Andrew Warner of Mix­ergy recently inter­viewed Alex Algard: the entre­pre­neur who founded the $57m a year (rev­enue) busi­ness WhitePages.

One exchange in the inter­view I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed is when Warner pon­ders WhitePages’ tar­get demo­graphic. Real­is­ing that he, his col­leagues and his friends don’t use the site, don’t talk about the site or even hear about the site he asks who are the peo­ple that bring in this rev­enue: who are the users?

Algard’s answer touches on some­thing I dis­cussed with a friend recently: that many (most?) entre­pre­neurs and soft­ware devel­op­ers pro­duce prod­ucts and sys­tems tar­geted at peo­ple like them: computer-literate, pro­gres­sive power users. The huge mar­ket of barely-computer lit­er­ate casual users who are enthu­si­as­tic about the Inter­net (yet need help for basic tasks) is largely ignored.

Andrew Warner: Well tell me about it, because you know that all I hear about every­day is Twit­ter and Face­book and some of the hot­ter sites, some of the sex­ier sites. I don’t hear peo­ple talk about WhitePages. I don’t remem­ber when I went on WhitePages, or referred WhitePages to some­body else, but obvi­ously a lot of peo­ple are on the site. What am I miss­ing here?

Alex Algard: For one thing I think we do a good job in cater­ing to what the typ­i­cal Amer­i­can needs, as far as con­tent infor­ma­tion goes. A lot of our friends, I think, tend to be a lit­tle bit more focused on, you know, what’s hot in the Bay area and so forth. So I think it’s very impor­tant that we, every once in awhile, pinch our­selves and remind our­selves that not every­one in the world, or in the US, is nec­es­sar­ily liv­ing on Twit­ter, or quite yet on the social net­work. Cer­tainly that’s the way things are mov­ing, but I think we’re doing a good job on address­ing Amer­i­cans’ needs as of the here and now. Like I said, I’m a here and now kind of guy. I think that’s also how our com­pany thinks.

When asked if any­thing in par­tic­u­lar sticks out that helped him sep­a­rate him­self from the com­pe­ti­tion, Alex replied:

I think in ret­ro­spect, it was just being really, really focused around what users are look­ing for; pro­vid­ing a rel­e­vant ser­vice; really try­ing to put myself in the users’ shoes. In the WhitePages sce­nario it’s find­ing con­tact infor­ma­tion, so doing a bet­ter job than any­body else: being singularly-focused on help­ing our users find the con­tact infor­ma­tion that they’re look­ing for. That more than any­thing has helped our success.