Part 1: Strong technology meets the Fools

Hi Kevin, thanks for talking with us. How did your foolish background prepare you to be the Senior Director of Technology of Foolishness at Motley Fool?
I am a congenital geek. I started programming at six years old when my dad brought home a TI Silent 700 terminal. Within a couple of years I had absorbed every manual page I could find, so I turned to an early online community, the BBS world, to further my education in programming and electronics. Eventually I wrote my own BBS software and ran my own system.

Fast forward a couple of decades or so to 1997, when I began my financial education at Fool.com. It took me only days to see the fit, given my background. And so, in February 1998, I ecstatically boarded the ship of Fools. The Fool is a wonderful mélange of everything I love: creativity, self-determination, technology, community and a socially-positive message of self-improvement.

What is the secret to maintaining such a large and diverse site for your customers and community?
Our customers regard us as their trusted advisor on their journey to financial independence, so the top of the pyramid is availability (which is equal parts connectivity and security). In fact, I rank availability and speed well ahead of functionality.

Functionality isn't always a win-win in a competitive feature set market, but site availability is an inviolable requirement. Decompose the Web user experience a bit further and you get "speed" and "simplicity"; the latter falls on the shoulders of our line-of-business managers, and the former belongs to us in the tech group. We have substantial investments in systems management software, data security, connectivity and redundancy.

What impact does good message-thread management and fast online interfacing have in strengthening the community?
The common denominator here is bringing people together and connecting people with information more efficiently. Clear navigation is vital. Our user base is always overjoyed when we add thread management features to the boards. And our Top Nav is our most-reworked application on the site (although most of it's behind the scenes).

As for speed, I mentioned its importance before. We gave faster access to our customers with a product called "FireClick" by a company called "Blue Flame". It provides read-ahead on the client side, anticipating the next click of the dial-up user so (s)he doesn't have wait for the page to download. What a difference that makes!

Other pieces in the puzzle for us were: a content delivery network (in our case, Akamai) that sends users static content from the nearest location to them; a major-rework of discussion boards software to minimize page "weight" (the byte size of the page, which directly affects download time) and optimizing our servers to decrease database access times on the back end.

How much does a community member's opinion count on the site in regard to revisions, etc.?
Virtually every release of our software includes improvements suggested or requested by members of the community. When our users post to the "Improve the Fool" board, they give us a generous gift and they become, themselves, builders of the community. It isn't a perfectly democratic process (no business ultimately can be), but we believe that part of our success derives from making sure our boards fit our customers' needs. I can think of few other businesses who have such a wonderful opportunity to listen to their customers.

Motley Fool's communities are some of the most active online, what is the greatest challenge in keeping the communities "fluid and foolish" so to speak?
Relevance. A community is a group of people who come together for a given purpose. We've grown a lot, last month, Media Metrix counted 2.85 million monthly unique visitors at our site and we have more than two million registered Fools. Fools like our boards because they are relevant and on mission.

We have a "speaker's corner" and "land of off-topic posts" for folks who want to share their individualism, but even there, we draw the line at those who use our educational community for sales pitches and angry screeds.

What is your advice on how to build a community from scratch?
I recall the children's story "Stone Soup", told well by Marcia Brown, in which three hungry soldiers come to a French town. The townsfolk claim that a famine has struck and they turn away the soldiers' entreaties for food.

In turn, the soldiers resolve to make "stone soup", borrowing a cauldron and firewood from the townsfolk. For days, they stir their cauldron of rocks before the first villager approaches and asks, "So, how's that stone soup?" to which one wanderer replies, "Well, it would be fine, but it needs parsley. Sadly, you don't even have any parsley, do you?" And, naturally, the villager replies, "Who doesn't have parsley?" Thus the cauldron begins filling with ingredients, slowly at first, then faster as each villager sees his peers participating.

For me, the story is a foundational business parable: begin small and lead by example, but allow any and all who might productively contribute to join you. In time, you will have made a richer product than any you might have formulated by yourself. To my mind, this is the message online community and perhaps, in a broader sense, entrepreneurship as a whole.

Why is it important to set realistic goals in regard to online communities?
Our customers come to Fool.com for a reason: they want to learn about how to take control of their financial destinies. The Fool's discussion boards arrived at a time when disintermediation in financial services deprived many of the counsel, however valuable it might have been, that full-service brokers and financial planners gave to their clients.

The boards' value proposition is a straightforward one. All participants are theoretically on the same side of the table and, given their number and diversity, they can provide a broader spectrum of opinion and fact than any one professional might. The flip side is that we ask everyone to do their own due diligence.

A "hot tip" on a discussion board is no better (and perhaps worse) than a hot tip in the locker room at the health club. Our community congregates for education, amusement and enrichment. Any who hope to use it for a quick buck will probably be disappointed.

What are some realistic expectations to have in regard to creating and maintaining an online community?
We let the community members tell us what they need. We believe our online community to be one of the best out there because we have evolved it in response to the demands of its participants. If you build a "field of dreams online", leave room to be extensible and flexible. The community must grow as a real-world community might, and as its planner and facilitator, you must make factor these requirements into your designs.

Expect it to grow slowly at first, also. Tom and David Gardner joke that, on the first day of their AOL forums, they received hundreds of posts and, on the second day ... forty-five.

Last, build controls into the software and plan to hire people to use them. No neighborhood is without its occasional difficulties. We weed our "field of dreams" assiduously to protect our customers.

What are some unrealistic goals or expectations in regard to online communities?
First off, online communities are not direct sales vehicles because discussion board postings are not actionable like an e-mail is. If you want to sell somebody something, get their e-mail address and as much information as you can about them and push the campaign at them.

Next, people live online in varying proportions as real-world and competing virtual-world endeavors contend for their time. Don't expect all to be addicted. To elaborate, for some people, online communities are a great social outlet and these users might account for a large majority of your page views, but the more-task oriented users will prefer to hunt and shoot rather than browse and dally.

As a result, the time-online usage patterns of many customers will decay over time, either because they lose interest (worst case) or because they have become more efficient at finding what they are looking for (best case).

In either case, don't make your site confusing for the occasional user, or (s)he will go away entirely; most BBS's in the 1980s had an "expert mode" that turned on automatically after a certain number of visits. Even then, developers intuitively understood the downward-sloping usage curves.

Are offering freebies an important part of building community and a site's success?
The freebies aren't necessarily part of the Motley Fool's community offerings so much as part of the benefits one receives as a part of Fool membership. You may participate in the Fool's community without registering, but if you decide to register, we give you several incentives to become more deeply involved. Most importantly, all the freebies we give away are on-message.

A trial subscription to a financial publication can assist you on your journey to financial independence better than, say, a CD of 1980s rock hits. And, if you've seen the PBS Motley Fool special on TV, you'll know you don't want to hear David Gardner singing!

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