And he invests in startups including DanceJam and the company behind ICanHasCheezburger? Alex, that’s a lot of background. He’s also the founder of, the leading social network for car enthusiasts. I’m the founder of home of the ambitious upstart, and today’s guest is Alex Algard, the founder of one of the biggest sites you’ve probably never heard of, or never think about, WhitePages, the people directory that he founded in his dorm room, and today, according to ComScore, is the 39th most visited site on the internet. Here’s the interview:Īndrew: Hey everyone it’s Andrew Warner. And thank you Wufoo, for sponsoring my work. Grasshopper is the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs love, because we can use our current phones with it, and we can manage the whole thing online, on the web. In fact I could also add a field that says, let’s do that, “What can I do to improve? How would you make this better?” “How would you improve this interview?” Just like that, I have another field on my form, and I can take this whole form embed it in the interview you just saw, and get feedback froown store online, and start to bring in some revenue with your website. I can take this form, embed it in my website, make it look like my site, and start getting feedback from you on what I can do to improve my work. Now I like it displayed all in one row, so let’s do that side by side and there it is. Let’s add a bunch of these, so people can rate a 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and hopefully a lot of people will be rating it a 10. First field is 1, second is 2, give it a third. I’m going to go into “Add a field,” and I want a multiple choice field, but I can add all kinds of other fields and what I’ll do is, I want people to rate my work from 1 to 10, so let’s do that. So what I’ll do is I’ll make the form name into, “Rate today’s interview.” I don’t want a description underneath it, so I’ll get rid of that. So here’s a blank form on Wufoo and I can customize it. Listen and tell me what you think.Īndrew: Alright before we get started, I think the best way to introduce you to my new sponsor Wufoo is to show you how I use Wufoo to get feedback from audiences like you, on my work. At this point, you probably want details. Today, the company makes about that much in sales every week.Īlong the way, Alex has launched the top car social network and has invested in tech startups. He didn’t even incorporate until 2000, around the time he made his first million dollars. For revenue, he used a freelance salesman. His next challenge was bring in users, but the great domain name helped with that. He made a deal with another web site to allow him to pull their data in real-time. He didn’t have the infrastructure to find, store and serve up data on his new site, but he found a way around it. So Alex was able to negotiate a price of just $900 for it. He only had $1,100 in the bank, but because it was 1996, even the domainer who owned WhitePages didn’t realize how valuable the domain was. Alex Algard was still a student when he had the idea to create a web version of the old white pages.
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