In Silicon Valley, there is no more pejorative term than “lifestyle business.” It’s usually applied to companies that do well enough to earn their founders and employees a living—sometimes a very good living—but that will never make anyone mega-rich. Venture capital partners, who have to weed out all but the fastest-growing companies if they’re to have any hope of making the Forbes Midas List, often dismiss these less meteoric players with a phrase like “It’s probably a nice lifestyle business, but it just won’t move the needle for my fund.” Even many startuppers, who often work insane hours on the assumption that their options will turn to gold when their company is acquired or goes public, seem to reserve special pity for lifestyle entrepreneurs who haven’t won Sand Hill Road money and aren’t perpetually “killing it” or “crushing it” in the way Silicon Valley culture demands.
Well, I visited a Web company recently that occupies a lovely cottage near downtown Palo Alto, has grown to 12 employees without raising a dime in outside funding, and attracts 30 million unique visitors a month to its website. For comparison’s sake, that’s more traffic than Groupon, the New York Times, Match.com, Zynga, or Yelp can boast. If that’s a lifestyle business, then I’ll have what they’re having.
The company is wikiHow, which, as the name implies, is a crowdsourced encyclopedia of instructional articles on everything from how to kiss to how to perform CPR on a dog. (As it turns out, those are pretty much the same thing.) It was founded in 2005 by a former management consultant, serial entrepreneur, and rock climber named Jack Herrick. If I were making a list of unsung heroes around Silicon Valley, I’d nominate Herrick for his success building a huge media property without help from the venture industry, and for assembling an amazing online resource for readers without polluting it with acres of advertising. One hundred percent of the company’s revenue comes from unobtrusive Google AdSense text ads, which makes wikiHow one of the many companies that owe their existence to the search and advertising giant; more on that below.
“I hate the term, but yeah, that’s what we are, a lifestyle company,” Herrick confessed to me in a recent interview. “Somebody needs to create a better word. I think it should be ‘awesome company.’ One of the reasons I have the best job in the world is that we are not venture financed. It just gives us so many more degrees of freedom. We can decide not to have a sales force, we can decide we don’t need to grow revenue 100 percent this year. We can figure out what is the most important thing in our mission, and focus on that.”
The mission at wikiHow is simple, and as breathtaking in its ambition as Google’s: “We want to cover everything and have it be universally good,” Herrick says. And the site has made impressive progress in that direction. It features more than 129,000 user-contributed articles in seven languages. Obviously, it’s not nearly as comprehensive as Wikipedia, which has 3.8 million articles in 282 languages. But you won’t find Wikipedia articles on such indisputably helpful subjects as How to Deliver a Baby, How to Remove Odors from Your Car, and How to Accept Criticism with Grace and Appreciation. If there’s anything Web audiences seem to love more than seeking advice, it’s giving it—and wikiHow taps both impulses with more sincerity, and far less junk, than any other how-to site I’ve seen.
Back in July, just days before its acquisition by Autodesk, I profiled a maker-focused how-to site called Instructables. I called it “the rare crowdsourced site that actually turns a profit,” which brought an e-mail rejoinder from Josh Hannah, a friend and former business partner of Herrick’s who now works at venture firm Matrix Partners. Hannah called wikiHow “the even more rare profitable crowdsourced site that has 5x the traffic.” That might be a bit of an exaggeration: WikiHow’s U.S.-only traffic is only
