-alexis
There it is. Were you expecting something more dramatic? Two college seniors just agreeing to get together over their laptops one weekend. That’s how mundane starting a top-fifty website is. There’s no parting of clouds or springing from foreheads—just deciding to set aside some time on a Sunday to get some work done.
We did start thinking about reddit a bit, although I didn’t come up with the name until a couple of weeks later. I promptly registered it on April 29, just a few days after my twenty-second birthday.
After graduation, Steve and I started working in earnest in a rented apartment in Medford, Massachusetts, a quiet neighborhood outside Cambridge. I’d found the place, which was subleased by some Tufts students, on craigslist; all I knew was that it needed to be on the MBTA Red Line and it had to be cheap. We’d shown up with a month’s worth of clothes (it was already furnished), our laptops, and some sketches in our notebooks, including one of the logo and one of our alien mascot (in truth, I’d created these months before we’d even figured out how the site would work. Priorities!).
Steve and I set out that June to build a website where readers, not editors, would determine the front page of what’s new and interesting by submitting links to be voted on by the community. We had no ambitions to have the president of the United States conduct a real-time interview with millions of people on our site, which he would end up doing—from Charlottesville, no less—seven years later; we just wanted to create a place where anyone at any time could find what was new and interesting online. These could be links to an article, a video, or even a photo of a cat; if users like it, they vote it up (and vote it down if they don’t). Neologisms like upvote and downvote came into existence without any forethought—I just liked the way an up-and-down arrow looked.
The first version of the site used two words a user could click on, interesting and boring. We even debated dropping the “negative vote”—whatever it’d end up being called or looking like—in favor of a binary “I like this!” button, perhaps in the shape of a star. Fortunately, we’d already had a taste for how good it felt to bring a bit of retribution to the submitter of a bad link with a click of the downvote button, so it stayed and I got back to redesigning exactly how those arrows should look—down to the pixel.
We didn’t anticipate how much people would adore getting these upvotes, but we did know that the karma score (your total upvotes minus your total downvotes) would be a great incentive, especially early on, for people to submit. And when you’re trying to build a community from scratch, you need a simple system to encourage participation. The point system was neither novel nor fancy; it just worked. Steve engineered a clever algorithm to keep links rising and falling based on their votes and time, producing constant freshness.
The most pivotal product decision we made seemed much less important at the time but was our first big fight. I really wanted “tags” as a way to categorize content, and Steve insisted we let users launch their own reddits within our network (we’d call them subreddits). Just like WordPress was a blogging platform for online publishing, reddit would be a platform for online communities. It didn’t seem important at the time, but Steve was absolutely right and it’s a damn good thing he won because that decision would ultimately drive reddit’s success where all of our then competitors failed. We combined this simple point system with the ability for anyone to create a forum for an online community to share and discuss links—from NFL fans (/r/NFL) to corgi lovers (/r/corgi).7 The resulting network is a black hole of productivity worldwide.
We applied essentially the same model to our commenting system, which as a result generates the best discussions on the Internet. We added that commenting system a few months after we launched and I still remember Steve promising “something awesome” as he dashed off to get started building it—boy, did he deliver. I wish more people copied the reddit commenting system so I wouldn’t have to question my faith in humanity every time I watch a YouTube video and glance at the comments. But we started, as all startups do, with only ourselves as users.
I came up with the name reddit (as in, “I read it on reddit”8) while I was in the Alderman Library at UVA one day, but we didn’t settle on it until just a couple of weeks before the launch. It was almost reditt, but fortunately I asked my friend Melissa Goldstein which bastardization made more “sense.” She chose wisely, and I stuck with reddit from then on. Yet it nearly became something else. Thanks, Melissa.
The alternatives we considered back then were even more ridiculous, and plenty of people offered suggestions. I blame domain squatters for making this such a difficult proposition (and, frankly, a waste of time, given there are more important things to do, like building the product). The result was that my in-box became full of e-mails like this one from Steve:
how about oobaloo.com? i like it
Or this one from Paul Graham:
360scope.com. I like this one. A 360scope being something that looks in all directions, rather than a microscope or telescope, which look[s] at either extreme of one direction. You can imagine people saying, let’s go check out the 360scope.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t changing my mind. I also really wanted a mascot. By the way, I’ve met a few people who’ve had the reddit alien tattooed on their bodies, which never ceases to amaze me (and is something I hope they never regret), but the little creature had to win over my co-founder, Steve, and our chief investor, Paul.
From: Paul Graham
Date: June 22, 2005 1:29:10 p.m. EDT
To: Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian
Cc: Jessica Livingston
Subject: prototype
Also, get the content as far as you can into the upper left.
That’s what people came for. Smoosh the logo and put the login on the right side.
In fact you might want to consider getting rid of the logo….
If you’re attached to the little bug guy, put him at the bottom instead of the top; then it looks like a joke instead of branding.
—pg
Needless to say, I didn’t heed Paul’s advice. He’s brilliant, but also a fallible human just like the rest of us. Though Steve waffled a bit on the name, I certainly wasn’t going to change it or the mascot. Besides, there were more important discussions we needed to have just then.
Steve and I would have brainstorming sessions with pens and notebooks, which I’d take to PaintShop Pro 5.0 so that I could mock up designs and layouts, sometimes even for random ideas that had no chance of coming to fruition anytime soon. We only had one developer, of course, and that was Steve, who was responsible for everything technical. Thanks to him, those pixels I doodled actually became something useful. Today he’s rightly respected as one of the best developers in our industry, but back then he was a fresh computer science major with almost zero experience in developing software for the web. If he’d taken a job at an established software company, it’d more than likely have been at the ground-floor level. Instead he was a CTO, albeit at a company of two. But without a gatekeeper, he was (and we were) able to learn as we went.
Steve’s senior thesis was his first substantial chunk of web code. He didn’t know anything about databases, user experience design, or scaling, but he’d read enough online that he figured he could just learn it along the way. “Everything I had learned about programming, I’d already learned online. That’s the culture of development right now. More than any other piece of knowledge, how to program is on the Internet.”9
This makes sense: the Internet was built by programmers, so it’s no surprise that programmers have made it such a fertile place to learn the trade. Programming also happens to be a field that Steve calls the world’s most valuable profession. I totally agree. Not everyone succeeds in mastering it, but it’s getting easier and easier to acquire the skills to build things on your own. I’ll go into more depth about this in chapter 4, but your search engine is the easiest place to start learning how to write software (for free, right now!) and how
to do everything else you’ll need to create the next [insert your favorite startup here]. Just wait until this chapter is finished before you go, okay?
Every morning we listened to the hit song of that summer, “Hollaback Girl,” by Gwen Stefani. I’m not sure why or how it got started, but it became our morning ritual. Shit was bananas. We didn’t go out a lot during those first weeks; instead we played World of Warcraft for recreation. When I hit level 60, which was then the cap in the game, I retired the account to focus on the more pressing quests of startup life. It took about a month of work, day and night—and daily Gwen Stefani—to get something online that was only slightly embarrassing. After all, to paraphrase LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, if you’re not a little embarrassed by what you’ve launched, you waited too long. It need only be good enough to be useful. There’s no big secret. Just build the simplest possible solution to a real problem. The motto of Y Combinator is this rather obvious, yet immensely valuable, goal: make something people want.
Back in June of 2005, we thought we had something people wanted. What we didn’t have was users. When sharing anything you’ve created with the world, you have to assume at the start that no one gives a damn about it. Well, maybe your mom does (you hope). But everyone else needs to be convinced that what you’ve made, whatever it is, is worth his or her attention. To quote Paul Graham: “The Back button is your enemy.” This simple fact about online creation forces us to make something compelling and to value our audience as much as possible.
So how do you get people to look at your user-driven website when you don’t have any users? You fake them, naturally. That’s what Steve and I did for the first few weeks—submit content under different user names. Sure, we asked our friends for help, but only a few really committed themselves to helping our nascent venture (thanks, Connor Dolan and Morgan Carey!). Our first surge of traffic that didn’t come from browbeaten friends was thanks to an essay Paul Graham wrote, which sent over the first redditors (reddit + editor, since all users have submission and voting privileges) and got us off to a great start. People actually seemed to be using the site. Maybe we’d made something people wanted after all.
The Alien and the Importance of Giving a Damn
Our first milestone came the day Steve and I simply read the site as everyone else did, not faking submissions. Suddenly there were scores of user names we hadn’t created. You can be sure we treated those users like gold. That’s not to say we locked them in a vault (early attempts were discouraging); rather, we were vigilant about responding to anyone who wrote to us about reddit publicly or privately. Say you wrote a brief blog entry about reddit and how much you hated the mascot—fortunately, this didn’t happen often. You can bet you would have gotten a comment from me, thanking you for the feedback but gently letting you know that the alien wasn’t going anywhere. Don’t be afraid to show your users that you give a damn. It should shine in everything you do, from the design of your website to the way you respond to feedback e-mails.
To this day, when I find myself doing something I know a normal person wouldn’t do, I know I’m onto something. When you wake up every morning with the privilege of doing something you love, it’s easy.
I still remember the first blog that was ever written about reddit. It was called Changing Way and was written by a guy named Andrew.10 He probably didn’t have more than a hundred readers a day, but I was thrilled. In what became my routine, I commented on the piece. I tried to comment on everything I saw written about reddit, good or bad. The legacy of articles mentioning reddit is covered with comments from me thanking the authors for their feedback. I even got Steve to comment on this one, too. Andrew thanked us for stopping by. I wonder if he still uses reddit….
On the first Fourth of July after we launched, I decided to borrow an idea from Google and doodle a special logo for the day. It looked awful.
I hadn’t even learned vector graphics; I was still using outdated software from when I was in high school. The result is a less-than-stellar celebration of our nation’s birthday, but it was the first of hundreds of doodles I’d draw, sometimes every morning for days in a row. I found it cathartic. In contrast to all the chaos in my personal life, it was consistent and delightful. My mother would talk to me about what the reddit alien was doing every morning when I’d call her. Those 120 × 40 pixels were a canvas for me, a way to make her smile. The users appreciated it, too, but while my art was often inspired by them, it wasn’t made for them. It was for me and Mom.
The first time I used my reddit logo doodles to tell a story, it lasted five days—the week leading up to Thanksgiving—and involved five different logos.
It all started so well.
You can probably see where this is going. Did you notice the Pilgrim got a little bit skinnier?
Cornucopias are even harder to draw than they are to spell, especially when you’ve got such limited real estate.
Looking rather gaunt, an American Indian offers sustenance. A turkey! (Almost our national bird!11)
And here’s how the Indian’s kind gesture would be repaid. The smallpox blankets aren’t pictured, but upon reflection, this is quite a statement for a logo doodle. The longest series I did ended up spanning thirty days in a row. An entire month of doodling every morning, usually before I ate, and even before I checked my e-mail.
To this day, long-term redditors remind me how much they enjoyed visiting the site in the early days, if only to see what the alien was up to. Granted, we hoped they’d stick around for the great content, but… baby steps. Since I left reddit full-time, our users have restyled logos for the thousands of subreddits that flourish on our open platform. Want a subreddit for a community of corgi lovers? Make it! Oh right, actually, one already exists (r/corgi), but there’s nothing to stop you from making a better one. No surprise: it has an adorable corgi logo. It’s humbling to see all the superior artists who now use our platform and contribute their talents to building communities around this idea of damn-giving.
Magic happens when you give a damn. I used to organize “press tours” for myself—I would send cold e-mails to journalists to say I’d be in town with only an hour or two available to meet with them. I was taking the Fung Wah bus from Boston to New York every month or so and crashing on a friend’s sofa while concocting new ways to share our story.
For a period of time I’d find the number one post on reddit that day and e-mail the person who made the content. I would tell the person the news about hitting number one on reddit and present him or her with a very special award—a gold alien! (Gold is expensive, so I simply attached an image of a gold reddit alien that looked like a trophy and joked about it being suitable for framing.) One of those winners was a New York Times journalist whom I’d never met before. He recently wrote me to say: “One of my favorite moments in my seventeen years at the New York Times was when you presented me with the reddit Alien. I still keep it among my treasured memories. You and reddit have gone on to great things since then.”
As Paul Graham says, you must be “relentlessly resourceful”12 as a startup because you have so little going for you. Paul isn’t one to use football metaphors, but he compares the resourcefulness of good startup founders to that of running backs: “A good running back is not merely determined, but flexible as well. They want to get downfield, but they adapt their plans on the fly.” He’s right. But I’d go a step further, because great running backs also keep driving their legs forward after contact, which—if you’ll permit me—reflects the relentlessness one needs in the face of adversity. You must give more damns than your competition about your technology (as Steve does) and your audience (as I do). If you do, it’ll pay off.
Why It Pays to Be Good
It turns out that an entire building full of editors, no matter how smart or tireless they are, can’t match the speed or efficiency with which the reddit communities discover, create, and promote interesting content. This made reddit an extremely valuable destination. Word of mouth did the res
t. I never spent more than a few hundred dollars on advertising for reddit. That’s not a typo. And I spent that money on stickers. To this day, you can still find them around Boston. But they started out as just a cheap way to thank users. Whether I handed them out at talks or mailed them to users who found bugs, they were all the advertising our company needed to grow. Thank you, Internet.
That was enough to get the attention of Condé Nast, whose head of biz dev, Kourosh Karimkhany, e-mailed me about licensing our software. Then, just sixteen months after Steve and I first showed up in Massachusetts, Condé Nast acquired reddit.com. All in all, we had raised only $82,000 in funding, which essentially paid for our apartment, pasta, and servers. At the time of acquisition (for an undisclosed sum—sorry!), our biggest monthly expense was the fifteen hundred dollars a month we spent on the three-bedroom rental in Somerville. At the time of this writing, reddit is a top-fifty website, with more than sixty-five million unique visitors a month who generate more than four billion page views. In industry speak, that’s a metric shit-ton.13
Along the way, we experienced an entire book’s worth of stories, many of which I’ve chronicled on my blog (AlexisOhanian.com). There’ll you’ll also find plenty of photos my editor said would detract from the legitimacy of this text. Now would be a good time to head to your closest Internet-enabled device and peruse the site until you’re satiated. I’ll be here when you return.
Our success is just one example of many in a world where a pair of twenty-year-olds needn’t ask anyone for permission. If you can build it, all it costs is a credit card to cover the server fees, which will be cheaper than your cell phone bill. Tell your parents you need to move in for a couple of months to get your project off the ground. The only advice I can give that I guarantee is true is that you’ll never succeed unless you try. Just please start. You don’t need anyone’s permission—certainly not mine.
Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed Page 5