Keynote: The Story of How Angie's List and Toolbox.com Took User-Generated Content and Created a Successful Community-Driven Business

Angie Hicks, CEO & Founder, Angie's List
Dan Morrison, CEO & Founder, Toolbox.com

Angie's List started offline, in OH, call-in service for referral service, 16 years ago.

Then moved online to 250 cities, outside home improvement sector, to healthcare and other sectors. Get over the back fence comments about services, $6/month fee to join.

Getting to critical mass, biggest challenge?

is listening to Angie's List founder, critical mass challenge was convincing people they had good info that would benefit them #oms09

is Toolbox.com Founder, critical mass = community members giving value to each other, getting users to open up to each other #oms09

Need to create a community that gives them enough value that they want to sign up and participate. Will only want to be members of 1-3 social networks, not 5-10. So setting up a community that gives value is key, make it clear.

Could make it a subscription model, add a job posting service to extend its value? Value of a community is a direct result of who's in it, so Toolbox wanted to remove any bottleneck, paying, to build the numbers to make it a higher value proposition.

Angie's List collects subscriber revenue and ad revenue, can't post anonymously, no gaming the system -- want to ensure quality of posts/premier consumers who are willing to pay for the best information.

Cost per member acquition, lift in target segments based on the campaigns you're rolling out. Was it worth the effort, and was the lift extended over time and not drop off? < Toolbox.com

Add a field to signup forms of how they heard about us to track effectiveness of multiple elements of a campaign, not entirely useful but gives some info about where traffic is coming from in general.