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I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost <1 million :D - 1 million, even saying that makes me

I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost <1 million :D - 1 million, even saying that makes me laugh. Completely coded by us from the ground up. This says https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong. My question: What in pickled f*s are these people doing with 80 million on a Q&A site? How far out of the reach of reality is this industry?

not_paul_graham 13y ago
I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. </sarcasm> On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily. Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora. Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true). It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.
- hitchhiker999 13y ago
  That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point: "topics on Quora are limitless" The thing (only based on my experience) is that when you grow/diversify too much on a Q&A site, quality tends to dilute, and the audience tends to drop off. I don't know if this is true for Quora; I merely suspect it might be (as it has been for all the others who tried). In many ways our focus on just one topic has been our saving grace. Many 'globals' try to compete (even S.E.) few manage to top 'specialisation'. Not sure why.
  - not_paul_graham 13y ago
    My question is completely off topic, but I have some questions regarding your site, if you don't mind answering: How long have you been operating englishforums.com ? Is this your full time engagement? How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number ? Was it purely organic or some paid advertising ? And is the site profitable? Thanks.
    - hitchhiker999 13y ago
      Hi not paul, And is the site profitable? I started it in 2002. It's part of my full time engagement. It's paid my way since 2006. There has never been any business model. Adsense only, yes it's profitable - we pay the 3 of us from that - but only because our costs are so low (single server, I've optimised the code to handle itself on an 8 core with 24gb - it runs at about 10% usage, @ about 10 requests a second) How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number We knew what Google wanted, we knew what our visitors wanted. We put our visitors first, but made sure the entire site worked in a way that would help Google do its job. (never really SEO). Our design is lacking, we didn't have a designer - we do now (very exciting for us!) Essentially we predicted for many years what Google would be looking for, did some things ahead of other folks and tried our best to keep the quality of our content high. We also created a very friendly (most of the time) atmosphere on our site and encouraged high-quality posters to stick around - as much as we could. A lot of sites copied us, but missed the concept of keeping the community conducive to friendly interaction. We also did some interesting things to keep out trolls. Like our 'ghost' mode which makes a troll thing they've annoyed everyone, when in actual fact they're being system-level ignored. Fun stuff like that. This reduced further our overhead, and allowed us to expand while not worrying so much about spam. We spent time to build a system that self-managed, and self-grew. That seemed to work. That's all the old system, what we've created now is far more interesting.
- majani 13y ago
  Quora's largest source of traffic is a third world country, India(source is Gawker, which is blocked on HN) As harsh as this will sound, that automatically puts it into the garbage pile of advertiser profiles. They are never getting 80mil out this deal.
webwright 13y ago
First off, Compete.com is a JOKE (I've regularly seen it off by 10-100x). Second, investors care about growth more than traffic-- do we have any data on Quora's growth? Third, Quora's founder/team is pretty bankable-- a failure scenario for them is an $80M acqui-hire. Assuming preferred shares or liquidation prefs by the new investors, that almost entirely de-risks this investment. That coupled with their long term ambition (supplant Wikipedia?) makes this a non-terrible bet.
- shitgoose 13y ago
  "How to boil water?" [http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-boil-water http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-boil-water] - supplant Wikipedia???
- davidgerard 13y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't want your Facebook login before you can read the answer. Seriously, any talk of Wikipedia around Quora is strictly Quora's wishful thinking. This will never happen.
akc 13y ago
what's your site?
- hitchhiker999 13y ago
  Can I PM that to you?
  - hitchhiker999 13y ago
    sod it - cant find PM on HN. www.englishforums.com (that's the old version, we're updating in a couple of months)
fidotron 13y ago
I've wondered along these lines too. There is clearly something else going on in the VC business beyond strictly evaluating company value based on ability to generate it directly. One factor I'll project (since I can't tell where you're based) is that companies with proven engineering staff in the Bay Area get a boost in inherent value just from acquihire potential. Bonus points for famous and connected founders, as Quora has. Bay Area VC activity looks a lot like Wall Street to me, with the same disconnect between price and value happening.
- hitchhiker999 13y ago
  I'm nowhere near the 'bay area' or any US state, nor even in Europe. I'm British, but living abroad, have never known anyone else in the IT industry. HN is my only contact :) When I hear and see the things people in SV say and do - I honestly wonder what the hell is going on out there. It seems people who can put a bit of html + css together are getting paid 10 million these days. -- good luck to them and everything - but it's a bit mental (imho).
  - pbreit 13y ago
    That sentiment could not be further from the truth. You could prove it to yourself simply by doing what you describe and seeing how far you get. Breaking through the noise and building a large, attractive user base is incredibly difficult. Sure, just building the web site isn't that hard (actually it is).
    - fidotron 13y ago
      I think you're right, but it's definitely the outside perception that something is odd about SV in this respect, and relatively trivial products can get blown out of all proportion there. For me it was Cover, that Android launcher, that caused the confusion. The value of that is not in being able to develop it, because that aspect of it was trivial, but having the idea to do it, the vision to see it's possible, and the connections to get PR to get visibility for that in SV seems much more valuable than "just" the ability to execute. I think the surprising factor is just how valuable those intangibles can be judged to be. (Not saying they're not valuable, as they clearly are, but it's interesting just how much the VC market thinks they're worth, amplified by the effect if you happen to be in SV).
smackfu 13y ago
Consider that Quora basically forces mobile users to access the site via their app.
- balladeer 13y ago
  And it's like a parasite. It's takes everything from users for free but it never lets the outside world see the content without a Quora account.
  - pbreit 13y ago
    ...without a [free] Quora account.
wpietri 13y ago
It is a really good Q&A site. I was a Quora Top Writer in 2012 and 2013, and I've also built a lot of web stuff and spent a lot of time studying web communities. Purely from a craftsmanship perspective, they've done an incredible job. The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch. That said, I have never understood what their economic plan is. I have a very good understanding of the economics of content businesses, and the people at Quora are either incredible geniuses or totally nuts. Since they won't say how they plan to make money, we can't say. If I had to bet, It be "totally nuts", just because so many content businesses get seduced by a creative vision that current revenue streams just can't support. But having met some of them, I know they're very smart, so I am hoping that I am wrong and that they have some clever monetization strategy that will let them justify their very large valuation.
- webwright 13y ago
  "The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch." I SO disagree here. It's a mess. It's 10x more complex than it needs to be. And it's horribly unapproachable for new/non-geeky users. I've had non-technical relatives sit down and try to use it who were positively baffled by the user-experience. I think Quora is an example of what happens if you listen exclusively to your most active users, when you should be tempering that with conversations with new and drive-by users. The Curse of Knowledge is deadly for product designers (http://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge/ar/1 http://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge/ar/1).
  - techwatching 13y ago
    Agreed. Its always felt spammy to me - "Register to see more than the first answer." Why??
    - Smudge 13y ago
      Growth. It's spammy, but it works.
wpietri 13y ago
As an aside, I am delighted that there are 4 million people learning English from somebody who uses the phrase "pickled fucks". They are, and I mean this sincerely, in very good hands.
- hitchhiker999 13y ago
  Lol, cheers! OFC The last person you want teaching English is a coder. I have many thousands of volunteers to help with that ;) For the first 3 months of our site (before help came) 'grammar' was spelt wrong on the header.
mknits 13y ago
Really americans are fucking idiots. They think whatever they think and use is correct! Stupid assholes. So if americans use some otherwise popular qna website much less, they think it's foolish to spend 80 million fucking dollars on that. Enjoy the fucking kickstarter.
- dang 13y ago
  Please don't post comments like this to Hacker News. They violate the two most important values of the site: substance and civility.
  - kumarski 13y ago
    How you stay so aggressively on top of all comments amazes me.
    - shitgoose 13y ago
      He's got a filter on "Americans fucking idiots". Never fails.
ulfw 13y ago
Wasn't Quora hot like years ago when it came out? Do you guys actively use it?
sixQuarks 13y ago
First, you have a great site! congratulations. Second, there is no way Quora only gets 1.5 million visitors per month. They have an Alexa ranking in the 400s. Yes, the tech audience skews this, but even a tech-heavy audience can't skew it that badly. Getting in the top 500 of Alexa is very, very difficult. My guess is that they get at least 10 million visitors per month.
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  I disagree. MyFitnessPal is in the top rankings in Alexa, and they get less than that. Add to to fact that tech is more skewed, I wager they get a bit less than a million a month.
- hitchhiker999 13y ago
  Thanks!! re: alexa reference: we had hit 5,000-ish on alexa a while back (then google had some fun with Q&A sites) - at that level we were getting around 180,000 uniques a day. 40k was the difference between 7000 and 5000 on alexa, it's also not as 'exponential' as one might think. I previously would assume more than 10 mill a month, but I tend to imagine the guys above me must be 'rolling in traffic'. 10 is probably closest.
Smirnoff 13y ago
Here is my theory: Most likely this huge investment is a way for investors to get their money from their previous investment, which might be locked up due to some contract rules. Basically, in order to free their funds (or avoid taxation) from their first investment (let's say from some portfolio company of Benchmark/or other participated investors), they will transfer funds from the big company to the small company aka Quora (in which these investors got a better contract). I am not going to be surprised if Quora gets acquired from the bigger company, which happens to have the same investors ;)
return0 13y ago
Great tech people often make mediocre or bad investments, or invest in things that are not really worth their time in the end. Things like, Max Levchin creating slide. It's just that the amounts being available to invest are so staggering in SV compared to other places, that any movement of money will look huge in comparison. That makes news like this sound infuriatingly irrational. Also, i guess the facebook link is important.
majani 13y ago
if it were anywhere else in the world, we'd immediately be calling it out for exactly what it is: barefaced corruption amongst the incestuous VCs. But since the Valley has convinced many that it's the meritocratic mecca for formerly maligned nerds, we scratch our heads trying to preserve that image while the truth lies right in front of you.
RivieraKid 13y ago
I also don't understand the 80million (perhaps rich people don't know where to put their money?). But Quora is definitely not just another Q&A site. First, they have incredibly good technology. I would say that their livenode/webnode2 framework is one of the (or the) most technologically advanced web frameworks in existence. (Although now that React exists, it should be relatively easy to create something even better than what Quora has.) Also, I like their deployment process - they auto-deploy on every commit if tests run flawlessly. And their CEO is pretty smart (http://www.quora.com/Adam-DAngelo-1/What-are-some-good-stories-about-Adam-DAngelos-bad-assery?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Adam-DAngelo-1/What-are-some-good-stori...). Second, there's lot of very valuable and high quality content. I've learned a lot from Quora.

not_paul_graham 13y ago

I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. </sarcasm> On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily. Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora. Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true). It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.

hitchhiker999 13y ago
That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point: "topics on Quora are limitless" The thing (only based on my experience) is that when you grow/diversify too much on a Q&A site, quality tends to dilute, and the audience tends to drop off. I don't know if this is true for Quora; I merely suspect it might be (as it has been for all the others who tried). In many ways our focus on just one topic has been our saving grace. Many 'globals' try to compete (even S.E.) few manage to top 'specialisation'. Not sure why.
- not_paul_graham 13y ago
  My question is completely off topic, but I have some questions regarding your site, if you don't mind answering: How long have you been operating englishforums.com ? Is this your full time engagement? How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number ? Was it purely organic or some paid advertising ? And is the site profitable? Thanks.
  - hitchhiker999 13y ago
    Hi not paul, And is the site profitable? I started it in 2002. It's part of my full time engagement. It's paid my way since 2006. There has never been any business model. Adsense only, yes it's profitable - we pay the 3 of us from that - but only because our costs are so low (single server, I've optimised the code to handle itself on an 8 core with 24gb - it runs at about 10% usage, @ about 10 requests a second) How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number We knew what Google wanted, we knew what our visitors wanted. We put our visitors first, but made sure the entire site worked in a way that would help Google do its job. (never really SEO). Our design is lacking, we didn't have a designer - we do now (very exciting for us!) Essentially we predicted for many years what Google would be looking for, did some things ahead of other folks and tried our best to keep the quality of our content high. We also created a very friendly (most of the time) atmosphere on our site and encouraged high-quality posters to stick around - as much as we could. A lot of sites copied us, but missed the concept of keeping the community conducive to friendly interaction. We also did some interesting things to keep out trolls. Like our 'ghost' mode which makes a troll thing they've annoyed everyone, when in actual fact they're being system-level ignored. Fun stuff like that. This reduced further our overhead, and allowed us to expand while not worrying so much about spam. We spent time to build a system that self-managed, and self-grew. That seemed to work. That's all the old system, what we've created now is far more interesting.
majani 13y ago
Quora's largest source of traffic is a third world country, India(source is Gawker, which is blocked on HN) As harsh as this will sound, that automatically puts it into the garbage pile of advertiser profiles. They are never getting 80mil out this deal.

webwright 13y ago

First off, Compete.com is a JOKE (I've regularly seen it off by 10-100x). Second, investors care about growth more than traffic-- do we have any data on Quora's growth? Third, Quora's founder/team is pretty bankable-- a failure scenario for them is an $80M acqui-hire. Assuming preferred shares or liquidation prefs by the new investors, that almost entirely de-risks this investment. That coupled with their long term ambition (supplant Wikipedia?) makes this a non-terrible bet.

shitgoose 13y ago
"How to boil water?" [http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-boil-water http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-boil-water] - supplant Wikipedia???
davidgerard 13y ago
Wikipedia doesn't want your Facebook login before you can read the answer. Seriously, any talk of Wikipedia around Quora is strictly Quora's wishful thinking. This will never happen.

akc 13y ago

what's your site?

hitchhiker999 13y ago
Can I PM that to you?
- hitchhiker999 13y ago
  sod it - cant find PM on HN. www.englishforums.com (that's the old version, we're updating in a couple of months)

fidotron 13y ago

I've wondered along these lines too. There is clearly something else going on in the VC business beyond strictly evaluating company value based on ability to generate it directly. One factor I'll project (since I can't tell where you're based) is that companies with proven engineering staff in the Bay Area get a boost in inherent value just from acquihire potential. Bonus points for famous and connected founders, as Quora has. Bay Area VC activity looks a lot like Wall Street to me, with the same disconnect between price and value happening.

hitchhiker999 13y ago
I'm nowhere near the 'bay area' or any US state, nor even in Europe. I'm British, but living abroad, have never known anyone else in the IT industry. HN is my only contact :) When I hear and see the things people in SV say and do - I honestly wonder what the hell is going on out there. It seems people who can put a bit of html + css together are getting paid 10 million these days. -- good luck to them and everything - but it's a bit mental (imho).
- pbreit 13y ago
  That sentiment could not be further from the truth. You could prove it to yourself simply by doing what you describe and seeing how far you get. Breaking through the noise and building a large, attractive user base is incredibly difficult. Sure, just building the web site isn't that hard (actually it is).
  - fidotron 13y ago
    I think you're right, but it's definitely the outside perception that something is odd about SV in this respect, and relatively trivial products can get blown out of all proportion there. For me it was Cover, that Android launcher, that caused the confusion. The value of that is not in being able to develop it, because that aspect of it was trivial, but having the idea to do it, the vision to see it's possible, and the connections to get PR to get visibility for that in SV seems much more valuable than "just" the ability to execute. I think the surprising factor is just how valuable those intangibles can be judged to be. (Not saying they're not valuable, as they clearly are, but it's interesting just how much the VC market thinks they're worth, amplified by the effect if you happen to be in SV).

smackfu 13y ago

Consider that Quora basically forces mobile users to access the site via their app.

balladeer 13y ago
And it's like a parasite. It's takes everything from users for free but it never lets the outside world see the content without a Quora account.
- pbreit 13y ago
  ...without a [free] Quora account.

wpietri 13y ago

It is a really good Q&A site. I was a Quora Top Writer in 2012 and 2013, and I've also built a lot of web stuff and spent a lot of time studying web communities. Purely from a craftsmanship perspective, they've done an incredible job. The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch. That said, I have never understood what their economic plan is. I have a very good understanding of the economics of content businesses, and the people at Quora are either incredible geniuses or totally nuts. Since they won't say how they plan to make money, we can't say. If I had to bet, It be "totally nuts", just because so many content businesses get seduced by a creative vision that current revenue streams just can't support. But having met some of them, I know they're very smart, so I am hoping that I am wrong and that they have some clever monetization strategy that will let them justify their very large valuation.

webwright 13y ago
"The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch." I SO disagree here. It's a mess. It's 10x more complex than it needs to be. And it's horribly unapproachable for new/non-geeky users. I've had non-technical relatives sit down and try to use it who were positively baffled by the user-experience. I think Quora is an example of what happens if you listen exclusively to your most active users, when you should be tempering that with conversations with new and drive-by users. The Curse of Knowledge is deadly for product designers (http://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge/ar/1 http://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge/ar/1).
- techwatching 13y ago
  Agreed. Its always felt spammy to me - "Register to see more than the first answer." Why??
  - Smudge 13y ago
    Growth. It's spammy, but it works.

wpietri 13y ago

As an aside, I am delighted that there are 4 million people learning English from somebody who uses the phrase "pickled fucks". They are, and I mean this sincerely, in very good hands.

hitchhiker999 13y ago
Lol, cheers! OFC The last person you want teaching English is a coder. I have many thousands of volunteers to help with that ;) For the first 3 months of our site (before help came) 'grammar' was spelt wrong on the header.

mknits 13y ago

Really americans are fucking idiots. They think whatever they think and use is correct! Stupid assholes. So if americans use some otherwise popular qna website much less, they think it's foolish to spend 80 million fucking dollars on that. Enjoy the fucking kickstarter.

dang 13y ago
Please don't post comments like this to Hacker News. They violate the two most important values of the site: substance and civility.
- kumarski 13y ago
  How you stay so aggressively on top of all comments amazes me.
  - shitgoose 13y ago
    He's got a filter on "Americans fucking idiots". Never fails.

ulfw 13y ago

Wasn't Quora hot like years ago when it came out? Do you guys actively use it?

sixQuarks 13y ago

First, you have a great site! congratulations. Second, there is no way Quora only gets 1.5 million visitors per month. They have an Alexa ranking in the 400s. Yes, the tech audience skews this, but even a tech-heavy audience can't skew it that badly. Getting in the top 500 of Alexa is very, very difficult. My guess is that they get at least 10 million visitors per month.

AznHisoka 13y ago
I disagree. MyFitnessPal is in the top rankings in Alexa, and they get less than that. Add to to fact that tech is more skewed, I wager they get a bit less than a million a month.
hitchhiker999 13y ago
Thanks!! re: alexa reference: we had hit 5,000-ish on alexa a while back (then google had some fun with Q&A sites) - at that level we were getting around 180,000 uniques a day. 40k was the difference between 7000 and 5000 on alexa, it's also not as 'exponential' as one might think. I previously would assume more than 10 mill a month, but I tend to imagine the guys above me must be 'rolling in traffic'. 10 is probably closest.

Smirnoff 13y ago

Here is my theory: Most likely this huge investment is a way for investors to get their money from their previous investment, which might be locked up due to some contract rules. Basically, in order to free their funds (or avoid taxation) from their first investment (let's say from some portfolio company of Benchmark/or other participated investors), they will transfer funds from the big company to the small company aka Quora (in which these investors got a better contract). I am not going to be surprised if Quora gets acquired from the bigger company, which happens to have the same investors ;)

return0 13y ago

Great tech people often make mediocre or bad investments, or invest in things that are not really worth their time in the end. Things like, Max Levchin creating slide. It's just that the amounts being available to invest are so staggering in SV compared to other places, that any movement of money will look huge in comparison. That makes news like this sound infuriatingly irrational. Also, i guess the facebook link is important.

majani 13y ago

if it were anywhere else in the world, we'd immediately be calling it out for exactly what it is: barefaced corruption amongst the incestuous VCs. But since the Valley has convinced many that it's the meritocratic mecca for formerly maligned nerds, we scratch our heads trying to preserve that image while the truth lies right in front of you.

RivieraKid 13y ago

I also don't understand the 80million (perhaps rich people don't know where to put their money?). But Quora is definitely not just another Q&A site. First, they have incredibly good technology. I would say that their livenode/webnode2 framework is one of the (or the) most technologically advanced web frameworks in existence. (Although now that React exists, it should be relatively easy to create something even better than what Quora has.) Also, I like their deployment process - they auto-deploy on every commit if tests run flawlessly. And their CEO is pretty smart (http://www.quora.com/Adam-DAngelo-1/What-are-some-good-stories-about-Adam-DAngelos-bad-assery?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Adam-DAngelo-1/What-are-some-good-stori...). Second, there's lot of very valuable and high quality content. I've learned a lot from Quora.