HOTorNOT Reinvention

James Hong, one of the founders of HOTorNOT has a series of interesting posts about how they are reinventing HOTorNOT to be about more than just dating, and completely scrapping their subscription business model in favour of CPM ads.

In the first post, there’s a sub-heading which reads: “Stop Clinging to the Past and Jump into the Future”. This reminded me of the story from Intel, when it decided to get out the memory game and focus on processors. Apparently Andy Grove and Gordon Moore framed the decision in terms of what a newly appointed management team coming in would do.

One thing I found interesting is that while HOTorNOT is obviously a social networking site (particularly with the Hotlists product), they’re building it so that it works with Facebook without the end user needing to worry about it. A pretty clever tactic, and one that should ensure that the growth of Hotlists won’t stall.

Anyway, here are the links to James’ posts:

• Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part I
• Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part II
• Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part III