Sriram Krishnan™ Live

I remember watching a video from someone’s blog sometime ago about a one day seminar in Stanford. If I remember correctly, Guy Kawasaki, was the moderator for the panel discussion on social networking sites. The organisers got together a group of young lads (Horornot, Suicide Girls, Hi5, Former Paypal founder Peter Thiel and more) and got them to speak about their experience and so on.

Hotornot caught my eye because they had an extremely simple idea: To create a site that would rate a picture of a person from a scale of 1 to 10. IRL, the conversation goes like this. “Wow, hot guy/girl at your 3 o’clock” “Ah man come on, I give her/him an 8 only”. Initially they wanted to create a window for users to see pictures ‘floating’ or ‘moving’ sideways, sorta like the view one sees from sitting outside a cafe and watching the street (Recollecting vaguely). But James and Jim decided the 1 to 10 was the way to go.

They racked up 40,000 visitors after the first day of launch when they only showed the site to 40 of their close friends. They recently had to make some changes to their business model to compete with new sites that offer similar services. Read more about it.

All I want to say is that a simple idea like this can go a long way…..USD600k a month way. Kudos to these two guys for epitomizing the spirit of Silicon Valley.