YC: Please, criticize my startup!

Here's two random data points for you: 1. I, coincidentally this morning, just asked my first question on LinkedIn. I had my first answer in 25 minutes. Done.

2. S&P runs a service called Vista Research. They've built a stable of experts in various vertical markets, and they've cultivated an advisory client list. So the clients come in with crazy questions about things impacting their business or investment decisions and S&P hooks them up with the Expert to answer. The Experts bill the client, and S&P also bills the client as a subscriber with access to all the experts. (I'm an 'expert' and get a question once a month or so. It's never turned into business for our company yet though.) Theirs is a super-premium service for people making $million decisions. It's also heavily manual. Recruiting experts, selling clients, matching clients to experts, etc. Maybe there's some web2.0 optimization of that niche to be had.

Hey white,

This kind of idea is hard to evaluate up-front. Sometimes you just have to build it and see but I think you could be onto something.

If you do it, try to integrate visual ways of showing that the app is working, and spend effort on getting that key first answer incredibly fast. Another question to ask yourself is if you want someone to wait and watch the answers come in, or if they'll come back in an hour to see what came in. That decision is crucial to how you build the app.

This article might be of interest: http://www.seo24.org.uk/how-yahoo-or-facebook-could-really-k... Most isn't relevant, but skip down to the text "Think of it this way - today's search engines answer three basic questions:"

It's talking about exactly the problem you're solving, and the value you're providing. Hope that helps and all the best with the idea!

We built something similar, but our focus has been on gathering votes quickly rather than answers. Personally I think something magical that happens when an app crosses over into being truly (and visually) real-time.

- aaron

Does your startup do anything that Amazon Mechanical Turk doesn't do? (may be yours does it better?)

That's the one which is really close. However, our main point to to provide multiple answers, but not a simple solutions. Besides, the Amazon's idea is not about instant answers, so there are not many chances to get your answer(s) within an hour after asking. And yes, I bet we can do it better. Just because we're more simple and easy and intuitive. More, speaking about Amazon's Turk, the price paid isn't relative to real world cost of living. Most of the HITs over there are less then $1 per hour gigs. We see our business in questions, which can be answered in 5 minutes or less, without need to perform long term investigation, review, discussion or anything time consuming.

Not that you'd want to do this... but you could even leverage Amazon Mech. Turk w/o telling your clients =)

If you have plenty of good, inexpensive answerers then you wouldn't need to.

Wishing you all the best.

Just curious... which {language,framework,hosting}?

We've got a dedicated server at ServerBeach, everything else is a typical LAMP. We've got enough skills with Java and Ruby, but PHP could be the best choice to bootstrap quickly.

Maybe tech support? I don't know about the multiple answers bit, but perhaps there's a market for crowdsourced tech support, that works much faster than regular channels.

Personally, I don't think this will work well. Although, it's a good idea for some niched startup, but for something more global, we'll never get much luck with crowdsourced support, comparing to hundred thousands of subscribers.

To me, off the top of my head, I'd say you need to first focus on the community that you'll be targeting. People want something better that makes their life easier. I think the bigger challenge you'll have is the credibility of responses. I'd almost suggest a way for people looking for an answer to evaluate the answers they've found. I'd take a look at www.qaboom.com. A similar idea, but it is targeted to students. The question I would ask myself, is, who are the early adopters. If you have some early adopters, what is going to make it worth while for them? What if the person tags their question with a category and another person subscribes to the RSS of that category...being able to see what others are asking and then seeing the real time responses is going to be powerful. Just some thoughts. I'd love to be a beta tester for you. Let me know. Honestly, you might want to look at a model like about.com. Find some experts who already belong to a community and give them a % of revenues. just some thoughts, I think it is a great idea! Good luck with it!

You mention 'market research groups' and maybe that's your differentiation niche. Some statistically sound methodology that Google and LinkedIn and Yahoo don't provide. Then you can build your audience by dealing with a professional groups of question askers. Consumer products, advertising, anything with a mass audience likes to base on market research.

I am not a big fan of advertising-only business models but I think this is one idea that would be better off relying on ads than on paying users. To be frank, I just don't think that users will pay for answers. They will exhaust other avenues first and even then most won't be able to bring themselves to pay.

As I explained in a recent blog post (http://www.ideatagging.com/a-facebook-and-yahoo-partnership-...), after search, questions are the next best thing for detecting users' intent and therefore are a good basis for tageted ads. So my advice, much as it pains me to say it, is to ditch the paying users idea and instead focus on ad revenues.

By the way, I have some interesting angles on the whole questions and answers thing. Contact me via my blog (link above) and I would be happy to share. Good luck.

What do you plan to do differently from the likes of Google Answers that would allow you to deliver on the 60-minute timeframe more often than they did?

Mostly it's about delivering updates to people, who want to participate. Email notifications, IM, cell... Also it'd bring a spirit of a challenge, and so you'll have to hurry up and use your chance to answer the question and get some money. So this will motivate subscribers to check the site often (when they have spare time) or even have it a a home page or keep it sticky all the time.

Unless you're offering Jeopardy style prizes (or at least something worth paying attention to), I don't see how you'd get particularly well qualified answers in a short time period. Expertise isn't cheap, and expertise on call is downright expensive (when I was a consultant I charged an annual service fee just for the privilege of calling my cell phone number outside of business hours)...so if someone can make $100+/hour consulting with their expertise, or make $10 every few hours via your service, they're obviously going to spend more time consulting than sitting in front of their mailbox waiting for questions that match their expertise.

I'm not saying it can't be done effectively and profitably--it probably can. We used SitePoint for a logo contest recently and had a half dozen professional designers, and another couple dozen serious amateurs, who responded over the course of 10 days...the prize was $500, though, so not chump change. We were extremely happy with the resulting logo, and we all (designers included) had a lot of fun with the contest.

But you might consider focusing on a few niches to get started, and actually line up experts on retainer just to prove to people that you have a working system (we've seen Google, Yahoo, and a dozen also-rans come and go in this field...most people are not going to believe that a startup can make something work that all of the big names in internet tech have failed to deliver). I believe you're going to have to prove it, but I might be wrong...maybe you can just let it run and gather momentum slowly.

The other problem is that most of the high end questions and answers I've seen (the ones where you'll make your money) on similar services have been extremely vague and, in result, poorly answered. I got a strong feeling that the questioner probably wasn't going to be very satisfied with the answers. Quality is historically very low from these kinds of services, and it's hard for me to imagine how you'd solve that problem without a lot of (expensive) oversight.

I wasn't very clear with my point. We're not about professional services, but with something, which doesn't need a degree or special skills. Like choice between red or black shirt, one nightclub or another, how good is some idea, the best gift for the girlfriend, etc.

Ah. OK, then it's a terrible idea. ;-)

Can you tell me why? I'd really appreciate this kind of feedback.

Here's the harsh answer:

Why would I want to pay you to tell me what nightclub to go to, what color shirt I should wear, or what I should buy for my girlfriend?

Those are things that either a) I should already know or b) I would find out from my friends and family.

b/c if i want to ask those types of questions i can ask (in order).

my friends on gtalk/yelp/google

furthermore, i would never in a million years think of paying for the answer to a question such as "which color shirt do i wear" or "where do i shop for X".

i have a brain, and the internet offers answers to those questions for free, and it doesn't take an hour.

Well, #3 is not good choice. ;) That's even not a subject for discussion. Besides, our potential clients already gave up on Google when they are coming to us. #2 - well, maybe yes, maybe not. We make it easier. And #1 - not much people have hundred of friends on IM. And sometimes, it'd be nice to know 50 opinions, instead of 10 (someone's typical online IM active list). (And well sometimes you don't want you friend know that you're interested in SOME THINGS :P

Don't forget that if you know where is the best retail store close by, some people don't, and they are not that happy to invest hours looking for it.

Speaking about my example with shirt/club/etc, these are really bad examples, saying about paid questions; but they are good if they'd be free (and they would).

However, just a silly example. I'd like to buy a gaming console, but I don't know which one. I have close to 100 of active contacts in my IM, but barely few of them know something about gaming consoles. So I'm about to spend several hundred dollars, and (me, personally) would be happy to spend $10 or $20 in advance to gather opinion of 50 or 100 people about the gaming consoles before making a purchase. And I want it now. Not tomorrow. Not after the week of gathering all pros and cons.

To go further with what others have said, it sounds like you're putting strangers in charge of answering questions that only close friends have the knowledge to answer well.

What game console do I buy? Well, the one my friends have, so we can trade games and play against each other! What club? The one my friends go to...we like the same music (roughly), and have the same general style...we probably even like the same kinds of girls. So, IM is infinitely more valuable than the service you describe even if only one or two friends are active right now. If it's not expertise that you're brokering, you've got nothing of value, as far as I can tell.

A Google search about game consoles will turn up thousands of random opinions from strangers about just about any subject (particularly game consoles, but clubs also get talked about, etc.), so without some sort of expertise, you're just doing a really inefficient and slow Google search.

Now, I'm not saying brokering expertise is an easy business, but I can at least see value in it. I can't think of any good use cases for a dedicated "trivial questions with easy answers" system.

I'm happy to be wrong. Maybe you should build a prototype this weekend and see how people react...you'd probably be able to get some media for it, since all of the big answers services have been shutdown or shuffled off into a corner to die quietly. If it looks cool, you'd be able to get a crunch and maybe some hits from design blogs. If you use a funny language (Smalltalk or Erlang or something) you can get some hits from that. It costs nothing but time to try it.

But, it's not an idea I would be willing to invest any time in. (Although, I did just invest fifteen minutes or so in my various responses to your query about it.) ;-)

thanks for ur answer, it helps

swelljoe has great advice.

"trivial answers with easy questions" just sounds like a slow google, nothing i would be excited about using, and certainly nothing i would pay for.

that being said, i dont think your idea is horrible at all, but simply that i think you need to spend some time refining it.

someone mentioned a site that helps people answer very difficult, expensive questions, the exact opposite of what you're looking for.

explore that avenue. spend a day reading about google answers and why they died. really, if i were you, i would spend the next week doing nothing but looking at other sites that failed or are failing and ask 'why' and 'what can i do better?'.

it sounds like you've done that a bit, but as you can see from the wonderful amount of criticism you've received, you could probably stand to do a lot more research and thinking about the problem.

i personally think you're on to something, but just need to rethink it a bit.

and btw, dont write off google so quickly. search for "xbox 360 vs ps3" and within .5 seconds you'll have more information about which console to buy than your service could hope to offer in a full day of responses.

i don't see the value in this. informed shopping is done either with search (google, mahalo) or simply visiting a store. that's what they're for. if you're dropping 400 bucks on a video game console, most people go to best buy. if you're dropping 25,000 on a car, most people go to a car dealership.

even when it was paid, google answer didn't gain traction. you need an even more vigilant and coherent audience in order for answers to be replied to within 60 minutes. the technical challenges aside (which, really, this site sounds cloneable within a weekend), this is just a chicken and egg problem.

I would never pay for shopping advice from people who might be paid PR shills.

What's to prevent a guy from GM from signing on to answer questions and advising every single one of your questioners to buy a Chevy truck?

More importantly, if your site tells me to buy a Chevy truck, how do I know that I'm not a victim of product placement?

At least when I read competing ads for game consoles I know the bias of everyone involved. And reading ads is free!

I think it is an interesting idea. I don't know that there is a market for it, but I think it is worth building to find out.

Why not ask your beta testers or don't you believe in generating information by using your own service?

Beta testers are already hooked-up, so their opinions would not be too objective. I need some thoughts from those, who never used us before, but now can get an opportunity to try.

My lack of knowledge of the market makes me feel that this is an idea in search of a market.

Have you considered developing the technology and then licensing it to special interest groups? Somehow I get the feeling this would work well in vertical niches (i.e. trade associations).

>Please, drop me a line

The email address in your profile doesn't show up to the public, you've gotta reenter it in the about: field if you want other people to be able to see it.

It's "white at chief dot la". Thanks! Or you can write here.

site:answers.google.com

After the first page, it's basically a list of old questions and answers -- so reading over the first hundred or so might give you a good idea of what the market is for this service.

That's not exactly what we're talking about. We're not questionary service, but instant and multiple answers. Instant, means, within very short period of time, like 60 minutes max. See my other comments. Thanks.

Are questions that require quick answers different from Google Answers-style questions?

Well, some of the will be different, some of them will be pretty similar to Google Answers' style.

You'll need to articulate your goals better if you're going to get funding or customers. So far, I know that it is like Google Answers, but not, because it is "Instant" (as in, it takes up to an hour) and has multiple answers (like other answer services).

It sounds like you're offering an answer service with a deadline, which is great, because now all you have to do is figure out what kind of questions people will ask, how to attract the people who can answer them, how to compensate everyone, and how to outcompete much larger rivals who can duplicate your entire product over their lunch break, while taking advantage of their existing network. Sounds pretty surefire!

I already showed an example for questions, which I see to be typical there: which shirt to choose, where to shop, which club to go for, what present for girlfriend to buy. Also, we could be a great match for market research during the product development cycle. I don't see problems how to compensate everyone (the client pays for getting answers), subscribers will get attracted by the challenging style of the process and ability to get paid. However, what I really concerned about is whether this idea sound interesting for potential clients or not. Speaking about competition, it's always good and it speeds up the progress. Besides, the market always has a tendency to change the business model within time.