Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends. • Hacker News Board

Re: Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends.

#11

Post by jdp23 » Wed, Feb 16, 2011, 9:39 PM UTC

fuzzmeister wrote: post #9

jsm386 wrote: post #8

I really like the idea. I can see this being really popular amongst a group of friends in lots of social situations - bars, dinner parties, events. That said, I know Quora is the thing right now, but how does asking a question and getting yes/no from your friends have anything to do with Quora? Yes this is a Q & A service but Quora isn't a yes/no type of Q&A service. Also - this is amongst your friends, whearas Quora…

We actually didn't write the current title, we like to clearly differentiate ourselves from general Q&A services such as Quora. Unlike Quora, Yahoo Answers, etc, questions on Cloudy are structured (more comparable to a poll), asked to a specific group of friends (rather than to everybody), and are pushed out to the people you ask (either by APNS or SMS). You're quite right when you say that we have relatively little…

What do you think of Doodle as an analogy?

Love the idea, will look for an opportunity to try it out!

Re: Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends.

#12

Post by pspeter3 » Wed, Feb 16, 2011, 9:45 PM UTC

marketer wrote: post #4

fuzzmeister wrote: post #2

I'm one of the founders of Cloudy (I submitted a post earlier and it didn't go anywhere, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2227646 ), so feel free to comment with any questions or suggestions you have.

What are some common questions are people asking with this?

I've been asked a lot about where my group of friends should go to dinner

Re: Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends.

#13

Post by arctangent » Wed, Feb 16, 2011, 10:09 PM UTC

User charliekim asked a really good question [1] in the previous thread: "why is it free?"

Would you care to answer that here? I assume you do have some kind of revenue model in mind, but charliekim and I can't be the only people who think that people would pay to use this app...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2227784

Re: Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends.

#14

Post by blacklife » Wed, Feb 16, 2011, 10:17 PM UTC

How do you plan to monetize ? too early to ask but if you had something in mind since you are going to incur cost per sms.

Re: Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends.

#15

Post by fuzzmeister » Wed, Feb 16, 2011, 10:52 PM UTC

arctangent wrote: post #13

User charliekim asked a really good question [1] in the previous thread: "why is it free?" Would you care to answer that here? I assume you do have some kind of revenue model in mind, but charliekim and I can't be the only people who think that people would pay to use this app... [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2227784

Our goal for Cloudy, at least right now, is to get as many people as possible using the app. When a user asks a question using Cloudy to a non-user, we send that friend the question by SMS, along with a short blurb to the effect of "Have an iPhone? Download Cloudy for free here to ask your own questions!" and a link to the App Store listing. So, the more people that use the app, the more viral growth we can have.

In order to not be eaten alive by SMS costs, we are working with 4INFO to include short ads at the bottom of texts sent to the SMS users (users who receive and reply to questions by SMS, but don't have the app) who received the highest number of texts over the last week. Once we hit a certain number of ads included per month, we will actually break even on SMS costs, all while only showing SMS ads to a small subset of users.

Beyond SMS, we have monetization plans for the app itself that will come a bit further down the road.

Re: Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends.

#16

Post by fuzzmeister » Wed, Feb 16, 2011, 11:10 PM UTC

sdh wrote: post #10

fuzzmeister wrote: post #2

I'm one of the founders of Cloudy (I submitted a post earlier and it didn't go anywhere, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2227646 ), so feel free to comment with any questions or suggestions you have.

my feedback ... first, the app is really cool. love the idea. personally, I'd lose the head shots and job titles from your about page. instead, tell us why you created this, how you got started, etc. what are you doing with this data? do you have a privacy policy? this probably won't stop your growth, but it might encourage adoption if you let people know you aren't evil.

We'll change the about page, thanks for the feedback.

We have a privacy policy, but I'm considering writing a more prominent, "human-readable" version of it. We definitely want to make people feel comfortable and reassure them that we aren't evil.

Re: Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends.

#17

Post by timjahn » Thu, Feb 17, 2011, 3:12 AM UTC

This is a cool idea and I can actually see this being used in social situations. Along with everybody else, I'm curious as to how you will monetize this other than good old fashioned ads.

Can you elaborate anymore on your ideas in that realm?

EDIT: Figured some feedback would actually be more helpful for ya. As somebody else mentioned, may want to change the "Learn more" link to go to something that actually tells me more about what Cloudy is and examples of how I could use it. And also as mentioned, definitely show some other screens in the app other than the home screen. This is what will sell me more on trying the app. (although I'm curious enough as it is to run upstairs now, grab my phone, and download, heh.)

Re: Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends.

#18

Post by fuzzmeister » Thu, Feb 17, 2011, 4:00 AM UTC

timjahn wrote: post #17

This is a cool idea and I can actually see this being used in social situations. Along with everybody else, I'm curious as to how you will monetize this other than good old fashioned ads. Can you elaborate anymore on your ideas in that realm? EDIT: Figured some feedback would actually be more helpful for ya. As somebody else mentioned, may want to change the "Learn more" link to go to something that actually tells me…

We're working on both the learn more page and the screenshots right now, thanks for the feedback.

As for monetization, we're considering some kind of "sponsored questions" offering that could be used for both advertising and market research purposes.