Interview With Lachy G Founder Of Uncoverr.com
While Amazon is at the top of their game when it comes to their recommendation engine, nothing beats a good, thorough review of product. In this case, the product is books. Lachy G who is the founder of Uncoverr.com (clever name I think) took the time to talk with me with regards to his project, starting an online venture, the culture books have around them and much more. Before we get started, tell us a little bit about yourself.
My names Lachy, I’m a 14 year old web developer from Australia. I got started about 3 years ago just with HTML and then moved onto coding other peoples sites, and worked up from there to develop PSDtoWordPress.com. Now I’ve just launched www.Uncoverr.com, a book resource for designers and developers.
Speaking of Uncoverr, that’s the site we’ll talking about for the majority of this interview. How did you come up with the name and what is the sites purpose?
Well, I was buying Uncover.org and had everything developed but then the buyer decided to pull out and I couldn’t think of anything else, so Uncoverr it was. The site is basically just a resource for designers and developers to find books in a range of categories, along with author interviews and book reviews. I’m really hoping to get the users to contribute the reviews!
Book reviews. Care to share your monetization strategy with us?
My lack of, more like! It’s basically just Sitepoint and Amazon affiliate links. Had over 350 clicks, guess how many conversions? That’s right, none! It’s really frustrating. I’m going to start doing some A/B testing soon, but hopefully I can get my act together. Sitepoint sponsored me, but this month I opted in for books instead of money, I’m doing a massive contest next week.
So how did you plan the launch of Uncoverr? Have you seen the results you were expecting?
Well, I planned it pretty badly to tell you the truth. I just used my connections with a few blogs to get launch posts. I was expecting 5000+ visitors first day, but it was more like 1000. Next time I think I should get a lot more posts done and leverage social media first day.
How does Uncoverr become a better source for reviews than Amazon itself?
I find that a lot of Amazons reviews are short, 1 paragraph at most, you find the odd one that’s a lot bigger. We show very in depth reviews and usually have an author interview to go along with it. We have a nice easy way to find the books, a lot more thorough than Amazon. You don’t get results that aren’t web development related, because we have only added those types of books.
Books seem to have a culture of their own. For example, one person mentions a book he or she read and someone else chimes in with another. A good reason why book clubs are still popular. Have you been able to tap into that audience to get user participation on the site? Is that something you’re looking into down the road?
We don’t really have the regular audience to have that user participation yet, hopefully we will soon. Later down the road we actually do have plans to start a book club service. A very cheap price and you’ll get 2 books a month along with 1 ebook. We plan to first increase the user participation and get a nice subscriber count.
In the beginning of the interview, you mentioned you were only 14. Pretty young I’d say. Has your age been a restricting factor at all with regards to operating these websites/businesses?
Definitely. I’d love to say it hasn’t, but you get those people that reject you for your age, people that won’t work with you. I never really mention my age to my PSD to WordPress clients just in case! But I don’t think it should let it limit you, in anything other than client work I don’t think it’s much of a factor except for the initial starting money we have and the time we can spend. We have to balance school work, social life and work, gets a bit tough sometimes.
With a good amount of experience already under your belt, what advice can you give those young or old who are thinking about launching their own blog or web business?
Network. Network. Network. It’s not what you know – it’s who you know.
What do you think the future of blogging is?
I think blogging still is going to be the same concept for a long time, but the software involved will get a lot more complex to cater for sites like mine. I think it will be a lot more community oriented and commenting will advance. But apart from that – I’m clueless.
This Interview was published on January 21, 2009 at 3:03 pm • Did you like it? Subscribe!
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