Yesterday on TechCrunch, Robin Wauters posted an article announcing that Beepl, a company building a Q&A site, had received funding to the tune of $400K. Hooray for them, I am glad the market for Q&A products is still frothy. But, I must address what I see as an issue for a business looking to “build a better mousetrap” as the author says.
Beepl’s goal, and the goal of Quora, their most obvious competitor, is that they are trying to be a knowledge base for everybody, on everything. From the article on TechCrunch, Beepl is:
“…building a platform that will enable users to get quality answers to their questions, as well as opinions from relevant topic experts, enthusiasts and their social graph.”
They want to answer any question you have, which I think is a great idea, but one I do not think is a very profitable unless approached the right way. Granted, I have absolutely no idea what they are doing behind the scenes, but I believe that as long as you are going after the “any answer, on anything” market, you will never be the answer because the internet is full of answers (and opinions). The job of a Q&A site is to gather knowledge into one place, but how can you have all the knowledge about everything? One company that I believe is doing things right is Stack Exchange. They have grown slowly and organically, only launching new communities when they have enough regular activity.
I do not think any user will ever think to go to just one site when they have a question about anything. When I have a question about where to go, maybe I will use Localmind (when they launch an Android app). When I have a programming question, Stack Exchange; sports question, well, that should be obvious, but you get the idea. I definitely think there is a usefulness to sites like Quora and Beepl (depending on how it turns out), but I do not believe the business can be a profitable one, or one that can be sustained over long periods of time.
What do you think? I welcome your opinions in the comments.
UPDATE 11/14/2011: I migrated the blog, this is the only comment on this post, from “Steve on 7/22/2011.”
“Thanks for mentioning our start-up and I understand your point entirely with relation to whether or not a niche approach is a better one.
That said, we (obviously) think that our approach is a worthy one and something that we hope to validate in the next few months. While we are inevitably being compared to Quora, we are taking a different approach. Watch this space.”