Web Masters

What do archaeology and cookie recipes have in common? In truth, not much. But that didn't stop a group of archaeology graduate students from the University of Washington from joining together to create CookieRecipe.com. CookieRecipe grew so popular that the grad students started building other similar sites, like PieRecipe.com, CakeRepice.com, ChickenRecipe.com, and ThanksgivingRecipe.com.

Eventually, their network of recipe sites got so popular that they decided to combine it into one site for all their recipes. They called that site Allrecipes.com, and it's still still one of the most popular recipe websites in the world.

On this episode of Web Masters, one of those archeology grad students shares the story of how he and his friends built Allrecipes. His name is Carl Lipo, and, despite helping build an enormously popular website, he decided to stick with archaeology, and he's now an archeology professor.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Everyone is familiar with the 1 to 10 numeric grading scale used to describe people’s attractiveness. A supermodel might be described as “a perfect 10,” while “a 1” is basically the ugliest person you could ever imagine.

In the early 2000s, a couple of college buddies in Silicon Valley decided to turn that concept into a website. It was called HOTorNOT.com. On HOTorNOT, brave people who wanted an honest measure of their attractiveness would upload pictures of themselves, and other users of the website would grade their hotness on a ubiquitous 1 to 10 numeric “hotness” scale.

Within days of launching, HOTorNOT became a massive, viral hit. Millions of people from around the world were logging onto HOTorNOT.com to judge the attractiveness of others, and the site soon became one of the most popular and heavily trafficked websites on the Internet.

On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the story of how -- and why -- James built it, as well as how people responded to what was perhaps the most superficial site on the Internet.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

As the ShareFile name implies, it's a software for sharing, storing, and otherwise managing files in the cloud. It's not a particularly unique service. In this episode, you'll hear ShareFile's founder, Jesse Lipson, mention some familiar competitors -- companies like Dropbox and Box and YouSendIt. Though, to be fair, in 2005, when the company launched. these types of services weren't so common. Still, cloud file management isn't exactly an obscure niche, meaning, there are a decent number of companies playing in the space, which makes for a challenging, competitive environment.

However, despite that challenging environment, Jesse managed to bootstrap his company to an impressive exit over the course of six years.

Bootstrapping enterprise SaaS apps isn't common. And it isn't easy, either. On this episode of Web Masters, we're going to hear how Jesse did it.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Most founders are lucky if they build one organization that changes the world. Mitch Kapor has done it multiple times. And he's supported dozens more through venture backing and philanthropy.

On this episode of Web Masters, Mitch talks about his experiences building Lotus Software, the digital world's first massively scaling software company. He followed that by launching the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help protect innovators and entrepreneurs experimenting in the digital space. And he's gone on to support dozens of other world-changing organizations including the Mozilla Foundation, creators of the Firefox Web browser.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Before social media websites became our feeds of information from around the Internet, people relied on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to build their own feeds of content from different websites. While this was a great way for consumers to keep updated on what their favorite sites were producing, it wasn't so great for the sites themselves. Lots of their readers were viewing content through RSS feeds, which meant less site visitors and less money from advertisers.

The FeedBurner team helped solve that problem. FeedBurner allowed websites with continuously updating content (i.e. blogs, news sites, etc.) to monetize on people who subscribed to their sites using RSS.

In this episode of Web Masters, one of FeedBurner's co-founders, Matt Shobe, shares the story of helping build FeedBurner while helping us understand what the Internet was like back when you could "reach the end" of it thanks to your RSS feed.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Scott Heiferman was the featured guest on Web Masters Episode #80. In that episode, we heard about how Scott built Meetup, the pioneering website for helping people find their local communities. But that wasn't the only popular website Scott built. He also built Fotolog.

Fotolog was a social media website where people posted and shared their photos online for their friends to view in their feeds. In other words, it was basically Instagram. But it appeared nearly a decade before Instagram.

Fotolog never quite achieved the same global status as Instagram, but it was one of the most popular websites in lots of countries around the world. On this episode of Web Masters, Scott talks about what it was like building Fotolog alongside Meetup and how it grew into a popular cultural phenomenon of its own.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

We all know the Internet is a great place for connecting with people anywhere in the world who share the same interests and passions, but can it also be a great place for getting connected with people in your local comunity? The guest in this episode of Web Masters thought it could be. It's Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup.

What began as a project to help Scott better connect with his New York City neighbors in the wake of the September 11th tragedy quickly grew into the world's biggest online community for finding people in your local area interested in the same things. In this episode of Web Masters, Scott explains how (and why) he started Meetup, how he grew it, and, ultimately, where he sees it going as the world continues moving away from IRL communities and toward a metaverse.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Hard as it may be to remember now, there was a time when every song we wanted to listen to wasn’t available to stream instantly. Instead, we had to own physical copies. First came the record, then the tape, then the CD.

However, in the late 90s, a new encoding technology was developed that allowed near-CD-quality music to exist in a relatively small file format. The format was called MP3. You’ve surely heard of it.

As MP3s grew in popularity, Michael Robertson decided to buy the domain name “MP3.com.” He wasn’t buying the domain because he was interested in the music industry. He was buying it because he owned a file search engine called Filez.com, and he thought he could use the surging popularity of MP3s to direct traffic to his startup. However, when he launched a website on MP3.com, thousands of people started showing up, and he knew he needed to capitalize on the opportunity.

Ultimately, Michael built a service people could use to stream their music collections online. That doesn’t sound unique today, but Michael launched MP3.com in the late 1990s, and, at the time, no other streaming service existed. The uniqueness of MP3.com made it wildly popular with consumers. It also made MP3.com the target of a lot of animosity from the powerful recording industry.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Not every online dating website needs to be for everyone. At least, that's what Andrew Conru believed. Rather than creating a single dating website and expecting everyone to join it -- which was the strategy of dating mega-site Match.com -- Andrew took a different approach to online dating. He launched a network of dating websites, each with their own theme designed to serve a specific niche of users.

Most well-known among those dating websites was Adult FriendFinder, the Internet's original "hookup" website. But Adult FriendFinder was just one site in a much larger network that Andrew grew into an enormous business. Unfortunately for Andrew, running the company took a huge mental toll, and he eventually had to sell it.

But the new owners mismanaged FriendFinder, plunging the company into debt and almost ruining it.

On this episode of Web Masters, not only will you hear how Andrew created FriendFinder, you'll learn about the unique way Andrew responded to another company nearly ruining the thing he built.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Most people can’t imagine a form of the Internet that doesn’t involve the World Wide Web. In fact, the World Wide Web and the Internet are so deeply entwined that the majority of users don’t even realize there’s a difference. But that’s only because the World Wide Web was the winning technology. In the early days of the Web – i.e. the early 1990s – it was competing with other, similar technologies. In fact, some of those other technologies were significantly more popular.

The most popular of those competitive technologies was called Usenet. And, just like the Web, Usenet users needed a way to search. That's why Steve Madere built Deja. Deja was the search engine for Usenet, and had things gone a little different in Internet history, we might have been talking about "deja-ing" to find what we need instead of "googling."

In this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the story of how Steve built Deja and how it could have been as impactful as Google.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.