Here Comes Quora

Quora is nailing it. They are winning. No, they don’t have majority market share; their top 3 competitors — Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Mahalo — have that.¹

But Quora has the best answers of anyone in their field. And to users seeking answers, (as opposed to users answering questions, discussed below) all that matters is quality answers. Quora is succeeding because they actually solve the problem: foster quality answers — yes, that implies their competitors are not fostering quality answers.

So why is young Quora getting the best answers? In a nutshell:

Build bottom-up rather than top-down

Quora, like most tech start-ups, suffered from the chicken-and-the-egg problem when they started. For Quora, it went something like this: people who ask questions need to know they will get good answers; people who answer questions need to know their answers will be appreciated. Where to start?

Instead of content farming to build initial content, Quora had an invite-only private beta phase.² By design, the best answers get voted up/down on Quora, so early users had a lot to gain/lose from the quality of their questions and answers. Reputation is everything, and small communities — when done right — foster quality, intimacy, accountability, and responsibility.

(Also, big ups to Quora’s staff. Historically, they’ve done an outstanding job of giving users freedom; they rarely moderate content, and let users self-correct. This sense of control and freedom is important when you’re asking people to provide free content. Too much control and users feel stifled and leave; too little control and inferior content flourishes, and your best users feel under-appreciated and leave. It’s a tightrope, and requires a lot of improvisation, experience, and intuition. If there’s any one thing that makes Quora so successful, it’s the evident wisdom and taste of the people behind it.)

Early users essentially acted as Quora’s Founding Fathers and Mothers, building the content from the ground-up. They were a community (and still are) and share a sense of camaraderie. That camaraderie helps keep the quality flowing today.

Design thinking

Exhibit A. Compare answer page screenshots: Quora vs. Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Mahalo. Overall poor web design aside, the latter three focus screen real estate on pizazz and profiteering (e.g. oversized graphics, irrelevant and sometimes offensive ads, and misdirection). Quora focuses on the question’s answer; bingo. Hack away at the unessential.

The website is simple in its beauty, as if to say subconsciously to its users, “Go ahead, I won’t get in your way.” Web users just want to get-in-and-get-out. You can do that on Quora.

Design thinking → great design → users who feel appreciated → good questions ↔ good answers. In other words, Quora attracts smart users in the same way Apple does: make a product feel so good that people dare not use it except to produce things worthy of that product.

Quora is getting the best answers and, catastrophes aside, will eventually dominate the space. It’s only a matter of time. (Remind you of anybody else?)

^{1. It’s really by default. Yahoo! was able to grow on its current user base, and as far as I can tell WikiAnswers and Mahalo did a great job of SEO and, in the beginning at least, content (and possibly link) farming. (Though Jason Calacanis would deny this.) Back to citation}

^{2. Full disclosure: I was part of this private beta, but was not compensated in any way. Back to citation}