Q&A Simon Wright is the 28-year-old founder of the very successful website Whirlpool.net.au. Whirlpool makes almost no revenue, has no employees and isn't even a company, Wright says. Instead it will remain his hobby.
He explains to SmartCompany founder and publisher Amanda Gome how he built the Whirlpool community, what makes forums work, and why he won't commercialise his business.
What niche did you see when you started Whirlpool?
It was back in 1998. I was only straight out of high school and there was all this exciting new technology on the horizon about faster internet access. Back in those days everyone had dial-up, unless you were a company, and I figured let's collate a little bit of the information about what's available in broadband. The initial site was absolutely nothing special, a blog by today's standards would have been fancy. But it grew quite organically from very modest beginnings.
It's really an example of the long tail, isn't it? One very specific area attracted quite a lot of interest. So did you just build a community of internet buffs or was it wider? Did business people come to find out about broadband?
It's interesting you say long tail. It was certainly long tail originally, but to abuse the metaphor, I climbed up that long tail along with the industry. Broadband is now an extremely mainstream topic. So I was able to ride the growth of broadband from the long tail into the mainstream.
How did your content change?
The original service of Whirlpool was just to collate a little bit of information; there was not really much available at the time. Now there was some fairly useful information that people who wanted to get the most out of that internet connection would have benefited from. And it was nice to have that collated.
How did you build your community?
The community was built largely because in the earliest days the community by definition was very small. We're talking only thousands of people in Australia on broadband, an absolutely minuscule number. And these people are all technology enthusiasts; these are first adopters.
There was a natural tendency for these people to find a common point on the internet to discuss these matters, and it just so happened that Whirlpool, certainly within a couple of years, met most people's need in terms of being that outlet.
So you say you've got a million impressions a day or maybe 150,000 uniques a month, but you don't really measure. You haven't really thought to commercialise Whirlpool. Why not?
I don't spend much time thinking about it. Largely because the potential for what Whirlpool could be, were it commercialised, kind of depresses me — (that's why) I haven't done it.
Well, that's a good reason to do it.
Well yes and no. As a non-commercial entity, Whirlpool does give me a few things. For example, it gives me a hobby.
You could take up stamps; stamps are not going to make you some money, but this might.
I don't understand people who collect stamps, but then again businesspeople don't understand why I run a forum. But it gives me an outlet for a little bit of technology creativity. It gives me free reign in an environment where I can sharpen my skills for use in the business world.
Certainly a lot of what I've learnt about search engine optimisation, about community building, about optimisation and the running of a relatively large website, translates directly into skills that I've been able to benefit from.
But they're not business skills, they're operational skills.
Sorry. When I say business skills I mean skills that I could use within a business environment as opposed to those within Whirlpool.
But why not bring in some business expertise and build it up at this stage?
Because it changes the equation. Were Whirlpool to become a company to be monetised and have people expect money at the end of the day — although it is not a bad thing and for most people it's a good thing — it just changes what Whirlpool is to me.
From being something that I can play around with, that I can try something really interesting or really silly — sure I have a responsibility to the people who appreciate the site's existence to make sure the site works, that it satisfies its role as a community for people interested in technology. But if I wanted to do something that could be risky, I don't have to justify it to anyone.
I'm sorry, I want to go on to other things, but I do want to point out you'll still be able to do all of that. You're just bringing in businesspeople to help build the business around it, you wouldn't change. That's the beauty of that.
Oh sure, and I do have some very quiet murmurings with a few people which might allow the best-of-both-worlds approach.
The other worry is if you don't develop it or build it ... has growth slowed or is it still building?
I think growth has largely peaked. That's not because I think I've given up on it. It's more because I've reached, I don't know what the business guys call it, market capitalisation (critical mass)? I've basically reached as many people in Australia who might be interested in the topics. If I wanted to expand Whirlpool, I could do that by broadening the scope of discussion, take the concept and deploy in New Zealand, and deploy in some other countries.
It's been more than once that someone has come up to me and said "Hey Whirlpool's great, I'm in New Zealand. Could I take what you've done and deploy it or could you deploy something here for us?" I've been reluctant to do so largely because if I'm not making money out of it, then it's just one more hassle.
But you would make money, if you did it properly. You'd set it up as a sort of franchise and you'd licence it out.
It sounds so easy.
It is easy. I'm sure you'll have a lot of entrepreneurs telling you how easy it is. Now what are some of the best tips you have for building the community, particularly through your forums?
A very simple common sense rule is, don't let people talk in an empty room. So when I see a new forum start up, often they will think of every topic of discussion that might occur in this forum and set up areas for that discussion. If they're talking about say pets, they might set up 12 different forums for dogs and cats and geese and hamsters, and then separate forums for buying, separate forums for complaining about shops, and separate forums for goodness knows what.
And so what should you do?
What happens there, you make your place feel emptier than is necessary. So if you only start off with just a few areas and consolidate that discussion, then people will get a sense of a community. They'll feel like they're talking in an environment where people are listening. No one wants to talk in an empty room.
How do you consolidate the environment?
Don't set up 30 forums when three will do.
So do you go out and tell people that it's a topic at this time, to come and chat? In the early days, how often were you in there yourself? What did you do to drive it?
In the early days? Yeah sure I would participate in the discussion. The important thing for people who are running a forum is to try and avoid answering everyone's questions. So let's say you do have a forum about pets and you know everything about every pet, you could be really useful to people. What incentive is there for someone who also happens to know a great deal about dogs, to come in and really be helpful?
So often the role in a forum is to make it useful to people by answering some questions, by ensuring there is an incentive for people to come along to provide the answers themselves. Too often corporate forums that are set up to, for example, provide support for a product and service, get a bunch of staff members from their company to answer every question.
And that's fine, but if you're not too precious about it, why not leave a few simple obvious questions alone for a couple of hours and see if the community will answer the question for them. They'll get a better experience as a result.
I mean definitely don't let the community interact on their own. But as a value, if I'm going into the Ford forums let's say, and I have a question about my car, sure I want to know that there is someone there from Ford that's going to be listening and provide an answer, but at the same time if I ask "how do I program a radio station into the stereo", if I get an answer from someone who happens to own that car, that's great; and maybe they might even have a trick about how to do it quickly.
Or explain it better.
They'll explain it in language that's more human than what might otherwise be copy-and-paste out of a manual.
Page 2: Legal issues and iPhone development.
This article by SmartCompany.com.au founder and publisher Amanda Gome is replicated on ZDNet.com.au courtesy of a reciprocal publishing agreement.
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It is impossible to discern the kind of vocal inflections or gestures that went along with the questions posed by the interviewer, but I found those questions, focusing on the commercialisation potential to be slightly derogatory towards Simon Wright. He doesn't need to be badgered by the interviewer over why he hasn't commercialised the site. Sure, many would think his choice not to as being crazy, even if they are extremely noble. But still the job of the interviewer should have been to find out why he did not want to consider commercialisation and not give him a patronizing lesson in the value of his hobby as a business.