Thank you for the additional questions. Dais/Agora is approximately 3 weeks old since conception.
As it is with most natural progressions, the company began as a dense clump of inspiration that has been unraveling itself within my mind over this short period of time. Its features were much less recognizable compared to its current stage when I submitted YC Summer 2016 application. The very limitations of start-up evolution given the stage Dais is in necessitate formulation of generalized strategies in relevant space that take on specific forms as the business progresses. A prudent entrepreneur knows how to wait for an idea to unravel itself, takes notes of important developments, and acts decisively yet flexibly.
With these in mind -
i) Youth in their twenties (see my answer to user 'bestattack') will be targeted as early power users. 3rd and 4th year undergraduate students and graduate students are most sociopolitically motivated to engage in discussions online and offline, and can be reached in large numbers by marketing on selected college campuses. A specific example scenario - we will deploy flyers, recruit users through student groups, and employ the campus newspaper at UCB as three major avenues to increase our user base. I can provide an example flyer if desired, but that's better not done until parts of the product is built over the next few weeks.
ii) There is no single path to solving the biggest challenges of a start-up (i.e. early growth, establishing a market, etc.). Employees of Dais/Agora are hired with specific goals in mind, and their responsibility lies in meeting these goals to contribute to company’s bottom line. Voluntary employee involvement (as users) in the online community built by the company will be partially effective in fighting off “ghost town” issues if needed, but by no means is that meant to be a primary solution.
ii-B) No, we do not hire people to write content. That would be a death knell for our company. Therefore, the need to identify such people is nonexistent. The content will be created by the users as they have conversations on relevant topics.
iii) There are two forms of marketing – a) explicit marketing, and b) implicit marketing. In the former, a company will rely on advertising and focus groups to grow its market. In the latter, the company turns inward and aims to perfect itself on its vision, so that customers will be drawn by the quality of product and clarity of its purpose. Inherently viral features (eg. prompted to recruit FB friend on common "debate topic") are also categorized as forms of implicit marketing. At Dais/Agora, we will heavily rely on our well-planned and –developed product as a marketing tool.
Other sites present in this space including Brigade, DebateMe, Debate.com, State, and Lighthouse fall significantly short of providing an appropriate debating space. Their traffic is miniscule, their content switches between popular and sociopolitical topics, and breadth of discussion within these topics is wanting. Please see my detailed post on this subject elsewhere in this thread. Dais/Agora fully commits to idea of debating and leaves behind any unnecessary element of social networking at large.
People currently meet their debating needs via commenting on news articles and posts on social networks. Neither space is dedicated to conversations between users. In Dais, the user will receive peer responses on specifically initiated topics backed by evidences. This format will influence the conversations to be constructive, since it is designed to bring clarity to messages. Users, currently unsatisfied while debating sporadically across sites, will be satisfied by Dais' organization of topics and responses which will improve readability. It will also allow users to subscribe to chosen topics more effectively. The ability of the user to initiate debates will allow more local issues to be brought into attention, that are currently neglected due to bottleneck in news media.