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Curious to learn the strategy against Quora and StackOverflow communities. We have 'same' idea 9 years ago, but scrapped it as non viable. Good Luck

pyeargin 6y ago
Good question! Quora's business model is very different from mine. We're not looking at advertising as a primary means of revenue generation. The idea for us will be to generate revenue from brokerage fees connecting the 'brains/knowledge' to the seekers of the knowledge. The types of knowledge people are willing to pay for are different from the ones they'll ask for free on a site like Quora. StackOverflow is a slightly different beast as they have a lot of overlap with what we're doing. Their moderation policies are offputting to many and don't encourage people to ask questions. Rather, they deter them from asking questions because you're constantly wondering if your question is 'worthy' of asking there. They also don't have a paid option to ask questions. Another good comparison are the gig economy freelance-type sites like Fiverr and Upwork where those engagements are typically more in the consultative style. We're not looking to get in the way of that, but more to offer lead generation through transactional experiences. If someone is able to take business offsite after answering a particularly difficult question in mobile development, or artificial intelligence, or university research, then that's a win for both us and them.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Is there any general topic for this site? I often find myself with questions, maybe not necessarily hard, but niche and not on-topic for many of the goto sites. There are times I would definitely pay to get help in one of these areas.
  - pyeargin 6y ago
    Well, the topic list is continuously expanding. We're up to about 500 topics and sub-topics at the moment. We're also launching a new question listing marketplace feature where you can push questions up for others to answer. It's a push model instead of a pull model that we have in the initial MVP. It will give people the capability to ask a bunch of questions at once and not have to worry about finding a Sage in each topic area to answer them. You have 3 questions? Just push them into the market and see if someone is willing to answer them for the price you think they are worth. This would probably fit your scenario better than the current approach of picking a Sage directly and asking the question.

pyeargin 6y ago

Good question! Quora's business model is very different from mine. We're not looking at advertising as a primary means of revenue generation. The idea for us will be to generate revenue from brokerage fees connecting the 'brains/knowledge' to the seekers of the knowledge. The types of knowledge people are willing to pay for are different from the ones they'll ask for free on a site like Quora. StackOverflow is a slightly different beast as they have a lot of overlap with what we're doing. Their moderation policies are offputting to many and don't encourage people to ask questions. Rather, they deter them from asking questions because you're constantly wondering if your question is 'worthy' of asking there. They also don't have a paid option to ask questions. Another good comparison are the gig economy freelance-type sites like Fiverr and Upwork where those engagements are typically more in the consultative style. We're not looking to get in the way of that, but more to offer lead generation through transactional experiences. If someone is able to take business offsite after answering a particularly difficult question in mobile development, or artificial intelligence, or university research, then that's a win for both us and them.

the_only_law 6y ago
Is there any general topic for this site? I often find myself with questions, maybe not necessarily hard, but niche and not on-topic for many of the goto sites. There are times I would definitely pay to get help in one of these areas.
- pyeargin 6y ago
  Well, the topic list is continuously expanding. We're up to about 500 topics and sub-topics at the moment. We're also launching a new question listing marketplace feature where you can push questions up for others to answer. It's a push model instead of a pull model that we have in the initial MVP. It will give people the capability to ask a bunch of questions at once and not have to worry about finding a Sage in each topic area to answer them. You have 3 questions? Just push them into the market and see if someone is willing to answer them for the price you think they are worth. This would probably fit your scenario better than the current approach of picking a Sage directly and asking the question.