Dream It - Build It with Linh Dao Smooke - Chief Operating Officer at Hacker Noon (P2)

Dream It - Build It is a series where the Vietnam Tech Society invites high-profile and successful Vietnamese leaders to inspire Vietnamese students and professionals. We want to show you that everything is possible, you just have to dream it and go build it.

Speaker: Linh Dao Smooke - Chief Operating Officer at Hacker Noon

Hacker Noon is built for technologists to read, write, and publish. We are an open and international community of 15,000+ contributing writers publishing stories and expertise for 3,000,000+ curious and insightful monthly readers.

This transcript has been condensed, translated and edited for clarity. Full interview can be found here. This is the second part of the interview here. Find the first part of interview here.

Can you share with us about the partnership with Coil? How does it benefit Hacker Noon?

Two years later, now we're at a point where we want to take Hacker Noon further. One of the things that we have been thinking about from day one is how we could reward writers. As I mentioned earlier, we don't charge writers or readers or anyone to be on  Hacker Noon, but we also have not paid writers. A lot of people have asked us about when Hacker Noon ever got to the point of rewarding writers for what they do. I think partnering with Coil was a good direction to provide a web monetization solution to writer's being on Hacker Noon. If you go on any Hacker Noon writer's profile page, you will see a little sentence that says people have spent X amount of time on Hacker Noon. That is the money. Because if you spend one hour, I think Coil stream is like 36 cents, if you spend like two hours, that's like 36 times two. I have generated like a month of breeding time. The amount of money would be small, to begin with, and this is not going to be a financially sustainable way for writers to quit their job and be on Hacker Noon. However, this is a very important first step in basically putting some kind of value, not just distribution value on people's time and effort, for writers on Hacker Noon. The first thing we're going to do for anyone that doesn't install this web monetization solution on their profile is to pull it all together in one big fund called the back to the internet pool which will be used for donation to charity. We're not in the business to capitalize on writers' earnings, as part of our revenue. What we do want to do is encourage even if the earning is small, to begin with, you still can do something cool with the earning itself such as to donate to a charity that better the internet. That’s the nature of their relationship with Coil, and they have been awesome, like amazing people to work with. Chief of Growth Officers who used to be the CFO at Imgur, which is this very large community of imaging solutions, will join me and David on the Hacker Noon board. So his expertise and his insight into the growing community of millions of creators will strengthen our position in this industry. We are happy to have Jonathan with us.

How to compete with other websites, like Medium, Quora, and Twitter? What is Hacker Noon value proposition ?

The umbrella philosophy we have with Hacker Noon is that we don't have to be a zero-sum game with all these awesome fights in the world to make the internet and content more accessible. It shouldn't be a zero-sum game. The more people want to publish on just the internet in general, the better it is for everyone involved. In terms of our unique value proposition, I think we are very niched. So we publish technologists. Some people might have a personal blog, but a lot of them traditionally do not have the strongest and loudest voice in blogging or telling a story. It's generally the founder of the marketing professionals of that company who would do the job. Whereas software developers, like the actual people who do the coding, would do the job of building the thing, and they don't get to tell the story from their perspective very often. 

Another advantage is we don't publish breaking news and headline-grabbing stuff, which is very, very prevalent in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries. We do opinions and in-depth analysis on the industry, like the opinions of the expert. Most of the narratives on the world today are shaped either by journalists, who like professional writers, or the extremely influential people influencers. The little, vague, good, but not that famous, software developer from Amazon wouldn't have that same gravitas when it comes to telling this story. I think it's a very unique thing that we are trying to achieve in amplifying the voice of technologists and professionals the way I was able to do.

What is your vision for Hacker Noon five years from now?

The most ideal scenario for us right now is not to have to raise more money. It is a little bit intuitive for some startups to think about keeping grabbing VC money and doing all of these things to optimize and capitalize on growth, and maybe like cash out. That's a viable path for a lot of startups, but I don't think it's viable or ideal for us. And let me explain why we have never got any VC money. Because once you get VC money, a lot of the time, they're going to control the decisions and the strategies that you make in your company. Right now, David, and I still own the, by far the majority shares in this company 75% and 12%, which is the ownership of the crowdfunding also goes to David, because most of the crowd funders defer their voting rights to the CEO, as part of the crowdfunding. We have, like the destiny of this company is in our head, and it's really hard for us to get that up. We don't want to be a company that's like someone else's child. Getting the seeds and raising a lot of money would not be our next path, not to say that we would like to rule that out 100%. 

The best solution to not having to raise more money is to be a profitable enough business, which is the oldest model of a business. You have made enough money to cover your expenses. To do that, we have to improve all aspects of the company from editorial to product as a software company. Now, we build our content management system. Everything you see on Hacker Noon is coded by our developers. We have to improve our product, increase the rate of publishing, and make sure to get enough sponsors for our company that we don't have to raise more money. That would be the medium term, hopefully, we can achieve that by 2021. 

There are so many directions that we can go as a software and a publication in the five-year term. One way would be to license out of the software, we have a very proprietary good system that is good enough for 1000s of people to submit stories. We get anywhere from 50 to 100 submissions per day, and the editorial team only accepts about 60% of them. The proprietary software is good, it's able to withhold a lot of traffic and to make sure that a contributor can submit the stories and the editor can review the story and can publish the story. That kind of a platform, maybe is also of desire for many niches, not just tech industry only, for example, fitness, health. Another way I think we could go with the current cryptocurrency blockchain world is to tokenize the reading time or whatever is going on for every single reader. That’s a very lofty and very ambitious goal. And for that to happen, we probably have to raise a lot of money. At the end of it, we might be at the forefront of internet 3.0, we might be the first sites to be able to reward every single action of the reader and the writer on this site with a token. I do think that cryptocurrency and blockchain will be the future of the Internet. It will be like the next internet, I think if we can get on that early. 

You often see that in the media landscape which includes consolidation and acquisition. We could be controlled by another bigger company that's having more resources than we do or go on into something else. That's the exit strategy that you know. It's less exciting for me to think about that right now. But it could also be a possibility. I think we're smart enough, me and David, that we can go on to the next stage of our career doing something else as well. 

What do you think about partnership programs, for example, you can provide may be non-monetary incentives to a contributing writer? 

A lot of incentive in the early days, and to this day, for Hacker Noon’s contributors is distribution. We haven't charged anyone to read on Hacker Noon, which explains the traffic that we have early days. To do better for the writers, we just have to be better at distributing their content. That was our thesis, to just increase the rate of publishing and make sure that we promote the stories everywhere. We index the stories, provide good editorial feedback to the story, then whatever they want to get out of publishing on Hacker Noon, they can achieve. 

If you go on the profile, one of the things that we highlight the most is the call to action, for example, book a meeting with me, or like hiring if you're like a professional looking to, to, to get your resume out there. Think of it as publishing blog posts. In recent years we have focused a lot on growing that professional network of people while looking for jobs, transitioning from one career to another, or hiring. They want to put context to their resume including the projects they are working on. So that was our thesis to be better at distribution. 

Now there is another incentive for writers. We do have a small group, a couple of small groups on Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn, all different networks for people to talk to each other. That's like for it to be more sticky, closer to like a traditional social network. We have to make it like a reason for them to come back, maybe making the software more of a collaboration tool. After the end you might want to make the commenters or the readers, more of a collaborator with the story, for example, put annotations to like different concepts or do a very in-depth response to the stories. Maybe we can allow several people to co-author a piece, which has more depth and gravitas for the piece itself. Going into that direction like community editors, and making the experience of happiness more collaborative would be good. It's hard actually to build something that's also a commenting and collaborating, collaborating system, as well as just like a regular publishing thing. You need to understand the users and know what is their reason in the first place to come to this platform and what makes them stay. We're still learning that every single day, but right now our thesis is still making the distribution better, and building a better platform so that they have more reasons to say.

If eventually, Hacker Noon would reach a place where people can probably put it on LinkedIn like, I'm a contributor to Hacker Noon? 

We only have seven full-time people. For part-time people, a lot of our contributors are there already. Their involvement with Hacker Noon is probably a gamification system. Getting all of this fan page shopping and like, screenshotting my stats page or my company getting on Hacker Noons is cool. The question is how do you also gamify the whole software so that people get it. Getting them to the next level requires a lot of gamification going on, and I don't think we have, budget for this. We spend less than 2% of our budget on marketing, just because we have enough. We have 12,000 contributing writers and formulas, we have enough readers that know about the brand. It's still very niche, not like Reddit, or whatever. It is a niche but it's big enough that we haven't had to spend too much on marketing to advertise the value of publishing on Hacker Noon. Once we can bring people over to our platform, to make them stay and make more reasons to keep contributing.

Do you think there'll be one day when Hacker Noon, would also be available in other languages? 

I talked with my husband, David, just before this call about the localization of the app. So right now, traffic is 75% desktop and 25% Mobile. We haven't even gone into the development space of optimizing for mobile traffic yet. Once you have an app, it will be a little bit easier to localize that app into different languages, and we don't necessarily have to go to that rabbit. The site of different localization versions would be different versions of Hacker Noon itself. We do have some pieces like Chinese and Russian or even Vietnamese, but it's like a very, very small portion of the overall Hacker Noon library to do the translation. If you rely on just technology and AI, there is probably another safeguard that checks the quality of the content itself. You probably would have to go to the YouTube model of relying on crowdsource labor. I think the model that a lot of good tech companies do is just to rely on the power of the crowd, a large number of people. I think if we ever get to the point where there's enough interest. Right now, it's like 33%, US traffic, and then 66%, the rest of the world. A lot of those countries speak English as well. I do have some Vietnamese readers, but it's very small, like 2%. So if we ever get to a point where it's global, global enough that we need at least three or four other major languages, we can think seriously about developing apps and technologies or crowdsourcing strategies to make this more friendly internationally.

This is the second part of the interview, find the first part of interview here to learn more about Hacker Noon business model and funding stories here.