Quora: Product Review

Quora is a website for asking and answering questions based on subject matter expertise. This sounds fairly commonplace – several websites of this nature exist. For those of you who have used it however, you know that it’s a powerful social media platform because it could bring path-breaking innovation in the existing online publishing industry. I would consider it to be a major competitor of Wikipedia, Reddit, and the omnipresent Yahoo Answers. Here’s a link to the portal so you can check out the interface for yourself.

Quora – Main Website

Here are a few features/advantages that I consider to be disruptive.

Question Feed

The question feed is probably my favorite thing about the platform. Imagine a page which is tailored to show you the most critical questions that you have had about topics that you are interested in. Want to get career advice from the best mentors in your industry? Want to figure out why Elon Musk succeeded where others failed? I envision Quora’s feed becoming a bleeding edge artificial intelligence platform that answers questions BEFORE you’ve had a chance to fully construct them in your head or Google them. It knows your personal and professional interests. It could potentially help you learn things more quickly than you could ever have learned yourself (because you are learning from the crowd-sourced real-world experience of the very best visionaries in the world).

Upvotes from Friends

The network effect is, without a doubt, effective. It has been effective for Facebook, where you can see which photos/posts your friends like and you ultimately get addicted to this viewing experience. It has been effective for Instagram, where products can go viral overnight if the right celebrity posts photos about them. And I believe it could be more effective for Quora, where you can see the questions that your friends like. I particularly like this feature because I believe that my generation is highly competitive. We compete to be the most fit, the most knowledgeable, or the highest earners within our circles. But we cannot get there by ourselves, and we know this. So we look towards not only visionaries but also friends to determine how to navigate life. What are our friends Googling in order to succeed? What kinds of things are they really after? What makes them tick? I envision the upvotes/push notifications becoming a streamlined version of our best selves. If an employer or acquaintance ever wanted to understand who you are as a person and what you are truly after, all they would have to do is look at your viewing/upvote history on Quora. A big data way of summarizing a person and understanding their true personal and professional motivations.

Conclusion: I strongly believe that Quora is utilizing just a fraction of its true power as a social media platform. What makes it addictive is that it is not shallow. Now, it is not terribly scholarly and serious. In fact, it is quite fun but in a way that challenges your beliefs, your mindset, and your capacity to learn. And that’s the true unique value proposition and future of Quora. Who wouldn’t want to support a social media platform that enhances you and expands your outlook with each incremental minute you spend on it?

Just a thought

My $1 million idea:

I’ve decided to start an idea factory. It will consist of start-up ideas, or methodologies that I am too busy to work on/or will possibly never work on as they are far removed from my own experience. I am hoping someone in cyberspace will pick them up and implement them. No royalties needed. 😉 Just give me some props/credit when you make it big (although this may be too much to ask for in today’s world).

I build products for the people around me, for my friends, my family, and for myself. These are all distinct cohort/customer segments, mind you.

I have friends in many different professions, and with a wide variety of interests. My family is based globally and comprises of several age groups. And as you can probably tell by now, I am pretty eclectic myself. I think that I can do a fair job of discovering the world and people around me to build something that caters perfectly to their needs.

Having said that, I have the ability to empathize with people who are far, far removed from my world. And occasionally, I do have ideas on how to help them solve problems too. So here goes.

IDEA #1: Applying the concepts of The Lean Start-up to Bollywood!

The major issue that Bollywood producers have is not being able to tell what audiences want. There are many reasons for this, the most obvious and formidable one being the sheer variety of sub-cultures and mindsets that exist in one country of a billion people. How does one possibly test a minimum viable product with a randomized sample in a country of 1 billion people? Especially when the country has 150 different languages and sub-cultures. Add to that the complexity of testing with a variety of age groups and you can compute the combinations required to create a perfectly random sample from this mix as well as the size of the sample.

I would imagine the problem could be successfully solved in this manner.

1. Test a story/idea with an audience at a local level via youtube. Get a few actors to do a 5 minute skit of the story idea. Really short and sweet. Do not attach your brand name to it, and post the video under the name of a relatively unknown youtube user. Attach relevant tags that you think would appeal to your early adopter segment.
2. Measure. Look at analytics. What age groups seem to like the idea? What kinds of suggestions are they posting? What do they dislike about the story? Get a conversation going. Now, youtube commenters are not known for their eloquence or literary prowess but you will easily be able to tell which plot points they liked/disliked by engaging them.
3. Learn. Benchmark your performance and figure out if your prototype test was successful. Rinse and repeat. (Choose a different platform this time, maybe a group of writers and a focus group)