How HOTorNot Bootstrapped To Over $5 Million In Annual Profits | Hacker News Reader

How HOTorNot Bootstrapped To Over $5 Million In Annual Profits

mixergy.com

22 pointscorlapa17 comments

To anyone who has watched the whole thing, could you please very briefly summarize the responses to the following question that the author is intentionally withholding?

* How HOTorNOT negotiated away some of their biggest expenses using techniques you could (and should) use right now.

* How a bad economy could help your company grow. (It helped HOTorNOT.)

* The most effective way to increase conversions and get more users to pay. (It’s not what you’d expect.)

* The step James ADDED to his order process that increased sales. (It’s still an under-utilized technique)

(I'm not going to watch a 74 minute interview, but I would have gladly have read the 20 page transcript if it had been posted. )

* Negotiated with their hosting company to get free hosting for a year in return for endorsement of their scaling capabilities.

* Many large companies fail in a bad economy while lean, agile businesses have opportunity to thrive and gain market share.

* Make the site fast and leverage the press thereby using the funnel model; more users at the top of the funnel means more customers at the bottom.

* They added a phrasal template to allow unpaid users to send "canned messages" to each other. Only paying members can send custom messages.

Holy crap you sum things up better than I do!

Maybe I should sum up my interviews in this bullet form and just forget about the headaches of transcripts.

Here's the RAW transcript I got back from Mechanical Turk. It's the fastest way for me to get transcripts, but as you can see, the results are ugly.

It was painful for me to work with it, which is why I didn't post it.

I'm still trying to find a quick way to get my interviews transcribed and still maintain accuracy.

http://mixergy.com/hotornot-interview-with-james-hong-the-qu...

Buy/read founders at work.

Edit:whoops, imp4 already posted this!

Andrew, you have a great idea for a site. The only thing missing is transcripts. Asking viewers to watch an hour long interview is way too much (I didn't watch it). Transcripts will go a long way towards making your visitors happy and keeping them coming back more often (I know I'd come back if you added transcripts).

Seconded! Andrew- I'd love to see transcripts of the Mixergy interviews as well, as I'm sure many others are too.

I think part of it, is that they had a fun product, when there was no real competition from things like youtube(+5 years), flash games(+7 years), hulu(+9 years), decent social networks(+3 years myspace, +4 years facebook)

And the product itself, led them to pretty much be able to signup anyone who stumbled on their website.

A more in-depth description can be found in Founders at Work.

I asked him about how his chapter in Founders at Work was written because I'm a big fan of the book. (I actually hold it up a lot in the interview.)

Because many of us read the book, I asked James questions that weren't covered in it. I think you'll learn some new ideas in my interview. Let me know if you don't.

Thanks for the follow-up. I only read the text excerpt because I didn't have time for the video. I'll see if I have time later to watch the whole thing.

Link please?

Founders at Work is a book. http://www.foundersatwork.com/index.html

Enjoyed the interview a great deal, thanks Andrew. His strategy for locking out the press was brilliant.

One thing - I'm unable to skip forward in the video. The Firefox beta crashed on me midway through watching, and being unable to restart the video halfway was maddening. Is this intentionally disabled?

That's a strange issue with blip.tv's player. I think it just needs some time to fully buffer before it'll let you skip forward or backward. Sorry about that.

[Removed]

Offtopic comment and NSFW link. Please don't do either of those things.

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