reservation at a place you’ve never stayed at, called up the local Better Business
Bureau to find out how many complaints were lodged? None. So here you go to
TripAdvisor and you look up the place, and you see that seven out of the last
eight reviews all gave it a 1 out of 5 rating and talked about smelly carpets and
rude staff. You’re just not going to stay there unless it’s the only place in town.
That’s the impact that five or six people had. Total strangers. But the hotel
owner that wants to run this crappy place, preying off of the brand that they’re
under, and maybe their location as being near to something, that person has to
kind of shape up, maybe take something out of their profits and put it back into
Stephen Kaufer 371
providing a good service for the customers, because word is spreading. And
TripAdvisor is the conduit in the travel space for spreading that word.
Livingston: Looking back on your experience with TripAdvisor, what was most
surprising about it?
Kaufer: Certainly the most surprising to me was how much people voluntarily
share their experiences. I had never written a review before starting
TripAdvisor. I had never posted my comments on Amazon or anywhere else.
But we’re able to collect millions of opinions each year. It is 2006, and we’re up
to over five million now. So you have a lot of people out there that, for
absolutely no reward whatsoever—we don’t pay them for opinions, we never
have—will take the time to write a review or answer someone else’s question.
Maybe it’s because we’re the size we are and that people have gotten a lot of
content, so now they’re interested in sort of giving back to the site that helped
them make a decision. But the fact that we’re able to collect so much on an
ongoing basis isn’t something I would have predicted.
Livingston: Is there any advice that you would give to someone who is thinking
about starting a startup?
Kaufer: Certainly the founding team makes the biggest difference. Usually
founding teams don’t stay together for very long. That happens. If the founding
team splits in the first 6 months, that can be pretty devastating to the birth of a
company. So getting to know someone before actually joining forces, spending
some more time thinking through what the roles and responsibilities will be
between the founding team members. You hear breakup stories of, “Well, I was
going to do this.” “No, I wanted to do that.” “Oh, you’re taking too much control
over this.” Unfortunately, odds are high that’ll happen anyway. But if you

Похожие записи:

• reservation at a