Founders at Work.pdf

C H A P T E R
27
James Hong
Cofounder, HOT or NOT
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?
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