Ask YC: Feedback on my new project http://www.askurpals.com

> I'm not too worried about monetization right now.

You might want to be. As Joe Kraus said, if you don't put your business plan into beta when you put your site into beta then you haven't really gone into beta or launched yet.

Search need more work.

There have been a few projects here on news.yc that follow the same pattern (in my opinion). And please take it as a constructive and healthy criticism.

I cannot really coin a proper name for this pattern, but I may call it "how is it better than Google?" problem. Thing is: there are already thousands of outlets where people ask questions on a regular basis: google groups, IRC, emails, thousands of PhpBB boards and a small army of advertisement-heavy outlets like expertexchange.com and "Yahoo Answers".

And google can search most of them really well.

Now, what is it that differentiates your offering from that plethora of options?

These are two questions everyone building "user-generated content site" should be asking:

1. What is the benefit for people asking vs google search?

2. What is the benefit for people answering, i.e. submitting content?

If you look around, you'll notice that every successful "user-generated content site" has fairly obvious answers to these two questions.

For instance: YC drives visitors to ask/answer because of it's obvious vertical focus on software startups. Additionally it uses a popular karma-points system with extra twist of minor but amusing features available only to active contributors.

My $0.02

I did think about providing the email interface. The only reason I ended up not implementing it was because I was afraid people would not be comfortable sharing their email ids with a new site. Plus, many people have auto email signatures (especially for office email account) that are appended automatically at the end of the email message. Sometimes these signatures contain personally identifiable information like title, extension number etc. I did not want this information accidentally disclosed on the site. I found these auto email signatures very difficult to parse out reliably across different formats and systems.

Thanks for your feedback.

Other people on your email may also be interested in the answers you get - may be now or in future. It happens all the time on the mailing list I use. People request others to consolidated answers they has received for the questions they asked in past. That's what gave me this idea. This way they get to see them easily at one place without any extra effort of manually consolidating every now and then. I hope overtime it will build into a community knowledge base of common questions and answers.