No Resume, No Problem: Pivoting Towards User Behavior

After years of operating within multiple agencies in the bustle of the NYC metropolitan area, it was time for a novel challenge in a different setting. As luck would have it, I found an information architect gig at the recently acquired startup, Tripod, in the quaint town of Williamstown, Massachusetts. The locals had coined their burgeoning tech hub, “Silicon Village.”

The dotcom era was booming and an entrepreneurial spirit had caught Williamstown squarely.

Tripod had just been purchased by Lycos for more than $50 million dollars, which was a substantial purchase price in 1999. The web page building company became another brand in Bob Davis' portal empire trophy case.

Interestingly enough, though, Tripod didn't begin as a personal publishing domain.

When the founding team flicked on the lights within the Billsville converted cable factory that served as HQ, the intent was to build a business to provide advice for college students and postgraduates, both in print and via the internet. 

DeWitt Clinton, a Williams student and Tripod programming intern in 1996, tells the story like this:

In the beginning — and this tension carried on for years — Tripod was a content company that just happened to use the Internet, as they had a magazine and a book published. Thanks to some clever people like Jeff Vander Clute and Nate Kurz, a few useful tools such as the Resume Builder were built — an interesting synthesis of ideas from the designers, editors, and programmers. Bo was in a position of watching what everyone came up with, rather than intentionally leading them there, saying as much in his recent book. The homepage builder was just one of these organic and surprising inventions.

So when did the tipping point occur, shifting focus to personal publishing and online communities? DeWitt adds more color from a post-acquisition perspective:

The traffic generated by the home pages earned Bo an acquisition, not the editorial content. See the Geocities acquisition just a few months later for evidence.

Bo Peabody, Dick Sabot and Ethan Zuckerman hired super smart developers to stand up their original concept of a novel online resume engine and created a place for community to form within the first iteration of Tripod.com. But a crazy thing happened; people weren't using the product the way the team had envisioned. They were more intent on building their own web pages with the resume builder, as it filled a real need.

People, amirite?

Bo and company had a choice to make: either stick to their origin vision and work against the market forming around their product or pivot to support the needs and desires of their users, abruptly shifting Tripod’s focus to making best of class homepage building tools.

In 1999, advertising was the primary revenue model, and site stickiness determined the value of a company. Bo and Dick saw an opportunity to drive deep engagement with this new approach and it became our job to build the necessary features to establish Tripod as a player.

Personal publishing became the new rallying cry.

By the time I came onboard, Bo was serving his commitment to Lycos, wandering the halls at odd hours as many acquired CEOs might, and corporate refocus was quickening its pace.

My initial charge was to cut community from the UX altogether, shifting focus to a suite of personal publishing tools. The move ostracized a number of the original Tripod folk who had joined the company to form online community, but the data were clear, so we shifted our capabilities and our culture to give the people what they wanted.

To determine how the user experience needed to evolve, I mapped out an exhaustive representation of all pages and features across the domain. My design director and I reviewed the diagram, discussed options, and over the next six months sunset obsolete areas while shipping a complete suite of new publishing tools.

Sliding Doors

About a year into my stint at Tripod I began to question where we were heading as a scooped up start-up. After months of creating useful publishing features, newly framed projects seemed to have less impact, such as Hello Kitty skins for the Angelfire UI. I wondered what might’ve happened if Tripod hadn't been sold to Lycos; if the founders were still in charge and continuing to listen to their members and eager to innovate.

Maybe Technorati would’ve been serving the world of "Tripoders,” rather than "Bloggers."

As things would have it, Lycos was in preparation to close the Silicon Village web factory with the upcoming Terra merger on the horizon, and I wanted no part of working in the corporate park at Waltham. I moved back to Brooklyn, picking up a leadership role at the dotcom consultancy, Xpedior, and Tripod became a lesson for me about listening to users, and a reminder about choices and their consequences.

There's no "right way" to create a viable, useful product; no methodology that’s 100% sound or fool proof. As Bo so eloquently pointed out in his book “Lucky or Smart?” if you can keep your ego in check, viable options will make themselves available in a manner that you can act upon.

A career long lesson.