"Now, you folks better give me my damn acquisition, understood!?" - VC
Quora collects $80 million in funding
41–50 of 110 posts
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#42>Founded in 2009 by former Facebook engineers, Quora is a revenue-less, question-and-answer service with 500,000 topics and an unknown number of users.
>Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors.
How could this possibly end well for the investors?
EDIT - besides a FB acquisition.
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#43I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong. 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?
First off, Compete.com is a JOKE (I've regularly seen it off by 10-100x). Second, investors care about growth more than traffic-- do we have any data on Quora's growth? Third, Quora's founder/team is pretty bankable-- a failure scenario for them is an $80M acqui-hire. Assuming preferred shares or liquidation prefs by the new investors, that almost entirely de-risks this investment. That coupled with their long term ambition (supplant Wikipedia?) makes this a non-terrible bet.
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#44I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong. 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?
It is a really good Q&A site. 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 understoo…
"The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch."
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).
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#45I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong. 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?
I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. 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 an…
That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point:
"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.
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. 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 an…
That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point: "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 g…
My question is completely off topic, but I have some questions regarding your site, if you don't mind answering:
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.
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#47I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong. 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?
Consider that Quora basically forces mobile users to access the site via their app.
And it's like a parasite. It's takes everything from users for free but it never lets the outside world see the content without a Quora account.
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#48Quora seems to have taken a strange turn recently - their email digest is full of creepy racial questions like "do white girls find Indian men disgusting?" and "do Asian men mind if Asian girls date white men?" I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure…
Never mind. It seems Indians[1] are using Quora more than others :-)
[1] https://www.quora.com/Quora/Which-country-has-the-highest-nu...
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#49I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong. 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?
Really americans are fucking idiots. They think whatever they think and use is correct! Stupid assholes.
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.
Re: Quora collects $80 million in funding
#50I also really dislike their model of making you sign in to see more than one answer. Annoying your potential users is a bad policy.
I just open Firebug or Chrome's developer console and delete the overlay. Annoying as fuck.