While looking for...
While looking for a job in 2000, James Hong launched a website with his friend
Jim Young just for fun. HOT or NOT lets users submit photos of themselves and
have others vote on their “hotness” on a scale of 1 to 10.
The site spread virally, and within hours their server was swamped. Hong
and Young sensed there was a business in it, and worked frantically to scale the
site to handle the load.
A few months after launching, they found the way to generate revenue from
the site: they added dating for a monthly fee. Despite many acquisition offers,
HOT or NOT continues to thrive as a stand-alone company. As of July 2006, HOT
or NOT had counted about 13 billion votes.
Livingston: Take me back to when you had the idea.
Hong: Jim, my brother and I were hanging out drinking, and Jim mentioned
that he thought a girl he met at a party was hot, and that she was a perfect 10.
My brother and I were working on a website at the time called XMethods,
which was the first directory of publicly available web services, so we were talking
a lot about what would be a cool consumer web service. In 1999, everyone
was talking about web services in the context of B2B, and I remember thinking,
“What about consumers? Aren’t consumers going to do this stuff too?”
When Jim said that he thought he found a 10, an idea popped into my head:
what if you had a service where people could post their pictures into the system,
and then other people could rate them from 1 to 10? The original vision
was that your client would call the web services, get a picture, and have it randomly
float across your screen or pop up on your screen at random times
during the day. The idea was that all our friends that were working in cubicles
could have a window: a random girl walking by you that they could rate from 1
to 10 on if you thought she was hot.
Livingston: It was just for fun, not an idea for a startup?
Hong: Jim was burned out from working on his PhD, and I had just graduated
from business school and was unemployed, so I figured what the hell, let’s build
it. It wasn’t that hard to build in the beginning—it was hard to build later
because we had to scale it—but just putting up something that looked like it
worked was easy. It was not something we focused on. We had the idea one
Monday, and it was coded by Wednesday or Thursday in spare time, really, and
then Jim sent it to me on the weekend. There was no hurry; this was not something
we were thinking about.
The weekend before it launched, I was visiting my parents and my dad
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