly gracious but then again, I guess it has to be since he's internet famous.

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

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.

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.

$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.

I thought 18-to-34-year-old males were advertisers' favorite demographic.

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...

I doubt that's the case. Females in their 20's to 40's are because they usually make the bulk of the purchasing decisions.

reddit raised $82,000 -- that's investment. You can google around for the sale price, the Internet has the range pretty much figured out, but reddit is indeed profitable today (and not at the expense of users!) thanks primarily to self-serve ad platform.

Savvy advertisers have done a great job using the tool, which admittedly needs work, but it's making us money. http://www.reddit.com/ad_inq/

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?

Happened to me. Turned out I already had an account, but forgot about it. If you try to register an account w/ an existing e-mail, it'll tell you if it's already being used. The checkout process after I was logged in went fine.

Also, I tried the password reset before realizing I had it stored in 1Pass, and the reset didn't work. Site could use some work on functionality.

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!

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 :)

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.

You can use calibre to convert from pdf to epub

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

Why thank you! I'll do my best.

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

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

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