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?
Bay Area VC activity looks a lot like Wall Street to me, with the same disconnect between price and value happening.
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).
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).
Early-stage companies are purchased/funded because their teams and not the checklist of experience on the team-members resumes. Successful, or even good products often take second-seat to this. Surprisingly enough, people pay boatloads for functional teams.
This is also on of the reasons they do separate funds. If 9/10 funds lose 50% of the money and one get's 500% returns they take a bug cut of that return despite only breaking even on average. It also explains why they don't care about small returns if a fund does not break even they don't care if it loses 1% or 99% they already have there cut and are not making any extra cash.
http://www.quora.com/Interracial-Dating-and-Relationships/Wh...
and
http://www.quora.com/Dating-and-Relationships-1/How-do-Asian...
and
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-worst-experience-youve-had-...
That right there is a whole lotta value.
http://www.quora.com/Family/I-caught-my-younger-brother-watc...
http://www.quora.com/How-does-a-sixteen-year-old-get-a-girlf...
Look - I don't care if Quora wants to spam my inbox with link bait in order to generate AU and page views, but they could at least not try to take the high road and pretend to be anything more than the lowest common denominator, no-business-model, spam factory that they are.
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.
There can't (in my v. humble opinion) be any realistic way of recouping 80 million from a Q&A site. They would surely need to be extremely aggressive at the least.
You decide to make something way better than the existing alternatives. Your smart and literary friends tell you it's a great idea, because they want something better too. You find inexperienced investors with the same vision, and present them with early samples that make them say, "Yes! This awesome! Let me invest in your vision." Then you start shipping, and the small fraction of the population that isn't satisfied with mid-market stuff signs up and praises you. You're not profitable, but everybody is so excited that you keep going, possibly for years, getting new investor money and never selling as much as you hope.
Basically, it's like making a quirky indie film and thinking it will be a $500m blockbuster because you and your friends love it so. My fear is that Quora's on exactly the same path. That this new chunk of money comes from an outsider, Tiger Global, worries me further.
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).
The quality of content is hard to manage. There's no granularity in rating content, but when the content persists, isn't meant to be forgotten like HN comments, that's a serious flaw. Answers and wikis should be gradually improved, voted on per edit, etc.
I agree that when you're not in editor/contributor mode there is too much going on. There should be a separate browsing and contributing UX.
Simplifying all UIs for the lowest common denominator is not the way. Bicycles vs tricycles argument of Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay.
PS. I guess the people who find this useful live in San Francisco, and enjoy the "insider" feel.
*: Right now, while viewing any question while logged out, the "Continue with facebook" button text wraps outside the button.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
For the first 3 months of our site (before help came) 'grammar' was spelt wrong on the header.
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 ;)
Seriously, any talk of Wikipedia around Quora is strictly Quora's wishful thinking. This will never happen.
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.
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.
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-stori...).
Second, there's lot of very valuable and high quality content. I've learned a lot from Quora.
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.
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.