An Oral History of RT, Part One: The Beginning
In the first of a three-part series, the founders of RT talk about the site's early days.
Senh: After launching the site, I was burned out working at Design Reactor during the day and Rotten Tomatoes at night. I resigned from Design Reactor and moved back to Sacramento.
Needing help to run the site, he recruited two high school friends, tapping Binh Ngo as editor-in-chief and Bobby Ly to handle internet marketing.
Binh Ngo: I was working in a vet lab back then but I quit to work on RT full time with Senh and Bobby Ly back in 1999. We were working out of Senh's apartment in downtown Sacramento.
After a few months, Rotten Tomatoes and Design Reactor merged, moving into new digs in Emeryville, CA. Fellow Berkeley grads -- and Design Reactor colleagues -- Stephen Wang and Patrick Lee were instrumental in turning Rotten Tomatoes from a good idea into a solid business.
Senh: We decided to concentrate on RT. This was during the internet boom, and we thought RT had more potential then. As soon as we merge, we handed off the design stuff to another company, which we had a stake with.
Paul Lee (marketing manager): I think we always knew that it would be viable, it was just a matter of getting enough users and page views.
Senh: The more advanced features were added later by Stephen and everyone else who worked on the site then. Pat structured RT into a company. Stephen turned the site from static HTML pages into a database-driven dynamic site.
However, in the early days, the site had several problems. The coding was done in a patchwork manner, and some early diehard users felt Rotten Tomatoes had sold out by accepting advertising.
Paul: I remember though that when we started RT, the site had zero revenue. It was all hand-tweaked static HTML. We spent the first year turning it into something that was dynamic, database-driven, and one that supported ads in the design. When we launched the beta with the new design and ads, we got a huge amount of negative feedback. A lot of people were really angry about the presence of ads, and it was my job for a while to respond to all the feedback. One thing is that no matter how angry a person was, if you responded to them in a personalized way, 99 percent of the time, they would write back immediately apologizing for shooting off an angry email, and then expressing surprise and delight that a human being actually answered the letter. I probably spent four to six hours a day for a few months answering feedback, but it just goes to show you that being responsive and attentive goes a long way when most people expect faceless form responses.
Senh: Sometimes I don't think people understand how hard we worked back then. My routine was work, eat lunch at the office, work, play basketball, come home, work, sleep for six hours. Repeat process.
While the formula for calculating the Tomatometer has been the same since RT's inception, there were other paths that the company explored that were ultimately not taken.
Stephen Wang: The formula for calculating the Tomatometer has remained the same throughout. The simple calculation as opposed to methods used on other sites is easy to understand and provides good guidance to people. The original site features are largely intact and everything has been about building on top of the core idea.
Paul: We had this idea that RT could do all kinds of reviews, not just movie reviews. We would have a category for car reviews or maybe restaurants or maybe electronic products. In the end, we had enough challenges that we just stuck to movies, which was probably a good thing. We did later tentatively expand into game reviews, but it never worked nearly as well as movie reviews.
Stephen: It quickly scaled to 250,000 unique visitors in the 16 months between it started and January 2000, when we began working on RT in earnest as a company.
Next: The RT gang navigates the rough waters of the dotcom era
Jen Yamato
Senh is the man. I can't believe how far he took RT!
Jun 23 - 05:54 PM