The Internet has exploded with all these different sources, with Wikipedia being the one people think about first. People can type in anything and you need to return something interesting and ideally answer the question without having to click around. Weinberg: Search is really appealing to me because you essentially have infinite space. I started a golf social network which was super bone-headed because I don’t golf. For the next year and a half I tried out a bunch of companies and products. I realized I wanted to work on something I am actually excited about and could see myself working on for a decade or more. Weinberg: I realized that one of the reasons we didn’t spend time on the product was I wasn’t that interested in it. Which isn’t good but you can have some success if you have customers and no product. We spent almost all our time on how to get customers and zero time on product development.
In this company we flipped that on its head. In the book we advocate spending half your time on traction, which means getting customers, and half the time on product development. They end up launching, they realize they still have a leaky-bucket product and they have no idea how to get customers. Weinberg: Right after we realized we had a good idea, we focused mainly on how to continue to grow and get more users and have them refer each other. We didn’t have a product yet but people started signing up anyway.Īdams: What lessons did you learn from that success? At the beginning I just put a link at the top and sent the person to another site that said, sign up for this product.
People were searching for other people and my site was coming up first. Then all of a sudden this random site I put up started getting 10,000 searches a day. Six months later I had completely forgotten about it. Back then it took Google six months to index things. I just made pages of these names on the hunch that people would be searching for names on the Internet. One day I decided to make up pages of fake names, taking first and last names from popular names tracked by the Census. Weinberg: I was trying all these different side projects. Adams: How did you get people to sign up for a product that didn’t exist?
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