Talk | reboot9
Lessons from a social entrepreneur
Insights from Magnatune, BookMooch, and other free culture projects I've run
Over the years, I've run many different projects, from the open-music-record-label "Magnatune" to "never buy a book again" BookMooch, as well as "Lyris", a commercial software company I founded and grew to 50 people before selling it.
I'll present some of the lessons I've learned (both things to do, and things to avoid) from my experiences
Here are four lessons learned from my most recent project, BookMooch bookmooch.com - I'll be presenting more at reboot.
1) Offend people's pride to motivate them to action: BookMooch's 1st-pass machine translations of the site from English to 7 other languages produced translations that I knew would be offensive to native speakers, and the wiki-style correction mechanism allowed them to express their offense by correcting it. But, if I hadn't done the machine translation and mangled their language, very few people would have bothered to translate the site from English to their language.
2) People read a LOT more when books ownership is "liquid". I had an interview with the LA Times Newspaper a few days ago, the writer doing the story said her 11 year old daughter has read 20 books in the past 3 weeks because of BookMooch. The average BookMooch member trades three books a month, and that's growing 28% per month (ie, people are rapidly scaling up the amount of time they spend reading)
3) Mooch & Smooch: books are a great indicator of personality and interests, and so worldwide friendships and romance can be fed on the fertile ground of a book exchange
4) Capitalism-free-spaces : people are sick of all human relationships being assessed in terms of money, and embrace alternative human ecosystems
