Goodreads: Otis and Elizabeth Chandler

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2022

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. When he decided to launch his own site just for book lovers, a respected colleague told him there was "probably not a very big market there." Otis figured he might prove him wrong, and in 2007, launched Goodreads, a book catalog and review site that he coded from his LA apartment. His soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth joined the project, and they slowly built a following—without an office, a business model, or a single employee. In 2013, Goodreads sold to Amazon for an undisclosed sum; and today, it's the world's largest site for readers, with 125 million users. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	When you leave home, can you ever really go back?
0:12.0	Made a version!
0:13.0	Soccer legend Leo Messi and I both left Argentina as kids.
0:17.0	You know you're that piece of a puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere.
0:20.0	To so many immigrants, football is a way to reconnect.
0:23.0	Listen to the last cop in the embedded podcast feed
0:26.0	to hear the latest collaboration from MPR and Fuduro Studios.
0:32.0	I would come home every day and he'd be like,
0:35.0	oh look at what I'm working on.
0:37.0	It was really ugly in the beginning and there were spelling errors.
0:41.0	And you sent out an activation email and it said,
0:45.0	what does it let's read together?
0:47.0	Was that what it said?
0:48.0	Oh no, that was the friend connection email saying,
0:51.0	let's compare books or let's be friends or something like that.
0:54.0	But I forgot the apostrophe and let's.
0:56.0	And he got just reams of emails that just said things like,
1:00.0	I refuse to join a book site where you can't use an apostrophe correctly.
1:08.0	From MPR, it's how I built this.
1:10.0	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs,
	...

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