Otis Chandler explains how he grew Goodreads to 50 million users

“If you’re building a consumer-based Internet product, there are two ways to do that: 1) Make your product better — keep listening to your users and making your product better,” Goodreads founder Otis Chandler begins. “The second thing you can do is tune your growth channels.”

In the beginning of Goodreads, the team spent 80% of their time improving the product and 20% tuning their growth channels.

The first way they tuned their growth channels was SEO:

“If you solve a problem, Google will reward you . . . And the main inputs for tuning SEO are working on your inbound links — give people easy tools to share your product because that’ll put links out in the wild — and have lots of great content, which was the main thing for us. We focused on: How can we have as many reviews as we can across as many books as we can.”

The second thing the Goodreads team did was build widgets for blogs:

“Back when we were going viral in that early blogosphere, we built some widgets for those guys to show off the books they had been reading on the side of their blogs. We still have these today, and they’re still effective . . . The other smart thing we did was if you build one of these things, it’s basically just a line of javascript or Flash so it doesn’t help you with SEO at all. So we added a little logo at the bottom that was just static HTML to get a link to our homepage. So everybody who copied this widget to their blog gave us some SEO juice to our homepage.”

The third growth channel they focused on was address book importers:

“Back in 2007 to 2010, these things were the secret sauce. They really worked. Before you get excited, they don’t really work anymore. But back then, they helped you go pretty viral . . . and the reason they were so powerful was you could design these really tight viral loops. If you could get within 24 hours one user to invite one other friend — that’s all we needed to have happen — then you have a viral factor of 1.0. If you get just a hair above 1.0, one user becomes two, which becomes four, and it quickly grows astronomically . . . These things were very innovative and required a lot of tuning. You basically had to have a growth team just fully focused on this stuff and the conversion rate at every step of the flow. And half of it was copy.”

Otis gives an example of two headlines they tested in the Goodreads invite flow: “Let’s compare books” and “Join my reading network.”

“Join my reading network” had a 3x higher conversion rate. “You would’ve never guessed unless you tested it,” Otis comments.

Once address book importers stopped working, the Goodreads team found another viral channel: Facebook’s open graph.

“This viral loop was very similar but different,” Otis explains. “They were the same process: within 24 hours, you want one user to turn into two. But here we’re using Facebook sharing — sharing what I’m reading, share my review, share the book I just started — as the way to drive inbound links. And you needed a dedicated growth team to really grok this stuff and understand it.”

Otis concludes:

“2007 to 2012 was a lot of this: 80% make the product better, 20% tune our growth channels.”

Full video: My First Million “How Goodreads Got 50 Million Users – Otis Chandler @ Hustle Con 2016“ (May 2016)