

Quora meets SMS - Cloudy, social answers through your friends. - stephensprinkle
http://askcloudy.com/

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jsm386
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's popularity is being driven by
the answers from 'experts/insiders/etc' to questions from 'outsiders.'

I don't want to just assume the headline is purposely click-bait so I'll just
ask...how do you see this as Quora meets SMS?

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fuzzmeister
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 to do with Quora et al.

~~~
jdp23
What do you think of Doodle as an analogy?

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

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fuzzmeister
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.

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marketer
What are some common questions are people asking with this?

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fuzzmeister
We don't actually read the text of individual questions, as we want our users
to feel confident that their questions will only be read by the friends they
choose to ask. From talking to early users, though, coordinating group
activities seems to be a popular use-case.

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bouncingsoul
The homepage should show a screenshot of the results screen, because that's
where (I assume) this service has value over just sending a mass text.

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fuzzmeister
Very good point, we'll definitely add that in.

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arctangent
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>

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fuzzmeister
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.

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timjahn
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.)

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fuzzmeister
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.

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blacklife
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.

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nyellin
Do you offer a web version of the app?

