Col Needham lives twenty-two minutes (by Indian truck) from my house in Bristol; bizarre and interesting then to fly twenty-two hours to Austin to see him talk about founding and running IMDb (the *definitive* site for movie facts).
(UPDATE): what a nice man he is, unpretentious but engaging.
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Some stuff happened "…then in 1995 The New York Times called this guy in Bristol…" (which surprised his wife).
Incorporated in 96 - the first time he met his fellow directors was in the lawyers' office.
Bought a webserver on a credit card. Pleaded bandwidth from an ISP.
Entire IMDB was put on a 4GB hard disk and Fedexed to Wisconsin.
Sold some ads and went profitable in 96, spending the money on more servers. Quit his job as "a software researcher in HP Labs Bristol".
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"Who's here from Bristol?" - "We are!"
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By the way I'm having a blog-off with Clare, so for a more coherent take on this talk try here.
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IMDB built by passionate people who care about their subject area. Reciprocally chose / chosen by Amazon - (who aim to be the most customer-centric company in the world). IMDB goal is to keep serving their users the best they can.
Pressure from studios etc - "put the box office on the front page", "help us connect to crew etc", and contrasting that, pressure from film-goers who wanted different information - so created IMDB Pro for industry.
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IMBD story seems to fit with the idea that if you can successfully combine something people want with great service, success will follow (N.B. this is not the same as "build it and they will come" which is a silly dot.com-era aphorism based on a film about fatherly redemption and *ghosts*, and has nothing to do with either great customer service *or* making money).
This thinking should be obvious but seems not to be, judging by the number of times I've heard it said "you have to be in business to make money first and foremost". Yeah ok, good: money=survival; it's not optional, but it's not the starting point. Above-average profit comes from having something that people want. Hmm, I seem to have ranted off on a tangent here.
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"In three years time we'll look back and laugh at how little we knew about our business models".
"There are going to be lots of winners in this, ultimately the winners are going to be the film fans"
"We hope we'll be able to help people fund films that couldn't have been funded before - by helping them find their audience"
They recently bought Box Office Mojo - for hyper-obsessive box office stats. They also own Withoutabox.
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They put a lot of editorial effort into ensuring accuracy - the audience care about the facts being facts, so they aim to filter out mistakes both honest and malicious. They also have to be sure a film actually exists and isn't just a hopeful fantasy on the part of a filmmaker.
"We're not perfect, but we always try to be a bit better than we were".
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In 14 years of user-submissions, around about one million people have updated the site.
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By the way Clare Reddington is not on IMDb. Is that FAIL?
Tags: Austin, bristol, business, connect, information, obvious, sxsw, User
