Otis Chandler walked into his friend’s apartment and saw a large stack of books. He was able to have a conversation with that friend about the books and what he thought of them. He walked out of the conversation with 5 new recommendations. He thought it would be great if there was a website where you could see all your friends bookshelves and hear their thoughts and opinions on certain books

Otis purchased the domain and naming rights for the site and launched a rough version. He did all of the coding and soft wear programing himself and his wife Elizabeth wrote all the copy. The name of the website was called Goodreads and it was a social network for book lovers. People had the ability to see what their friends are reading and their opinions.

In 2007, the site received funding estimated at $750,000 from angel investors. An angel investor is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. In this year GoodReads also hit 100,000 users with no extra employees

After Otis obtained the money from the angel investors, he hired his first employees. The roles he hired ranged from librarians who fact checked and edited all of the catalogs, to soft wear developers who did the coding work. Every time the advertisement revenue got big enough to afford another developer, they hired another one. Otis purchased the first office space for the employees in downtown Los Angeles.

As GoodReads continued to grow at a steady pace, Otis started to seek out more investment opportunities. He was approached by a book publishing company called Random House to do a $10,000 advertising campaign. Goodreads also received $2 million dollars from True Ventures which is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early stage technology startups.

In 2013, Otis and Elizabeth Chandler decided to sell their business. At this point in time, GoodReads had reached 10 million users and 35 employees. For years, Amazon had been approaching Otis to a possible acquisition. Otis decided to agree to the proposition so he could move onto another creative venture. GoodReads was sold for $150 million.

In October 2010, GoodReads opened its application programming interface, which enabled developers to access its ratings and titles. This allowed for two or more computer programs to communicate with one another. Users had the opportunity to rate their recent reads on a scale of one to five stars.