Aardvark case study from #sllconf by Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz

April 2010
Damon Horowitz
dhoro@google.com
Max Ventilla
mventilla@google.com, @ventilla

Our Product

Web Search is great for objective questions, but subjective questions generate the majority of search revenues
Queries
X00B/yr
Search quality
Examples
RPMs
What is Einstein’s birthday?
~45%
Objective
Great
Low
How much is the cheapest iPhone?
What’s a decent housekeeping service in SF? How much should it cost for a small two bedroom place?
~30%
Research
What’s a good book to read about Romantic Poets?
~25%
Opinion
High
Ok

Friends can answer subjective questions but…
Unreliable -- small number of friends available to you in the moment
Hard to keep up with what your extended network knows about
Social cost of asking for a favor

Aardvark is a new type of social search

Why social search?
Users want personalized responses to questions
Most content is still locked in peoples' heads
Each individual’s network is growing exponentially
Social intimacy makes information actionable
Questions about how to spend your time and money are subjective and highly lucrative

Our Principles

Startups take a while…

…and they generally fail
“In a startup, the chance of anything good is always under 50%”
-Mike Cassidy (Ruba) .

Minimize Risk
Maximize Trials
Be Patient

Our Timeline

Conception0.5 Years
Picked a problem
Prototyped in serial
Abandoned

Rekkit - A service to collect your ratings from across the web and give better recommendations to you.
Ninjapa - A way that you could open accounts in various applications through a single website and manage your data across multiple sites.
The Webb - A central number that you could call and talk to a person who could do anything for you that you could do online.
Web Macros - A way to record sequences of steps on websites so that you could repeat common actions, even across sites, and share "recipes" for how you accomplished online tasks.
Internet Button Company - A way to package steps taken on a website and smart form-fill functionality. People could encode buttons and share buttons a la social bookmarking.

Implementation1 Year
Raised seed financing
Wizard of Oz testing
Recruited core team

Full Human Judgment
Constrained Actions
Automation
Rote Tasks
Action with Approval
Prediction
Logging
February 2009
June 2009
August 2009
September 2009

Refinement1 Year
Raised series A
Extensive refinement
Tripled team

The goal is eventual
product / market fit
Focus on acceleration

Our Process

Maximize the quantity and impact of trials
Process is king

Process: Assume that you are wrong
Make continuous improvement the goal
Experiment with process as much as product
Hire and indoctrinate to support process

Learning: exploit collective wisdom
Task people to collect and disseminate learning
Set aside regular time for discussion
Make transparency the default

Thank You
White paper on Aardvark Social Search (vark.com/aardvarkfinalwww2010.pdf)
How we do qualitative user research at Aardvark (http://blog.vark.com/?p=314)
Our approach to design and development processes (http://blog.vark.com/?p=49)
Preaching User-Driven Design (http://ventilla.posterous.com/preaching-user-driven-design)

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Aardvark case study from #sllconf by Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz

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