Interviews

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This interview was recorded after the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco, what follows is a full transcript.

SD: This is Sarah Drew with Vitamin, and I’m sitting here with Ted Rheingold from Dogster and Catster who just gave a wonderful speech on the passion-centric communities and websites that he’s seeing as part of the future here. First, just to give a little bit of background you term yourself sometimes as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, can you tell us a little bit about that?

TR: I didn’t expect Dogster to be a self-reliant business. I guess I was a entrepreneur in a way before, because I was making websites for clients, but I really never expected myself to be a CEO. I never saw that in my future, to be running a business and dealing with banking and legal issues. I think though I was very uncomfortable working for other people so maybe it was destined even though I didn’t see it clearly at the time.

SD: What was the ‘aha’ moment for you with Dogster?

TR: There was a day where my girlfriend (my wife now) posted a very brief message on a Craigslist pets area about this new site where people can make web pages for their dogs and there were a hundred new dogs added the next day! (There’s never been less that a hundred dogs added from that day, actually) And the Craigslist forums blew up. Within a week later Craig himself had to go on and say, “It’s okay, Dogster is a nice community service,” but it just created such excitement and emotion on Craigslist that I realised that this was so much bigger than I had imagined.

SD: What was the emotion that was happening at that time?

TR: On Craigslist some people were so annoyed that everyone was talking about nothing but Dogster that they were just like, “Can we just talk about something else?!” But so many people were just so crazy to be able to look at each other’s dog photos easily and share them that they refused to stop talking about it and I realised, “Wow, this is big.”

SD: So, the ‘…ster’, part of how you were using it was as kind of a tag line for the individualised passion-centred site. Is that something that’s come to use in the general lexicon?

TR: Yeah, well, y’know it already was - mobster, spinster, etc, and so when we were having a really hard time finding a good name, I spoke to the person who owned Dogster and he thought that what I was doing was a great idea and he’d sell it to me for what then was just barely within my budget! I thought, “Well, y’know what, everyone will know what this name means.”

SD: Have you become an evangelist for passion-centred sites - do you see that as something that you’re going to be doing a lot more of in the future?

TR: I think I have. I didn’t really plan on it, but what I just look at it every day and whenever I see it I’m really inspired. I love personal creativity and individual approaches to the same problem and every day I see a different approach to the problem of creating community, that is creating community that’s dedicated to just one group of people’s interests.

SD: What are some of the key points for really deepening the experience for users as a website creator?

TR: Well, people would say to me in the beginning, “Ted, why would I want to use your website when I can just go to the dog park and be with dogs?” And I thought, “You don’t want to use my website. You want to go to the dog park.” So really this site is for people who can’t be where they want to be, but still want to share that passion. So, that’s kinda my way of answering you question about allowing people to get deeper with their passions because they’re either stuck at work, or they’re at their grandmother’s and can be with their dog, or they stay up late and no-one understands their love for their Chihuahuas.

SD: Yeah, is it the ‘like mind’, it’s one of the great things of the net - that you’re again able to kind of aggregate and commune with beings…

TR: …and people will find each other. They’re out there, they don’t even know they’re looking for each other and when they find something they go, “Ah! How did I not even think I’d want to do this?”

SD: Have you taken Dogster to Japan?

TR: No. Really, since day one I was like, “Uh, maybe if this gets big I could drop out and be the Dogster Japan guy”. I think it would have to be different, it’s really harder to have a dog in Japan because of the expenses…

SD: Maybe Catster?

TR: Yeah. Or Grashopperster. Or maybe Dogster in Japan would be ‘adopt a dog from Dogster America’ and then that’s your avatar on the site for people, but it would need to be … even just the language barrier, it’s just so hard to change one web site’s language into another. You’ve got to take everything apart and put it back together. We’re still not there.

SD: Are you thinking about writing a book on passion-centred website creation?

TR: As I was preparing this presentation I was thinking, “That’s the kind of thing that would turn into a book,” and then I thought, “Uh, I don’t wanna!” I’m already so maxed out just trying to make great things happen with Dogster and Catster and still enjoying my life that I just don’t think I could do a book.

SD: You probably have most of the outline already down there from your speech.

TR: That’s what the editor always says. I look forward to doing so when I retire!

SD: What advice do you have to our listeners in terms of really following your passion and making it into a business and what are some of the … pitfalls is maybe not the right word - but some of the things to watch along the way?

TR: Well, Vitamin’s great and there’s a great community there, so it’s a pleasure to get to answer this question. I think one think that’s difficult for engineers or designers is that you’re often thinking about, “What problems do I have? What problems to I see people on blogs talking about that I could solve?” Before Dogster I made a site called FleetingImage.org, where anyone could upload an interesting image and that was important to me because before Flickr or photosharing I knew that people had really great images on their desktops and I wanted to see them.

So I made this site that made it easy to see them but hard to copy them, so you just had to go there and experience them. And then I thought, when that was done, well, you know what else people like clicking on, they like clicking on pictures of dogs, they like looking at dogs. So, and it was mostly because I saw my wife was going to rescue sites just to look at pictures of dogs and people were showing me on cellphones the pictures of their dogs and cats so I thought I could make this for them.

The interesting image site is still live and I think there may be nine hundred images on it, but doing something that other people wanted which I stumbled into, I’d no idea how many people there were, but I think it’s really important to not focus on what geeks or engineers or designers want to do and look for problems that grandmothers or brothers or sisters are having.

SD: When hearing I was going to be speaking to you a friend of mind said “My cat made number one on Catster”. What’s that about?!

TR: We can make anyone Cat of the Day, and it’s just great! Like right now if someone sends an email and says, “Oh, thanks so much for making this site”, they can be Cat of the Day. Or if someone’s in the forums and there’s a little argument going on and someone chimes in and says, “Oh, I don’t think you need to be fighting about that, lets look at this cute picture over here,” that person is Cat of the Day and then maybe twenty thousand cat lovers are seeing that cat photo and they’re giving him cat fish treats, and they’re giving him rosettes and it’s just, like, I had no idea how wonderful that could be and it’s so neat to be able to just dish it out everyday.

SD: So you have Catster and Dogster, without maybe giving away what might be your next thing, in the mind of Ted Rheingold what are some of your other pet passions?

TR: (We like puns!) We’ll probably do more pets. It’s just so natural for us and it seems so obvious. People say “haven’t you done them already?” but we just haven’t had the architecture - well, we haven’t had the server support, the financial support, or the community support to simply branch out. We could have done them, we could have gotten them live, but we wouldn’t have maintained them right, so we really want to make a place for everyone who’s a pet lover online because we see passions everywhere and you don’t need fifty million people having a passion, you really just need one or two million and so we’d like to branch out into offering more passion-centric services for people who aren’t getting them currently.

SD: In your presentation today you talked a little bit about the advertising, how in-house you were going and soliciting advertising, what sort of advertising model given your user base, given your context, do you find is working? You mentioned sponsorship?

TR: Yeah, sponsorship and big advertisers are making everything happen. You know, sponsorship is amazing because any site, no matter how small, could probably find someone who thinks it’s worth a certain amount of money to put their logo on every single page. If you have a thousand people coming to your site, but you’re writing about yarn types or something, there’s probably a yarn maker out there who you can convince to give you a thousand dollars to be a sponsor, or five thousand dollars and the minute you get one, you can go to the next one, and you can say well, that’s what this is, now it costs more, now it’s fifty thousand, and the sponsor is a whole different mindset, they’re looking at it from a strategic commitment, not a tactical ad buy.

So sponsorship is excellent and there are lots of young companies who are looking to get their name out, and if you’re an exciting web site that’s talking to an exciting crowd for them, it’s really reasonable that they could write a check for ten thousand dollars for a year.

Advertising is more difficult, but much more common. We do everything from letting small advertisers auto-upload their ads for a hundred and sixty-five dollars for three months. They get low impressions, relatively, and if they need favors, we’re going to have to charge them for the time we spend fixing their ads or something. Then we go all the way up to the PetsMarts or Nintendos, or Targets or Old Navys, who want to do ad buys, they want to be on our homepage, in our newsletter and each one of those gets priced out and that’s why you really need the inside ad sales because it’s a lot of back and forth, it could take three months to get a deal that may turn into a quarterly deal… so that that’s what’s made all the difference for us.

SD: Thanks for giving our listeners that insight. Do you have any other jewels, any other little doggie bones?

TR: Adsense or other third party ad schemes never really made any money for us. Affiliate programs never really made money for us. We thought okay, if we put a dog bed on the homepage and it’s half price and there’s free shipping right now, a lot of people buy it, and we’ll get a dollar for every one. Well, we sold two. All week long on the home page, turns out people who are coming to look at dogs aren’t really into buying a dog bed.

Turns out just because you’re a dog lover, doesn’t mean you want a third dog bed, just because it’s half price and free shipping. You probably want to feel it and make sure your dog likes it, so affiliate programs are hard, bounty programs are hard, referral programs are hard … Some people do amazing with them - Plentyoffish made nine hundred and forty thousand dollars in two months on just Adsense ads doing a free dating site, but for the rest of us it’s very elusive. We made the mistake of assuming that we’d be making a lot of money just by selling third party ads. Never came close to materializing!

SD: Ted, really appreciate your time. I wish all of you that are listening here have the chance to meet Ted, he’s a blast and you should check out Dogster and Catster!

TR: Thank you very much for having me. If anyone wants to say hello, I’m at ted at dogster.com

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