

Look Out Quora, InboxQ (YC W10) Takes Q&A Off-Site And Onto Twitter - clay
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/17/inboxq/

======
jdp23
It's certainly an interesting direction. I did an experiment last week asking
the same question on Quora and on Twitter and the results were pretty
astonishing -- Twitter rocked. Check out [http://storify.com/jdp23/what-are-
best-privacy-practives-for...](http://storify.com/jdp23/what-are-best-privacy-
practives-for-startups); the first answer is Quora, the rest is Twitter.

------
tudorachim
This is intended for one-off questions that can be answered in 140 characters;
the markets couldn't be more different.

~~~
mrtron
The title of Quora questions are usually that length. The tweet + link works
well for many sharing situations.

------
guynamedloren
I am extremely confused with the company/product situation here. Honest
questions: Is InboxQ a company, or is it a product of another company? Is
Answerly a company? What is Queryable Corp? Which company/product actually got
funded by Y-Combinator?

According to TechCrunch, Answerly is a company that built InboxQ (product),
but the InboxQ website leads me to believe that it is a company in and of
itself, while the Answerly website doesn't mention InboxQ once. Neither
Answerly nor InboxQ about pages mention Queryable Corp, though this mysterious
company sits in the footer of both. When I discover a new tool, I like to
learn about the people/company that are behind it, so please make this a bit
more clear.

~~~
answerly
Sorry about the confusion!

Queryable, Corp. is the corporate entity that we set up when we founded the
company.

Answerly.com was our first consumer product. We've always been known to our
investors, partners, vendors as Answerly because that was the consumer facing
piece.

We've stopped actively developing the Answerly.com q&a search engine and are
focusing all of our time on InboxQ now. It is the exact same team, same
corporate entity and much of the same core tech.

Hope this clears things up a bit. If you have any questions, just let me know.

------
immad
Cool, but why isn't it a standalone website instead of an addon?

~~~
answerly
Thanks!

The feedback we got early on from potential customers was that they loved the
idea of sourcing questions from Twitter. But, they didn't want another place
to login to access Twitter data.

So, we figured a browser app was a good first step since its persistent and
didn't require constant monitoring. There will be a full web app in the
future.

------
nika
I sometimes "just don't get it" so don't take this as a flame. But who is the
target audience here? Regular consumers, or businesses? In the article the
example is given of best buy trying to provide support, presumably for random
people.

How many of those people are actually going to be responsive? How many of the
questions people ask are going to be ones that you can answer? Seems like a
lot of effort, for a low return...

I mean here's the funnel as I see it: A. People who ask questions somewhat
relevant to best buy products. B. People who see the answer. C. People who
then remember best buy in a positive light. D. People who then decide to visit
a best buy E. People who then actually buy something at best buy on their
visit.

It is very hard to track B-E, and E could happen 6 months to a year later.

I'm not sure how you make money by selling people a tool to let them maybe get
a fraction of a percentage of people to buy something from you within the next
24 months.

But, usually when I'm this confused, it means I'm missing something extremely
obvious.

~~~
answerly
Great questions.

Our thesis here is that Twitter is a major channel for businesses to interact
with existing and potential customers and is only going to get bigger.

Big companies are already deploying lots of resources in an attempt to find
high quality engagement opportunities on Twitter. For example Microsoft
employs a whole team of support folks looking for xbox related questions and
making sure they get satisfactory answers.

Most companies aren't Microsoft and can't afford that type of resource outlay,
but will also want to take advantage of this channel. We hope that InboxQ will
be a tool that helps them do that efficiently.

Ultimately, our goal is to help reduce the transactional friction on the
channel as a whole (ie the funnel you detailed above). This is the first step
towards that goal.

Hope this helps answer some of your questions.

~~~
nika
Can't beat a major corporation already spending money doing what your tool
makes easy for validation. Glad to hear.

I think that there's an opportunity for the response to have a tiny URL that
leads the customer to a site which might make tracking their process thru the
funnel easier.

And of course, it is probably a very different experience for an online
retailer (Even someone like microsoft or apple who sells online) and I was
just getting hung up on best buy (being bricks and mortar oriented... though
they do sell online too.)

Anyway, thanks for answering!

~~~
answerly
Thanks for asking!

I agree with you. I think there will ultimately be different variations of the
product based on the goals/objectives of the business.

Our goal at this stage was to put enough structure around the product that it
would be useful, but also make it accessible enough that lots of different
types of users could get value out of it. We'll move in the direction(s) that
users point us in.

