dealing with customers...
dealing with customers and what they want that I can bring that back to
shape the product. Look at me 20 years ago, and at best I was a smart engineer.
I didn’t know much about business, knew nothing about selling, and unless you
have somebody who has an interest in talking with whoever you’re selling your
product or service to, your product isn’t going to turn out to be what the customer
wants.
In almost all circumstances I can think of, if not a member of the founding
team, you want to say, “With the money I hope to raise from you, this is the person—
here’s his/her r?sum?—that we’re going to bring on board to take care of
the business marketing aspect of it.” I’ve always had that in the startup companies
I’ve been associated with.
Livingston: What competitors were you most scared of as you were building
TripAdvisor?
Kaufer: There weren’t really direct competitors. We were fighting more of a
problem of, “No one else is using your stuff. We seem to be doing OK without
it. So why is your stuff critical? Why do I have to pay you for it?” The dollars
that might have been spent on us were probably going to a Frommer’s or
Fodor’s, which were branded content sites.
We would say, “No, no, no. They have one person’s opinion, and it was written
6 years ago by someone that may or may not have even visited the hotel.
We’ve got fresh stuff. We’ve searched for all the stuff around the Web that your
visitors want.”
But, there were drawbacks to our model, too. A user on Yahoo Travel looking
at their description of Boston was reading it on Yahoo Travel. When they
came to our Boston page and they wanted to read about fun things to do, we’d
take them off to an article on the New York Times, or on Frommer’s, whereupon
they would be leaving TripAdvisor or leaving the Yahoo network. Yahoo, like
most companies, didn’t really want to send a lot of people away. Yet that was
how we had such a rich database of information. So a tougher sell.
Stephen Kaufer 369
Livingston: What other things did your customers misunderstand about
TripAdvisor, since it was the only one of its kind?
Kaufer: I don’t know that they misunderstood too much. Today, user reviews are
in many spaces a matter of course. Amazon has done a tremendous job turning
that into a significant competitive advantage. In 2001 or 2000, Yahoo wanted to
get more than (I’m making up the numbers) $20 million dollars for a 3-year
Travelocity contract; they wanted to get $40 million dollars. They wanted to sell
a sponsorship to Carnival Cruise Lines for a million dollars. They wanted to
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