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YC: Please, criticize my startup!

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#31

Post by ekanes »

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

Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#32

Post by alaskamiller »

white wrote: post #30
joeguilmette wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

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.

Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#34

Post by SwellJoe »

white wrote: post #30
joeguilmette wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

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.) ;-)

Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#35

Post by white »

SwellJoe wrote: post #34
white wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

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…

thanks for ur answer, it helps

Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#36

Post by joeguilmette »

white wrote: post #35
SwellJoe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#37

Post by louisadekoya »

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.

Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#38

Post by sbraford »

white wrote: post #8
kirubakaran wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#39

Post by fleddermaus »

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!

Re: YC: Please, criticize my startup!

#40

Post by mechanical_fish »

white wrote: post #30
joeguilmette wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

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!

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