Summary: James Hong on Understanding People, Selling Hot or Not, and Balancing Business and Family James Hong (@JHong) is an entrepreneur turned investor. James and several co-founders started Hot or Not in 1999, a website that let users rate user-submitted pictures. “Today, you see pictures of people all over the place, on Instagram, on social networks and so on. It's not as big a deal today,” says James. In the early 2000’s it was a very big deal. After a single week, the site reached an average of nearly 2 million page views a day. Within a year, the site was a top-25 advertising domain according to NetNielsen Rating’s. “It's a very human thing to want to look at people and also to show yourself off.” Instead of focusing on what’s worked in the past when building a product or starting a company, James works to increase his understanding of the people who will become the company’s customers. “When you want to study a product, fundamentally what you're doing is you're trying to study users and try to understand users. To understand them, I think you have to understand people; users are people.” Entrepreneur Cory Levy (After School, Internapalooza) spoke with James Hong on OFF RCRD about Hot or Not, his transition from entrepreneur to investor, and what other young entrepreneurs should focus on when starting a business. “If they want to come up with good products, they should think about psychology and try to understand people, try understand users, what they like, what they don't like and why,” says James, who has gone on to invest in over 80 companies after selling Hot or Not. Listen here to the full episode and come back each Tuesday for new episodes of OFF RCRD. Connect with us on Twitter @OFFRCRD.
