The fol­low­ing are notes I took dur­ing the Com­mu­ni­tyNext con­fer­ence held at the Annen­berg Audi­to­rium at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity in Palo Alto on Feb­ru­ary 10th, 2007.

Jef­frey Kalmikoff and Jake Nick­ell of skin­ny­Corp pre­sented their “patent-pending method for cre­at­ing online awe­some­ness and other cool stuff too”

Mak­ing money was not the inten­tion behind mak­ing Thread­less, except to pay bills. The approach was sim­i­lar to what we felt like when they were kids. For exam­ple, I didn’t ana­lyze whether and why I should skate­board. “I just started skate­board­ing when I was 11 because it ruled”. And 95% of the projects they have done have not and will not make money. They’re just a way of giv­ing back to the com­mu­nity. As time goes by, skin­ny­corp gets more crazy awe­some. Their met­ric is how much fun are they hav­ing … it’s the fun scale. They start projects because they think they will be fun

Thread­less is the exact same idea as when it started. They have just added to it, but not changed it. The com­mu­nity came together, made art and then had some­thing made out of it. It’s only a great idea if it adds to the value and doesn’t change it

Always remem­ber: your project is not good enough. If oth­ers try to be bet­ter than you, then your own aim should be to be bet­ter than you.

How to make money using the “inter­nets”: a crash course brought to you by … skinnycorp:

• There’s “The Awe­some Way”: using tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate some­thing that will make people’s lives eas­ier. For exam­ple, Flickr and 37signals are fun. But LinkedIn is not fun: you justdon’t want to hang out there

• And there’s “The Not Awe­some Way”: iden­tity theft, phish­ing, MySpace (too much advertising)

The Four Commandments:

• Allow your con­tent to be cre­ated by its com­mu­nity. The employ­ees are in the minor­ity because the com­mu­nity is so much big­ger. So just open the door and let users do what they want

• Put your project in the hands of its com­mu­nity. The com­mu­nity sees its feed­back. 40% of all the fea­tures that are added have been sub­mit­ted by the community.

• Let your com­mu­nity grow itself. No adver­tis­ing. For exam­ple, they ran a $1,000 ad once and got a total of 7 sales from it. It just doesn’t work and it’s much bet­ter when users get new users. And their users want to get their design rated.

• Reward the com­mu­nity that makes your project pos­si­ble. They are now pay­ing $2000 for win­ning designs. When they started, they were pay­ing $50. They also give spe­cial prizes for spe­cial projects and pro­mo­tions (ie. Movie pro­mo­tions). As the com­mu­nity gets big­ger, the qual­ity of sub­mis­sions go down, so giv­ing more money keeps up the qual­ity. They will also do a $1M t-shirt prize give­away at some point.

Ques­tion and Answer Session:

How are peo­ple scor­ing the tshirts?

They hide the scores until the scor­ing is over. They look at what peo­ple want beyond just the sim­ple 0 to 5 score (includ­ing blog comments)

How about users get­ting upset with changes?

Neg­a­tive feed­back usu­ally restricted to 24-48hrs and then peo­ple adapt. Exam­ple of their blog design change: users said thread­less was wrong and they opened a thread where there were like 500 com­ments within a cou­ple of days and then they changed what was wrong.

How to keep it fun within company?

They voice opin­ions and have debates. Most peo­ple there are friends.

How to con­trol against fraud?

There’s not an easy way to beat the sys­tem because the sys­tem is sim­ple. Also peo­ple flag the con­tent and they are famil­iar with stock pho­tog­ra­phy. The aver­age win­ning design gets 4000 votes.

Donat­ing $1m to charity?

Thread­less donated $100,000 to Kat­rina. It’s a tricky issue because it’s hard to give money and not get slighted for not favor­ing another wor­thy cause.

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