GoodTree Community Blog

GoodTree, Inc is looking for talented people to help us grow and do even more good for the world.

We’re currently a dozen strong, mostly engineers, including graduates from top universities like MIT, Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard and the University of Moscow. We use state-of-the-art tech and business practices to create an environment where you’ll always be experimenting and learning new skills.

We have positions open for a Product Manager and an Engineer.

Here’s what we’re looking for in a Product Manager:

• a creative and energetic person with a natural sense for how a successful website works, looks and feels
• someone who can grow small ideas into big successes
• someone who is easily adaptable and can move quickly
• someone who will look at hundreds of sites, analyze them and bring the best ideas to the team
• someone who can express their ideas using graphics program like Photoshop or Fireworks

Here’s what we’re looking for in an Engineer:

• experience with Ruby on Rails or another web stack
• someone comfortable taking on responsibility for large projects
• knowledge of user experience and design
• a desire to always be learning and building new things

GoodTree Inc offers candidates competitive benefits and salary. We’re located in downtown San Francisco on Market Street. Local candidates only, please.

To apply, send us an email at recruiting at goodtreeinc • com with your resume. We can’t wait to hear from you.

The Story of Goodtree, by Ooga Labs

We once had a website named Goodtree
which provided lots of stuff for free.
Trying to make a difference everywhere,
with increasing style and flair;
we thought doing good was the key.

At first there were some non-believers,
who thought we were deceivers.
So we opened our books
to prove we weren’t crooks,
just natural achievers.

We had our plans for the site -
we wanted it clean and bright,
useful to use,
hard to abuse;
it was hard to get just right.

Homepages and friends were new additions,
and causes grew from user submissions.
But as we grew,
there was too much to do,
overwhelming our ambitions.

Of people we didn’t have enough,
making the going very tough.
We started to look for aid,
for people who wouldn’t fade
and disappear in a puff.

We added some more peeps
(our traffic was growing by leaps),
but we couldn’t add just anyone.
We really needed someone fun,
who’s sentences weren’t filled with beeps.

We’re still looking for one more engineer,
and offering a fridge full of beer,
to go along with their pay.
So listen when we say
that we want you in here.

We don’t want a Jane or Joe
who’s only here for the dough.
Good judgement is desired,
you should be inspired
to work and learn and grow.

Some skills we can teach,
to those who won’t leech.
We use MySQL, Ruby and Rails,
(unless one of them fails -
then look for us on the beach).

It was no Tuesdays with Morrie;
it had nothing of glory.
But now you know what we’re looking for
so no need to say any more.
Thanks for reading our story.

If you use MySpace you’ll be interested to know that we’ve released a MySpace application for GoodTree. It’s called GoodTree Causes and allows you to display your causes directly on your MySpace profile. Just like the main site, activity on GoodTree Causes generates donations for the charities you care about.

Use it to promote your causes to your MySpace friends while also making a positive difference in the world. Click here to check it out: http://www.myspace.com/360100453.

Recently we launched the Booster system. Boosters are unpaid volunteers who get to review the site and collectively decide what is permitted and what is not. Boosters review profiles, profile photos, Causes and Cause photos. In the future we plan to put additional types of content in front of the Boosters.

The beauty of the Booster system is that it allows for the community members to decide what is on GoodTree, not us. So the Boosters have a direct hand in shaping the community as it grows.

So far we have 231 Boosters, and they have reviewed 13,141 items

If you have not already become a Booster on GoodTree, it is very simple - just login and in the top right hand corner you should see a link which invites you to become a Booster. On the following page is additional information about Boosters and a link for registration.

We welcome all Booster feedback - please email us at headboosters@goodtree.com.

After about a year of improving the site, the site started to spread again.  It started just before the holidays in December, and frankly, took us a bit by surprise as we were in and out of the office with family and holiday trips, etc.  The virality this time came mostly in the US and Romania.  We don’t know why it took off in Romania, but there you go.  Viral growth.  We’ve now turned off the viral features, to give ourselves a chance to reset some of the code and do some interface tweaks.  We’re also in the process of testing different search feeds from Google and from Yahoo in addition to InfoSpace.   The plan going forward is very clear, and we’re excited!  Wish us luck and give us your suggestions when you get a minute.

We believe the GoodTree.com portal can make a real difference by:

1) Reaching out and attracting a community of millions of people

2) Giving us tools we engage with everyday to get informed on issues while keeping the enthusiasm alive

3) Giving us a place to express ourselves, our values and beliefs, and connect with others who feel the same

4) Let us generate ideas, knowledge and money, at no cost, in support of those causes

5) Keep innovating the website, and adding more features to serve these goals

Over the last year, GoodTree has developed a social network where we can do all these things, like join causes, spread the word about the issues, share videos educating people, listing what we can do to make a difference everyday in their lives, and meet other people who care about the same things we do.  We each can see how much good we’ve done overtime by seeing how many invitations we’ve sent, how many tips we’ve contributed, how many causes we’ve joined, how many friendship connections we’ve made, etc.  Nearly every action we take on GoodTree does good, and we can now measure it for ourselves. 

GoodTree’s personal homepage is the core of the service, giving us one central location to keep up to date on our causes, up to date with friends who use GoodTree, and up to date on other things that reflect our beliefs and values.  On that one page, we can also receive nearly any information we consider important from around the Web, including news, weather, sports, stocks, etc.   One of the features of that service is the search, powered by InfoSpace of Seattle, a company that aggregates the search results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others and feeds those results to GoodTree.  Each time one of us searches, a small amount of money is generated.  We currently give a minimum of 12.5% of that revenue to charities and hope to give more as our costs and income balance out and we get to break-even.  We compare that to other Internet portals like Yahoo, MSN, Google, Ask, and MyWay who give none of their revenues to charity (yet!  we hope they will start), and compare that to other social enterprises that typically give 2% of their revenues such as Ben & Jerry’s, Working Assets, and Body Shop. 

We will continue to build out features and areas of the GoodTree portal that do good for the world each time you use them. 

This month, we released the core Causes functionality to let us all group themselves together into Causes we care about.  The idea is this.  We all know that there are lots of small, day to day actions to make a difference, but we don’t always know what those actions are.  Gathered together in Causes, we can talk about those actions, share information, and work toward making a difference.  Some of us may want to go to www.justgive.org and actually give money to charities that are committed to a cause, but most of us won’t have the money to give.  Causes will give us a forum to learn how we can make a difference even if we can’t give money.  Causes will make it easy for us to broadcast our concern for a Cause in all the places we hang out online, thereby educating others.  And Causes will make it very efficient for us each to stay in touch with Causes we care about without a huge time commitment. 

An online portal that lets us see the Internet through the causes we care about, helping us make a difference everyday at no cost, just by coming to the GoodTree website to do our normal things…. I like it. 

Taday, after much coding, we released a whole new set of features, navigation, and even a new tagline.   Our goal continues to be to gather millions of people to make a significant positive difference in the world.   We won’t be satisified with something small, so we’re going to continue to iterate and experiment until we get there.  Thanks for being a part of it, and we welcome your feedback and suggestions.

We’ve been working on our social networking infrastructure and features for some time now, and will hopefully have it live in just a little while.  Fundamentally, we see GoodTree as a social network going forward.  We want people to use GoodTree to meet people, to find people who care about the same things they do, support each other, share information and expertise, organize to get stuff done and make a positive difference in the world. 

The social network has a lot of cool features, like a customized widgetized profile page and dashboard page, and it will an open API sometime after the social network goes live, so that anyone can easily build widgetized applications that work on the GoodTree site.   We’re also going to have groups with bulliten boards and forums, etc.   

As part of this new release, we’ve made the decision to focus on six countries: U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia, and N.Z.  Given the high costs of running a social network, customer service, maintenance, version requirements, keeping track of different laws in different countries, etc.  we couldn’t envision doing a great job with our small staff.  We certainly hope to serve other countries in the future. 

Last year between July and December, when the GoodTree website was in beta, the GoodTree community generated over $20,000 for charities. During that time we were experimenting with the technology platform and new features. We’re still doing that now but that “beta period” is coming to an end.

Here’s James, Dago and Oliver mailing the latest round of checks to charities.