The reluctant entrepreneur

Simon Wright is the 28-year-old founder of the very successful website Whirlpool.net.au. Whirlpool makes almost no revenue, has no employees and isn’t even a company, Wright says. Instead it will remain his hobby. 

He explains to Amanda Gome how he built the Whirlpool community, what makes forums work, and why he won’t commercialise his business.  

Amanda Gome: What niche did you see when you started Whirlpool?

Simon Wright: It was back in 1998. I was only straight out of high school and there was all this exciting new technology on the horizon about faster internet access. Back in those days everyone had dial up, unless you were a company, and I figured let’s collate a little bit of the information about what’s available in broadband. The initial site was absolutely nothing special, a blog by today’s standards would have been fancy. But it grew quite organically from very modest beginnings.

It’s really an example of the long tail, isn’t it? One very specific area attracted quite a lot of interest. So did you just build a community of internet buffs or was it wider? Did business people come to find out about broadband?

It’s interesting you say long tail. It was certainly long tail originally, but to abuse the metaphor, I climbed up that long tail along with the industry. Broadband is now an extremely mainstream topic. So I was able to ride the growth of broadband from the long tail into the mainstream.

How did your content change?

The original service of Whirlpool was just to collate a little bit of information; there was not really much available at the time. Now there was some fairly useful information that people who wanted to get the most out of that internet connection would have benefited from. And it was nice to have that collated.

How did you build your community?

The community was built largely because in the earliest days the community by definition was very small. We’re talking only thousands of people in Australia on broadband, an absolutely minuscule number. And these people are all technology enthusiasts; these are first adopters.

There was a natural tendency for these people to find a common point on the internet to discuss these matters, and it just so happened that Whirlpool, certainly within a couple of years, met most people’s need in terms of being that outlet.

So you say you’ve got a million impressions a day or maybe 150,000 uniques a month, but you don’t really measure. You haven’t really thought to commercialise Whirlpool. Why not?

I don’t spend much time thinking about it. Largely because the potential for what Whirlpool could be, were it commercialised, kind of depresses me – (that’s why) I haven’t done it.

Well, that’s a good reason to do it.

Well yes and no. As a non-commercial entity, Whirlpool does give me a few things. For example, it gives me a hobby.

You could take up stamps; stamps are not going to make you some money, but this might.

I don’t understand people who collect stamps, but then again businesspeople don’t understand why I run a forum. But it gives me an outlet for a little bit of technology creativity. It gives me free reign in an environment where I can sharpen my skills for use in the business world.

Certainly a lot of what I’ve learnt about search engine optimisation, about community building, about optimisation and the running of a relatively large website, translates directly into skills that I’ve been able to benefit from.

But they’re not business skills, they’re operational skills.

Sorry. When I say business skills I mean skills that I could use within a business environment as opposed to those within Whirlpool.

But why not bring in some business expertise and build it up at this stage?

Because it changes the equation. Were Whirlpool to become a company to be monetised and have people expect money at the end of the day – although it is not a bad thing and for most people it’s a good thing – it just changes what Whirlpool is to me.

From being something that I can play around with, that I can try something really interesting or really silly – sure I have a responsibility to the people who appreciate the site’s existence to make sure the site works, that it satisfies its role as a community for people interested in technology. But if I wanted to do something that could be risky, I don’t have to justify it to anyone.

I’m sorry, I want to go on to other things, but I do want to point out you’ll still be able to do all of that. You’re just bringing in businesspeople to help build the business around it, you wouldn’t change. That’s the beauty of that.

Oh sure, and I do have some very quiet murmurings with a few people which might allow the best-of-both-worlds approach.

The other worry is if don’t develop it or build it….has growth slowed or is it still building?

I think growth has largely peaked. That’s not because I think I’ve given up on it. It’s more because I’ve reached, I don’t know what the business guys call it, market capitalisation (critical mass)?

I’ve basically reached as many people in Australia who might be interested in the topics. If I wanted to expand Whirlpool, I could do that by broadening the scope of discussion, take the concept and deploy in New Zealand, and deploy in some other countries.

It’s been more than once that someone has come up to me and said “Hey Whirlpool’s great, I’m in New Zealand. Could I take what you’ve done and deploy it or could you deploy something here for us?” I’ve been reluctant to do so largely because if I’m not making money out of it, then it’s just one more hassle.

But you would make money, if you did it properly. You’d set it up as a sort of franchise and you’d licence it out.

It sounds so easy.

It is easy. I’m sure you’ll have a lot of entrepreneurs telling you how easy it is. Now what are some of the best tips you have for building the community, particularly through your forums?

A very simple common sense rule is, don’t let people talk in an empty room. So when I see a new forum start up, often they will think of every topic of discussion that might occur in this forum and set up areas for that discussion.

If they’re talking about say pets, they might set up 12 different forums for dogs and cats and geese and hamsters, and then separate forums for buying, separate forums for complaining about shops, and separate forums for goodness knows what.

And so what should you do?

What happens there, you make your place feel emptier than is necessary. So if you only start off with just a few areas and consolidate that discussion, then people will get a sense of a community. They’ll feel like they’re talking in an environment where people are listening. No one wants to talk in an empty room.

How do consolidate the environment?

Don’t set up 30 forums when three will do.

So do you go out and tell people that it’s a topic at this time, to come and chat? In the early days, how often were you in there yourself? What did you do to drive it?

In the early days? Yeah sure I would participate in the discussion. The important thing for people who are running a forum is to try and avoid answering everyone’s questions.

So let’s say you do have a forum about pets and you know everything about every pet, you could be really useful to people. What incentive is there for someone who also happens to know a great deal about dogs, to come in and really be helpful?

So often the role in a forum is to make it useful to people by answering some questions, by ensuring there is an incentive for people to come along to provide the answers themselves.

Too often corporate forums that are set up to, for example, provide support for a product and service, get a bunch of staff members from their company to answer every question.

And that’s fine, but if you’re not too precious about it, why not leave a few simple obvious questions alone for a couple of hours and see if the community will answer the question for them. They’ll get a better experience as a result.

I mean definitely don’t let the community interact on their own. But as a value, if I’m going into the Ford forums let’s say, and I have a question about my car, sure I want to know that there is someone there from Ford that’s going to be listening and provide an answer, but at the same time if I ask “how do I program a radio station into the stereo”, if I get an answer from someone who happens to own that car, that’s great; and maybe they might even have a trick about how to do it quickly.

Or explain it better.

They’ll explain it in language that’s more human than what might otherwise be copy-and-paste out of a manual.

Now you’ve had a few run-ins of course with the telecommunication providers, particularly Telstra. How do you deal with defamation issues on your site, when somebody in a forum is defamatory or extremely critical?

I actually have not had many problems from many of the ISPs. Most ISPs appreciate Whirlpool’s existence and certainly will not engage Whirlpool in a legal sense. In Telstra we’ve never had any official negative or even unofficial or direct contact with Telstra that wasn’t amicable or positive in some way.

Whirlpool’s there to facilitate discussion, it doesn’t have an agenda. There are a couple of ISPs that think Whirlpool has an agenda and there’s not much I can do to stop that. Most of the legal problems that we’ve had have been about surprisingly unrelated issues.

It’s the funny ones that come up that you think “god I would never have predicted that one”.

The genesis, the seed of almost every single legal issue we’ve had comes from having critical discussions on Whirlpool being second or third in a Google search for some company.

And if you’re a company and you’re not well known, that actually could be death to that company. If you’re looking for accounting software you might type the name of the accounting software into Google and the second result is a thread full of people complaining that the product doesn’t do what it says, you’re probably not going to buy that product.

So what do they do? Do they ask you to remove it?

Well yes, they ask to remove it and we say unfortunately for you this is legitimate discussion. We’ll certainly remove things that have personal attacks or abuse in them. If somebody is calling the owner of a company something inappropriate, absolutely we remove that stuff because that’s not what Whirlpool’s about. But if someone’s saying something negative about a product, even if it’s not broadband, well that’s kind of what Whirlpool’s about.

And then what does the company do? Do they then try and move you off page one?

Oh they might do that as well. What they start doing is “lawyer SEO”. They will find every page that is negative about them and send threatening letters from their lawyers.

What do you do with those?

Most of them you completely ignore because they have no basis in legal reality. Generally the defamation law in Australia is actually quite kind to publishers as long as you are talking about businesses.

So has anyone taken that further?

Oh yes, the most well known case which hit the mainstream media was a case involving a company making accounting software called 2Clix. These guys had exactly the situation I described earlier, the second and third results for their company name on Google were some harshly critical discussions on Whirlpool.

They wanted these threads removed, we said no. They initially threatened us with defamation, which they can’t, so then they ended up suing us for injurious falsehood. In defamation all of the responsibility is on the defendant to prove that it’s not defamatory. With injurious falsehood, the bar is set a lot higher, and the responsibility is on the plaintiff to prove their case.

So what happened?

What happened was trial by media, and they pulled out and since then the company has gone bust.

But did it cost you?

Yes, we had some costs.

How much money has gone into Whirlpool? How much money have you personally put into Whirlpool?

None, aside from my time, which if I charged with the same rate that I do it from nine-to-five would probably be quite a lot.

So who is behind Whirlpool?

Basically I started the site way-back-when. I had a very good friend of mine who is basically my right hand man, who is Phil Sweeney. He maintains the news feed, he helps me with the programming, and he maintains the ISP directory.

So how many employees are there?

It’s not a company, so there are no employees.

So it’s a hobby.

So I was very literal when I said hobby. There’s probably about two dozen who have elevated privileges on Whirlpool to moderate discussions and to provide advice.

Who do it for nothing?

We all do it for nothing because we love it and it’s actually part of the interesting conundrum of commercialising Whirlpool. These people do it for nothing, and it’s odd to say, but the outcome is better than it could be if Whirlpool was a company with employees.

Everything is simple at the moment and it really works. Take 2Clix legal case. I have a couple of guys on my team who are quite well versed in the relevant legal matters. And they have provided me with an amazing amount of advice and if I was Whirlpool corporation asking for the same advice…

You’d pay hundreds of thousands…

And rightly so. And these guys, sure they’re lawyers for their day jobs but they have the same motivation as I have or any of moderators have – that this place is alright – it would nice to see it stick around and be a great place for people.

You’re now working full time developing applications for mobiles for a start up company. Why are you doing that?

It’s a new challenge. Awhile ago Apple released the iPhone which was a really interesting product. Nine months ago Apple released SDK, which allowed people to make applications for it. It’s basically a new environment for deploying content, for commercialising ideas, for getting your stuff out there. And mogeneration (Wright works full time for mogeneration) was set up to build a lot of the interesting stuff that’s going to come out on the iPhone.

So what are you working on?

Most of the stuff that I’m working on at the moment is commercial in confidence. I recently finished work for a client, a language translator called Lingopal. It’s an audio phrasebook that is entirely contained on the phone. Just about every language that you’re probably ever going to come across, and with sound so you can hear how it’s spoken or play to the person you’re conversing with.

You’ve got your own business which is a hobby. You’re making a little bit of revenue from Google AdWords, but that’s all. And now you’re working full time for someone else. Does that ever stick in your gut a little bit?

Not really.

You’re still only 28.

Absolutely, it starts with that. I also don’t like being cooped up at home. I want the opportunity to do interesting things. I like working with people, I like doing stuff I haven’t done before and I like doing things that matter. So I think that Whirlpool matters absolutely, but that’s not the only thing that’s out there.

We’re making products that will be greatly appreciated by clients and customers. I loved when Lingopal was released into the App Store to see a whole bunch of really positive five star reviews. That’s what I do it for. Not so much for five star reviews, but it’s nice to build something and see someone has used it.