Mike-O-Matic

This past week I discovered Aaron Swartz’s weblog, called Raw Thought. For those who don’t know, Aaron is one of the four guys who work at reddit, the popular user-submitted news site that was acquired recently by Conde Nast.

His writings about the acquisition itself (seen here, here, and here) are intriguing.

He describes the sort of surreal situation that comes from having a ridiculously large bank account very suddenly.

I sat reloading TechCrunch, then wrote a script to do it for me. Finally the notice appeared, elaborating as time went on. Then I posted it to my blog and others to theirs. It started seeming real. Finally, I dashed downstairs to an ATM machine and asked it to print a slip with my balance. “Would you like anything else?” it asked. “No,” I said, and grabbed the slip. The numbers were big; the money was there. I started grinning and dashed back to the apartment.

He also describes what is like trying to explain what he does to other people “outside the bubble:”

Once I went far outside the city to have lunch with an author I respected. He asked about what I did, wanted me to explain it in great detail. He asked how many visitors we had. I told him and he sputtered. “I’ve spent fifteen years building an audience, and you’re telling me in a year you have a million visitors?” I assented.

Puzzled, he insisted I show him the site on his own computer, but he found it was just a simple as I described. (Simpler, even.) “So it’s just a list of links?” he said. “And you don’t even write them yourselves?” I nodded. “But there’s nothing to it!” he insisted. “Why is it so popular?”

He has found himself in a situation many other programmers/entrepreneurs have been looking for, and is still trying to figure out what to do with himself now that he has “made it.” At the same time he seems to notice the absurdity and humor in it, and is fully conscious that his company has now become another posterchild for the Web 2.0 Bubble: A magical land where traffic is king, and a plan to actually make money is irrelevant as long as you can get bought out before the cash runs dry. Reading through Aaron’s posts really let us see the human side of all of this, right at the moment everything changes. Instead of plotting out a triumphant tour of Europe or buying an island next to John Travolta, he’s handing out t-shirts at a Holloween party and trying to chat up girls waiting for Rocky Horror to start.

I hope the money doesn’t change him, and I doubt it will.

Reddit was able to emerge at just the right time with just the right product; an alternative social bookmarking system where you automatically start at the front page until deemed unworthy, instead of the Digg-based “guilty til proven innocent” upcoming links page, or the Del.icio.us “get 500 people to bookmark you, then we’ll talk” system. And while Digg was searching for just the right valuation, reddit decided to strike while the iron was hot and do a deal. While many people have expressed surprise that a site that is a household name for most bloggers was run by only four guys in an apartment, I think that is an excellent model. Instead of trying to be everything to everybody and bring in designers and sales guys and other advisors, they kept it simple and direct. Once they reached that inflection point and the traffic started pouring in, they realized that the barebones nature of the site was actually a draw and just kept well enough alone. No swarms, or tag clouds, or Flash stacks. Just news.

And, it turns out, a couple million dollars each.

For other startups looking to emulate reddit’s success, there isn’t a whole lot to take from it in terms of concrete directives. The nature of bubbles is that by the time people can see them, there are already other people and companies in dominating positions in that market. The way that reddit is run, however, can provide some useful guidelines.

Try to be agile and flexible, and pay attention to the way the wind is blowing. If you see a cool thing coming on the horizon and think you can do it better, get it out there, quickly. Don’t let design hold you back, but err on the side of “tastefully spare” rather than “trying too hard, badly.” Talk to people. Reddit used its connections to Paul Graham and other influential folks brilliantly to get their initial traffic; it is that traffic that validated the entire business model. In Aaron’s words, “Even when people had no idea what we did, the traffic gave us confidence.” It is amazing how much confidence you get from having people talking about you and using your stuff; anything that gets you there faster is a godsend.

Hats off to Aaron and the reddit team.

Til next time.

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